The Government has announced new measures to “flush out the oligarchs, criminals and kleptocrats who think they can use UK property to hide their illicitly obtained wealth”. But let’s be honest: these people don’t “think” they can use UK property in this way — they know they can, which is why they’ve been doing so on a massive scale.

According to the anti-corruption campaigners, Transparency International, £6.7 billion in “questionable funds” have been invested in UK property since 2016 — £1.5 billion of which was bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. No wonder that London is a described as a “laundromat” for “suspicious wealth”.

Boris Johnson may claim that “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” but, quite obviously, the UK has been — and still is — a place for dirty money. And the Government is now struggling to do anything about it. Yesterday, Keir Starmer confronted the Prime Minister: “Why are we giving Putin’s cronies 18 months to quietly launder their money out of UK property?”

Good question. Back in 2016, the Government hosted a “landmark” anti-corruption summit at Lancaster House in London. David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time, was very clear about what Britain would do: “First, we will expose corruption so there is nowhere to hide.”

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

His specific pledge was to create a “new public register of beneficial ownership” for foreign companies operating in the UK. Instead of hiding behind shell companies and other legal smokescreens, “everyone in the world will be able to see who really owns and controls each and every company”. An accompanying press release promised that this “will include companies who already own property in the UK, not just those wishing to buy”. And to emphasise Britain’s leadership on this matter, it was stated that “this will be the first register of its kind anywhere in the world”.

Well, it might have been had ministers got on with the job; but they dawdled. This week, Boris Johnson finally committed his government to the necessary measures. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade,” he said. Let’s hope so — because it’s been almost six years since the Tories promised the property register and it hasn’t happened yet.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a Great Survey, which covered every county of England and named over 13,000 places. Yet William’s surveyors completed their work — which became the Domesday Book — in 1086.

It seems ridiculous that its modern-day equivalent should take so much longer. Admittedly, there are nearly 100,000 properties owned by foreign companies in the UK. Establishing their true ownership is no small task. But that’s all the more reason why the effort should have started years ago. Why then was it delayed?

We can’t really blame David Cameron. Hosting the corruption summit was one of his last acts as PM. Can we blame his successor? Did Theresa May drop the idea when she took over? No, it continued as official policy under her administration — and also Boris Johnson’s. Rather, the problem was the glacial pace of implementation. 

There was a consultation 2017, followed by a draft bill — and yet more consultation. In 2018, the Government expressed its intention for the register to be operational by 2021. That deadline was missed. In fact, until the events of last week, the necessary legislation hadn’t even been scheduled. When pressed to do so, ministers just answered that “we will legislate when parliamentary time allows”. 

This week, a panicked Government pulled its finger out and by Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill made its long overdue appearance. It’s as if it were already drafted, ready-and-waiting to go — so why did it take Putin’s bloody war to prompt ministers to act?

Some might suspect undue influence, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories. The Government’s inactions are consistent with this country’s general lack of transparency over property ownership. 

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For instance, it should be possible to go to an official website and freely access a map showing exactly who owns every piece of land in the country. But you can’t. For a fee, the Land Registry does provide limited information on individual plots. However, to get this data for the whole of England and Wales would be extortionately expensive. Guy Shrubsole — author of Who Owns England? — puts the cost at £72 million. 

Even then, about a sixth of the land in this country isn’t registered at all. There is no requirement that it has to be, unless sold or inherited. The Government could put this right if wanted to — for instance by requiring registration as a condition of receiving farm subsidies — but it hasn’t. Indeed, far from empowering the Land Registry, there were two attempts (while George Osborne was Chancellor) to flog it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately, the privatisation was cancelled by Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

True transparency isn’t just about who owns the land, but also about who controls it. In particular, we need a public register of land options — legal agreements which give property developers an exclusive right to purchase potential building sites. The urgency is that options enable land-banking — the practice of sewing up the supply of potential building sites so that property developers can ration the supply of new housing to the market.  

In 2016, one Cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, had the guts to condemn the land-bankers. Measures to improve transparency were subsequently proposed. But, true to form, the Government has yet to follow through. In fact, it hasn’t even responded to the public consultation which closed in October 2020. 

It’s as if ministers don’t want to blow the lid on the murky world of British property. And no wonder. Government policy still operates on the basis that escalating property prices are a good thing. And nothing can be allowed to get in the way. For instance, Rishi Sunak wasted billions of pounds on propping up the housing market during the pandemic — when it clearly didn’t need any help.

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Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Encouraging overseas investment in British property is an integral part of this insane, inflationary obsession. The Tier 1 Investor Visa scheme is a prime example. Introduced under Gordon Brown in 2008, the idea was to dish out visas on the condition that the recipient invested at least a million pounds in the UK economy. Needless to say, no distinction was drawn between job-creating investment and property speculation which only pushes up the cost of housing. 

Last month, after years of criticism, the scheme was finally shut down with “immediate effect”. Apparently, the Government was concerned that the route was being exploited by money launderers and other criminals. Nothing gets past the Home Office.

Of course, I’m not saying that the London property market is entirely sustained by foreign corruption and criminality. Most of the money that flows into it — including overseas sources — is above board.

Yet this is an under-taxed and under-regulated industry that provides an ideal environment for the world’s worst people. And for what? Inflating land values enriches the wealthy, while those without property — especially the young — pay the price. Our economy is weakened and our democracy damaged.

When William I ordered his Great Survey, it was an act of domination — of taking control of a conquered land. A modern-day Domesday Book would be the precise opposite: a means by which we take back control of our own country.

After 30 years in Parliament it is a wrench to be standing down. Sadly, I leave with the House of Commons devalued as an elected chamber and with the image of politicians in general never lower.

I have served under four Speakers, of whom Bercow was most definitely the worst. His love of his own voice, his deliberate attempts to humiliate individual MPs and his bias on EU issues — his foibles are all significantly to blame for the shambles of this Parliament.

I very much hope that our new speaker will be genuinely fair-minded — someone with no favourites, no personal vanity and no wish to be the story. This will help the House of Commons revert to a place where politeness, even in the midst of huge differences, rules.

I believe that ‘modernisation’ moves — such as allowing children in the chamber and voting lobbies, lowering of dress standards, and clapping — have all contributed to the feeling that the Commons is not a workplace but a showground. New MPs need to remember that the traditions in the Commons had a reason for lasting so long. While I don’t expect all the changes to be reversed, it will be up to Speaker Hoyle to look again and exert his own influence. I hope he does.

Move Parliament to Milton Keynes
Philippa Perry, psychotherapist

I think our present system needs to change to something more like jury service, because egos have no place in Parliament. At the very least Parliament could move to Milton Keynes as a deterrent to narcissists.

Our trouble is that the more we appear to be hurtling into crisis, the more the electorate craves certainty. We may mistakenly think we need a bish-bash-bosh approach, and someone to blame. Needing a scapegoat is our most brutal trait, as blame turns to hate and the urge to purge and annihilate.

Let’s have neither rich against poor, nor poor against rich, nor tribe against tribe. We need, more than anything, kindness. To bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number is a tall order, but we could try to bring the greatest kindness to everyone. We could thank the rich for their tax contributions rather than grab it, and use the money to house, tend and feed us all. Let us extend that kindness to the planet.

We can start by being as understanding and kind to our children as possible. Kindness is what they will learn and pass on in their turn.

End anonymous communication
James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation

If you want to make the experience of being a politician more bearable, ensure that people can only communicate with politicians when they use their own name. Put an end to anonymous communication to MPs.

I don’t mean ban anonymous accounts: far too draconian. I just mean that if you aren’t prepared to put your name and address on a message, that message won’t be seen by an MP or their staff. Electronic communications to parliamentarians and their offices should be automatically filtered: no name means no-one’s going to read it.

I’m fairly militant about free speech but I don’t think free speech includes the right to send anonymous abuse; too many people currently misuse that freedom to send threats and abuse that make many MPs’ lives miserable and are corroding our public life. If people had to use their full name to engage in public conversation with politicians,  the volume and intensity of abuse would drop sharply.

We expect politicians to do everything on the record and in the open, and quite right too: transparency is essential because it ensures they can be held to account for their actions. But if we expect openness of politicians, because it ensures their good conduct, we should accept that a similar standard should apply to members of the public and their behaviour too.

Unshackle MPs from Westminster
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos

One of the worst features of being an MP is trekking between home and constituency. Much has changed since the days when Ross Poldark was elected a (fictional) MP, and disappeared to London for months at a time: even the most far flung parts of Cornwall and Shetland can be reached in a day’s travel from London. But we now expect MPs to make that journey at least twice a week. No wonder so many feel so exhausted.

We should bring Parliament into the 21st century by enabling some of its sittings — especially committee sessions — to be held entirely by video conference. MPs from far flung areas should able to conference in to the main chamber for ordinary sittings. And electronic voting should be possible, whether from in the chamber, or from a secure line in the constituency.

Traditionalists will say that you need everyone to be physically present, so that MPs can chat to Ministers in the lobby. But what kind of a system is it that relies on an MP to be charming while walking through a corridor? MPs should be able to make a choice about what best serves their constituents, not be forced to rattle around the Palace of Westminster regardless of whether they’re doing any good.

Look after parliamentary aides
Marie le Conte, author of ‘Haven’t you Heard: Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works’
Our politics is broken in a thousand and one ways; it’s hard to know how we can go about fixing it, if we ever find ourselves out of the Brexit vortex. But one vital change that’s long overdue would be an absolute overhaul of the way MPs’ staff are employed.

At the moment, each individual MP is in sole charge of hiring, paying and managing his or her aides. This causes all sorts of problems. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on salaries makes it look, to the untrained eye, like MPs are racking up huge expenses, for instance. Meanwhile, on top of everything else, MPs are forced to occupy a management position that most were never trained for.

It’s time the House of Commons set up a body dedicated to the hiring and management of parliamentary aides. On a day-to-day basis, the MPs would remain the bosses of their aides — whom they would still pick. But they should not have to deal with anything related to their salary, or what normal workplaces call “human resources”.

This would be a huge weight off the shoulders of MPs but it would also change the life of their staff. The new system would put an end to questionable hiring habits from MPs, a number of whom currently have staff on precarious time-limited contracts that they may or may not renew at any given point.

And, as we have seen time and time again, parliamentary aides bullied or sexually harassed by their MP have no-one to formally turn to, because their MP is their lone boss.

Happy and safe researchers are effective researchers, and effective researchers means effective MPs. The system needs to change to facilitate that safety. That this has not happened yet is a scandal.

Give Parliament a better building
Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Charles Barry’s neo-gothic Palace of Westminster is a masterpiece, but it is not a fit place for a modern legislature, either practically or philosophically. It was built in the mid-Victorian period after the old palace burnt down and the principles it expresses are those of that time: deference to aristocracy, exclusion of women, and pomposity, all harking back to an idealised past.

The interiors, by Augustus Pugin, are magnificent, but they might encourage parliamentarians to go mad, as he did; how can you govern a real nation from a palace that is a painted construct — essentially a stage set for a play about British domination, on a marsh? The parliamentary chambers themselves encourage masculine grand-standing, which is alienating; shouldn’t we have a circular chamber to encourage consensus?

In any case, it is falling apart, filled with faulty wiring, asbestos, and Victorian pipes that have yet to be replaced. The building caught fire 40 times between 2008 and 2018; fire safety teams patrol it 24 hours a day. The basement was flooded with sewage on the day of the Brexit referendum; the stone is rotting; the toilets stink; it is infested with vermin; the parliamentary archive in the Victoria Tower — the most important archive in Britain — could not be saved in the event of fire. There would be no time.

In 2016 a joint committee compared maintaining the building to “trying to fill a bathtub with a thimble while the water is draining out of the plughole at the other end”. How can a healthy legislature work here, when they do not even feel safe?

Parliament should move to a more suitable building, but it won’t. Instead they squabble about how to tell the electorate what it will cost to repair. Much like the country, it cannot let go of its dreams.

Let MPs have lives
Elizabeth Oldfield, director of Theos think tank

You can’t be responsible for the lives of millions if you don’t have a life yourself. The civil service — committed to flexible working and offering plenty of part-time roles — is great at making sure its employees have a decent work-life balance. It’s time Westminster followed suit.

Improvements have been made, but the house still sits until 7.30 two nights a week — and 10.30pm on Mondays. As well as making any kind of healthy social life impossible, there is good evidence that long hours like these are counterproductive. One review of the consequences of such habits “showed that long hours working, especially when coupled with sleep disruption, caused deterioration of task performance, because it had detrimental effects on such things as rates of error, pace of work and social behaviour”.
The shameful toddler-like outbursts in the chamber could be reduced if MPs simply got more sleep. And their judgement would be better — so these changes are in all our best interests.

Another relatively simple change would be to allow MPs to job share. This would not be without its complications in terms of campaigning and voting, but with a little careful thought and planning, it shouldn’t be impossible.

As well as benefitting those with children or other caring responsibilities, many people have argued that this is the only way to enable people with disabilities to become MPs. In other words, it’s the only way to make sure our house of representatives is actually representative.

Fix Westminster’s drinking problem
Julie Bindel, feminist activist and journalist

In 2017, the so-called Pestminster scandal led to the resignation of Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. He had been accused of “lunging” at a female journalist and propositioning her following a boozy lunch. The case represents an uncomfortable truth: Westminster has a drinking problem.

That was the conclusion of Laura Cox, who, in a 2018 report on the culture of bullying and harassment of House of Commons staff, wrote that, “a ready access to alcohol in the various bars on the premises was referred to (as an aggravating factor) by several contributors”. There are eight bars for MPs alone, with more for the lords. One was actually shut down after a glassing in 2017.

The report had been commissioned following a number of serious allegations — made against some male MPs by members of House staff, almost all of them women. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of the high-profile women stepping down as MPs at the next general election have cited abuse as a factor in their decision.

It’s time we followed Cox’s recommendation and limited access to booze in parliament during the working day. Doing so would make Westminster a safer and more respectful environment for every MP — but for female MPs in particular.

It would also, of course, make Parliament more effective. The Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Wollaston once spoke up about colleagues voting while drunk. Ensuring MPs are sober while they are running the country is a good idea — not just for the sake of their more sensible colleagues, but for all of us.

Liberate MPs from the letter-writers
Peter Franklin, associate editor at UnHerd

The moment a new MP is elected, the letters and emails start pouring in. Hundreds of them. He or she will be expected to reply to every rant, every round robin, every request for help.

Still, that’s their job, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. They are elected as legislators: their job is not to be their constituents’ agony aunt. Their job is to propose, scrutinise, amend, debate and vote upon the laws by which we are governed. It is a vital task — the lifeblood of a representative democracy — and yet the time available for it is under constant pressure from the post bag and the inbox.

MPs are there to serve their constituents, but the letter-writers represent a small fraction of each community. It is true that some correspondents are in real need and that MPs are often able to provide real help. But most of the requests concern matters over which the MP has no direct say.

There’s got to be a better way. If we properly devolved power to directly elected mayors, most issues could be dealt with locally. This would free-up MPs to dedicate their time to those matters that are actually decided in Westminster. Oh, and they might just have a little bit more time for their own families too.

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Overlooking the overlooked

James Bloodworth, journalist and author of the Orwell Prize nominated book Hired

If only May had acted upon those promises she made in that first speech as leader – the one that has become reduced to her ‘citizens of nowhere’ dig – things could have been so different.

In that keynote, delivered to a conference just after the Brexit vote, she surprised all the complacent neo-liberals in her party by lamenting the “division and unfairness all around”.

“Our society should work for everyone,” she told conference delegates, before running through a list of areas in which it wasn’t.

“If you can’t afford to get onto the property ladder… if your pay has stagnated for several years in a row… if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.”

May took digs at fat cats, tax avoiders and “citizens of nowhere”, pledging to tackle the injustices of low pay and precarious work.

The rest is history. All these promises fell by the wayside as her premiership progressed. Sure, the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices – which May’s government commissioned – did come up with some interesting and proactive suggestions. And the government promised to at least consult on all but one of Matthew Taylor’s recommendations. But then… nothing.

This was her great opportunity. This is where she could have made a difference to the lives of so many of those people who had voted in the referendum for change. But like so much else, workplace reform was gradually subsumed by Brexit.

So Brexit created Theresa, then destroyed Theresa. And it also contributed to her greatest failure as PM: that signal failure to significantly improve the lives of the ‘left behinds’ she pledged to serve back in 2016.

Her intransigence

Polly Mackenzie, director of Demos

Theresa May’s failure is all Ken Clarke’s fault. He accidentally gave her a brand identity when he was caught on camera calling her a “bloody difficult woman”. She loved it. Her team loved it. Conservative MPs who spent their teenage years pining over a Margaret Thatcher poster loved it. Bloody difficult woman, Mrs May thought: that’s who to be if I want to be loved.

She was always intransigent, as Home Secretary. But once “bloody difficult” got hung around her neck, she revelled in it, sticking to positions as rigidly as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, who got rusted into paralysis by unexpected rainfall.

She fought and argued, unblinkingly, for her withdrawal agreement long after it was dead, long after the body was rolled through the crematorium and the ashes were scattered.

I can understand why she clung to the belief that intransigence would, in the end, pay a political dividend. It seems to be the path to popularity in politics today. The No Deal Brexiteers refuse to budge, even if that risks no Brexit at all – and yet their tribe love them. Jeremy Corbyn built an entire political career out of never changing his mind and young people chant his name at festivals.

The problem, Theresa, is that intransigence only works for ideologues. You can’t be rigidly pragmatic, any more than the Tin Man could start dancing without having his joints oiled. In your resignation speech, you stressed the importance of compromise: the whole point of compromising is that you have to bring people together. If no-one will join you on the dance floor, you need to find a different song. We can only hope the next Prime Minister will do so.

The hostile environment

Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Theresa May’s biggest failure was as Home Secretary, not as Prime Minister. In 2013, she gave a now-notorious speech at the Home Office, introducing the central tenets of the ‘hostile environment’. To me – and this is just my opinion – it was a racist, aggressive, inhumane and sadistic warning. The hostile environment has persisted since then, unabated. It has fanned the flames of (what I see as) an increasingly openly racist, xenophobic and insular England. It has worsened with Brexit – for which it laid the groundwork.

I’ve reminded myself of that Home Office speech when, over the last three years, I’ve started feeling sympathy for Theresa May as Prime Minister. Well – not sympathy, exactly, but a kind of wonder at how she manages to get up every morning, put together an outfit and get through her day of work. She inherited the ultimate ‘glass cliff’ job: cleaning up a man’s stupid mess. David Cameron’s opinion poll on Brexit was callous and dangerous.

May might have convinced herself that she should and must and could ‘deliver Brexit’. She might have shown a steeliness, and an impressive poker face, in calling a snap election that caused her to lose her mandate – and in repeatedly forcing votes on the same unsatisfactory deal. But she does not have the fine shrewdness and responsiveness of the true political survivor – and neither did her predecessor.

May’s resignation speech showed, finally, an awareness of her own isolation and powerlessness. But ultimately, this is a mess of Cameron’s making. Brexit is a mistake and a catastrophe that poisons anyone who touches it, be they Tory, Labour or anything else. May’s departure is simply another inevitable episode in an unpleasant and unnecessary crisis – one that reflects the growing darkness of the political landscape.

The backstop

Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge

Theresa May’s departure was probably inevitable from the moment she lost her gamble to establish a Conservative majority big enough to get her withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons.

But she made one crucial misjudgement after the general election. In December 2017, she accepted the EU’s demand that the terms of the UK’s departure include a commitment that nothing would change on the Irish border. After an uproar, she redefined her backstop so that it applied to the whole of the UK, rather than just Northern Ireland – but this alteration left unaltered the commitment to prioritise the Irish border.

Whether the move was justifiable or not, in subordinating Brexit to another claim, May damaged the supply and confidence arrangement with the DUP; gave her ERG critics a permanent line of attack; fuelled the concern among part of the Leave coalition that she was pursuing Brexit in name only; and gave those in Parliament who want to stop Brexit reason to think it could be abandoned. In this political environment, she needed considerable good fortune.

The Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, tried to help her with the concessions made before the second meaningful vote, but did not reckon on Geoffrey Cox’s intervention. John Bercow repeatedly tried to thwart her – and managed to, right up until his refusal to take Gareth Snell and Lisa Nandy’s amendment on the third meaningful vote. But Cox was articulating the backstop’s legal logic, and the Speaker had his opportunity because the backstop gave anti-Brexit MPs a justification to keep fighting.

She chose in December 2017 a way of delivering Brexit that had little chance of success and has now paid the price.

Her empty words

Paul Embery, firefighter and trade union official

Theresa May’s finest two moments as prime minister were her inaugural and valedictory speeches. The rest was abject failure.

Her maiden address on the steps of Downing Street in 2016 hit the sort of unifying note that appealed not just to traditional Tory voters but also to those in the working-class Labour heartlands. She spoke of leading a One Nation government, tackling poverty and putting the interests of working-class families before those of the rich and powerful.

This was buttressed by her first Tory conference speech as prime minister, in which she railed against the international elites, untrammelled markets and the concept of being a “citizen of nowhere”. It was a pitch towards those who were, let’s say, not entirely sold on the idea of a liberal, cosmopolitan, borderless world dominated by global corporations.

She had parked her tanks squarely on Labour’s lawn – and some of us inside the Labour party saw danger ahead.

But the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, and her premiership quickly reverted to stale Tory dogma. Most destructively, she continued David Cameron’s programme of austerity, which had always been as needless as it was damaging, and caused suffering to the very people she claimed to be standing up for.

In her departure speech, she mentioned the tragedy of Grenfell Tower and the need to ensure that such a disaster never happens again. These words will ring a bit hollow to those, like me, who work in the fire and rescue service and have witnessed the savage cuts that have been inflicted on our industry over recent years.

On Brexit, she made all the right sounds early on. She had no choice but to affirm that the UK would leave the EU, if necessary, without a deal (frankly, no prime minister could do otherwise without handing an effective veto to the EU). But when the time came, she bottled it. And from that moment, her credibility was shot.

Her final address emphasised the value of compromise. It has its place, of course. But in trying to please everyone, you sometimes end up pleasing no-one. As, in the end, she discovered to her cost.

Her untruthfulness

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and Director of the Mile End Institute

After the initial surge of sympathy provoked in my sentimental old soul by Theresa May’s tears at the end of her speech in Downing Street, all I could think of Oscar Wilde’s words on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone,” Wilde wrote, “to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

It was a speech of epic self-delusion and self-justification, followed by a veritable flood of hypocrisy from many of those who had made her life – indeed, all our lives – a misery for the last two years. Ultimately, though, they aren’t to blame for the mess the country and the Conservative Party is in today. She is. Where, then, did it all go so terribly wrong?

It was as soon as she stepped through the door of Number Ten Downing Street. Instead of turning round and telling people, particularly in her own party, the truth – namely that the referendum was a close run thing, that people had voted Leave for a myriad of different reasons, that the Irish border was bound to prove problematic, and that, more generally, the EU-27 weren’t going to allow the UK to have its cake and eat it – she decided to present herself as Brexitier-than-thou.

Quite why we can only guess. There are a number of possibilities, even leaving aside the temptation to cast her erstwhile adviser, Nick Timothy as the serpent.

Perhaps it was pure partisan opportunism – the thought of the Tories pulling off Brexit and pulling in many of the four million voters who had supported UKIP in 2015. Perhaps it was the need to prove her personal bona fides after playing the role of reluctant Remainer in the referendum campaign. Perhaps it was her tendency, after five years as Home Secretary, to see everything through the prism of immigration: Vote Leave stressed it; therefore the referendum was won on it; therefore free movement must end; therefore hard Brexit.

From that initial decision everything else flowed.

Her lack of persuasiveness

Jenny McCartney, Journalist and Author

I do not doubt that Mrs May loves her country, as she avowed this morning, and has a strong conception of duty and public service – why else would she have so stoically endured the vitriol constantly poured upon her? The trouble was that the country did not feel as if Mrs May loved it. In that she resembled one of those parents who find themselves tragically estranged from a child for whom they had a powerful internal affection, but seemed unable fully to translate that affection convincingly into words or, often, deeds. 

It was Mrs May who, in 2002, warned that the Conservative Party was in danger of becoming ‘the nasty party’. Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote, her delay in assuring EU nationals of their secure future in the UK indicated a lack of emotional intelligence at a time when the country badly needed such direction. So too did the human distress caused by the Windrush scandal, which stemmed from policies put in place during her time as Home Secretary.

The ‘precariat,’ despite her post-referendum assurances, have felt no more secure under her time in office. Her task of enacting Brexit was a thankless and fiendishly difficult one, but under her direction the UK, at key points, has also seemed an unnecessarily ungenerous place. 

May has great doggedness – an important quality in political life – but an absence of persuasiveness. That proved a dangerous combination. The doggedness repeatedly drew her back to preferred solutions – but without the ability to persuade others of their merits and absorb their concerns, repetition did not improve the outcome. Yet if May’s flaw has, in large part, been sincerity without communication, we must guard now against falling into the opposite trap, and possibly a worse one: a Prime Minister who can communicate without sincerity.

The system

Peter Franklin, editor of UnHerd’s UnPacked column

The political obituaries have already been written: Theresa May was a terrible Prime Minister.

Well, they’re right about that – but for the wrong reasons. Her mistakes and weaknesses, though many and significant, were not crucial mistakes or fatal weaknesses. They did not make all the difference. Rather the most obvious failure of her premiership is a failure of the entire political system: government, opposition, media, every bit of the machine – all the way up to the EU itself, whose collective, history-changing decision it was to make an example, not an ally, of Brexit Britain.

Our own politicians have made that pathetically easy for them. There is not a single faction of any size in this parliament that has shown genuine leadership on Brexit – and precious few individuals. They have wilfully confused compromise with betrayal, and principle with their own self-interest.

Together they made Theresa May’s job an impossible one. It’s hard to look back over the flowchart of her decisions and identify an alternative pathway that would have produced a different result. Given the system she was operating within, she was doomed from the moment she lost her majority – and she’d quite possibly have been doomed if she hadn’t called the snap election.

But this is not to absolve her from all responsibility. Rather, what she’s to blame for is not primarily the decisions she made, but those she didn’t make. The original sin of her premiership was not doing anything about the system that made her downfall inevitable.

There were attacks on the previous regime, but they were petty ones – from the very public humiliation of George Osborne to the ‘not invented here’ abandonment of promising policy initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse and the Life Chances Strategy. At the same time, she left in place many of the worst policies of the Cameron era – such as the counter-productive ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for aspiring homeowners (which is in fact a subsidy for the big developers); the sinking student loan system; and the white elephants of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, HS2 and Heathrow expansion.

Despite promises of “an economy that works for everyone”, there was no obvious sign of any fundamental shift in the priorities of the system – not in infrastructure investment from London to our other great cities; not in education spending from the bloated university system to the under-resourced technical education sector; not in the tax burden the parasitic rentier class places on those struggling for a stake in the productive economy.

From Whitehall and Westminster, where the power-hoarding and hucksterish culture of politics became more entrenched than ever, to the still left-behind communities that Theresa May imagined would swing behind her insubstantial rhetoric, it became obvious that, in her words, “nothing has changed”.

The failure to deliver Brexit is both a symbol – and ultimately the result – of that much bigger failure.

I’ve counted down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

#50 

“Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper”

Toilet of the Year is possibly not the most sought after accolade, but in a piece for the Atlantic on China’s increasingly comprehensive use of facial recognition technology, Rene Chun identifies the clear winner:

“Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. That’s how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial-recognition scanners—part of the president’s ‘Toilet Revolution’, which seeks to modernize public toilets. Want more? Forget it. If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal: ‘Please try again later.’”

Is this ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#49

An IQ of 10,000

Masayoshi Son is the founder of SoftBank and reportedly the richest man in Japan. It’s fair to say he’s a very smart guy. But according to the Economist, he believes that in just thirty years time we’ll be sharing the planet with robots with an IQ of 10,000 (which would be more a case of them graciously consenting to share the planet with us).

Son is not alone, there are a lot of senior tech people who believe we’re on the brink of enabling the emergence of a self-created artificial super-intelligence (ASI) that will change everything – the so-called ‘Singularity’:

“The term has different definitions depending on whom you ask, and it often overlaps with ideas like transhumanism. But the broad idea is that the rate of technological progress is accelerating exponentially, and will continue to do so, to the point where it escapes all efforts at control…”

Singularitarianism, however, is based on the idea that we’re making progress towards artificial consciousness. But we’re not. We can’t even define consciousness, let alone explain or replicate it.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Religion

#48

The 50th anniversary of extraterrestrial life

OK, if we can’t expect artificial superintelligence anytime soon, how about a visit from the alien variety? According  to Liv Boeree in Vox, the Drake Equation has been recalculated – and it’s discouraging news for flying saucer fans:

“Based upon the current state of astrobiological knowledge, there’s a 53 to 99.6 percent chance we are the only civilization in this galaxy and a 39 to 85 percent chance we are the only one in the observable universe.”

2018 was the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 mission – the first spacecraft to circle the moon and come back home again. This space craft carried two tortoises (and an assortment of creepy-crawlies). If life is unique to Earth, then that means these were first known examples of extraterrestrial life.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#47

Economics catches up with common sense (maybe)

Are we heading for another financial crash? Writing in Bloomberg, Noah Smith says that economists have been revising their theories to explain the financial crash that the profession failed to predict last time.

One of the most interesting ideas to emerge is described as the “theory of extrapolative expectations”:

“…that when asset prices rise — home values, stocks and so on — without a break, investors start to believe that this trend represents a new normal. They pile into the asset, pumping up the price even more, and seeming to confirm the idea that the trend will never end. But when the extrapolators’ money runs out, reality sets in and a crash ensues.”

Arguably this phenomenon was already well known to the rest of us, only we know it as the ‘theory of reckless, greedy bastards’.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#46

Some good environmental news, for a change

Economic growth is often assumed to be bad for the environment, but it doesn’t have to be. For instance, thanks to improvements in agricultural productivity, the richest parts of the world are now experiencing reforestation not deforestation.

According to the Economist, “Europe’s planted forests put on a little more than 1.1m cubic metres of wood per day.” That is more than a thousand times the volume of iron in the Eiffel Tower.

These days it’s neither necessary nor economic to force food out of the poorest land. So instead of paying farmers to turn our uplands into ‘wet deserts’, we should pay them to recreate wooded habitats, encourage wildlife, prevent erosion and minimise flash flooding further downstream.

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The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#45

The capitalist trilemma

To truly thrive, ordinary workers need all three of the following: full employment, a decent wage and affordable housing.

We can divide up western capitalism into three zones on the basis of where they fall down worst. So we have the horrendous hosting costs of the global cities; the pitiful wages of US and UK ‘flyover country’; and mass unemployment in the underbelly of the Eurozone. We could call these three models ‘Iowa’, ‘London’ and ‘Italy’.

This is the capitalist trilemma. An awful lot rides on which, if any, of the three models can break free.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#44

Britain is about to send more power to Brussels – literally

Unlike those pesky windmills, nuclear power is reliable, right?

Tell it to the Belgians. The country is heavily reliant on seven nuclear reactors, split between two sites; but as Daniel Boffey reports in the Guardian, things have gone awry:

“A forced shutdown of one nuclear reactor in the lead up to winter may be regarded as unfortunate. But the closure of six of the seven reactors responsible for the supply of 40% of electricity is raising eyebrows, even in a country as prone to chaotic administration as Belgium.”

If it’s a cold winter and the Belgians can’t cadge enough ’leccy off their continental neighbours then “motorway lights will be switched off, industrial production suspended and rolling three-hour blackouts launched in homes nationwide”.

Luckily, there’s a new  interconnector (basically a power cable that joins up different grids) between the UK and Belgium opening early next year. So it could be Brexit Britain that keeps the keeps the lights on in the Berlaymont.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#43

Platform cooperativism 

Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Amazon – all examples of ‘platform capitalism’. Even in sectors where the products aren’t digital, proprietary networks are becoming key to market participation and coordination.

Is this future of the digital and digitally-enabled economy – i.e. a sequence of gated markets in which big tech gate-keepers collect all the money and then decide how much to give to the people who actually do the work?

In the American Conservative, Elias Crim proposes an alternative:

“…platform cooperativism, a marriage of the historic cooperative model of business and digital platforms aimed at bringing genuine democracy to the internet, especially in the form of distributed ownership…

“What if Uber drivers set up their own platform, or if a city’s residents controlled their own version of Airbnb?”

The alternative to nationalising Facebook is for government to make the ‘big data’ it collects available to platform coops. The tech companies are using their control over data flows to empower themselves; the state must use its digital resources to empower us.

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The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#42

Kris Who?

How to illustrate China’s growing ‘soft power’?

From The Economist, here’s a list of the world’s top 15 universities for maths and computing, of which seven are Chinese and none are European.

But maths is boring, so how about pop music instead? As Adam Minter explains for Bloomberg, something very strange happened to the US iTunes chart in November:

“Kris Wu, a superstar in China, not only had the No. 1 spot on the iTunes’ singles chart but also seven of the top 10 songs.”

Wu is not a superstar in America, so how did he storm the charts? The explanation appears to be that his new album was released in America before China – and that his devoted Chinese fans found a way of downloading it from US websites.

Just another reminder that the assumption that globalisation equals westernisation is both arrogant and untrue.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#41

The worst tweet of the year from a President named Donald…

President Trump tried very hard this year, as he does every year, but in 2018 he was edged out by President Tusk (of the European Council). If you missed it, here’s his winning tweet, directed at the entire population of Greece:

“You did it! Congratulations to Greece and its people on ending the programme of financial assistance. With huge efforts and European solidarity you seized the day.”

It’s amazing how much misjudgment you can pack into 26 words – the celebratory tone, the hypocritical reference to ‘solidarity’, the implication that Greeks had any choice in what the Eurozone authorities chose to do to them.

For the reality, read Frances Coppola in Forbes:

“The magnitude of Greece’s collapse over the last decade is extraordinary… The Greek people have just lived through a Depression as deep as the Great Depression and considerably longer. It is now the greatest recorded peacetime Depression.”

The only adequate response to the Euro-establishment is “no, you did it!”

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

#40

America’s Amish future

“Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms” – that was the motto of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and arguably we’ve been conforming ever since.

But not the Amish. What they do is get together as communities and decide whether particular technologies suit their chosen way of life or not. According to Michael J Coren’s interview with Jameson Wetmore for Quartz, different Amish communities come to different conclusions – but there is a common thread:

“It’s interesting that the Amish have different districts, and each district has different rules about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Yet it’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile.”

By the way, the Amish are thriving. Their numbers double every generation and of the 500 or so Amish settlements, about half were founded in the 21st century.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Religion

#39

The Internet of Bodies

I’d imagine the Amish would take a dim view of the notion that people should be microchipped like dogs. In a story for the Guardian, Julia Kollewe reports that microchipping is on the brink of going mainstream:

‘The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.”

Kollewe adds that one microchipping provider “is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips.”

With these implants we wouldn’t have to bother with security passes and passwords anymore. In theory, we’d be automatically, perhaps permanently, interfaced with the corresponding digital networks – creating a so-called Internet of Bodies.

It would be quick, convenient and deeply, deeply sinister.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#38

Your local branch of the Chinese Communist Party

Did you know that the Communist Party is setting up branches in the West? I didn’t until I happened across Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s report for Foreign Policy:

“Party cells have appeared in California, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, North Dakota, and West Virginia. The cells appear to be part of a strategy, now expanded under Chinese President Xi Jinping, to extend direct party control globally and to insulate students and scholars abroad from the influence of ‘harmful ideology’, sometimes by asking members to report on each other’s behaviors and beliefs.”

And it’s not just America where the CPC is organising. Other countries mentioned by Allen-Ebrahimian include France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

These cells appear to be for Chinese ex-pats only. But perhaps they should be open to the local population too and even put up candidates in elections. The CPC doesn’t have much experience with democracy I know, but a platform combining rapid economic growth with a strict approach to law-and-order would definitely find support.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#37

The big problem with tall buildings

With sky-high property prices in global city centres, developers can only make a profit by building sky-high. But as Travis Barrington argues in a piece for Propmodo ageing skyscrapers can be very expensive to maintain, while being impossible to upgrade:

“Built in an era of cheap energy, many post-war Manhattan towers have facades of single-glazed glass, and structures that can’t support the weight of additional insulating glass. Many have low ceilings, tight column spacing, and inefficient heating and cooling systems. Often these have become even more cramped by having to accommodate the infrastructure of modern information technology.”

We could tear them down and start again, but that isn’t easy either. The tallest building ever (peacefully) demolished was the 41 storey Singer Building in 1968. With towers going up that are twice as tall or more, we’re bequeathing yet another head-scratching problem to posterity.

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The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#36

The eugenicist at the royal wedding

The wedding of the year was, of course, that of Harry and Meghan. For many people, Bishop Michael Curry’s passionate sermon was a particular highlight. However, it did feature a quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the philosopher and Jesuit priest whose unorthodox ideas made him a favourite with liberal Christians and those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category.

What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in a jaw-dropping article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches. Quote after quote shows that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others.

Furthermore, he was a raving eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution.

Teilhard rejected the idea that we’re all inherently imperfect (i.e. the doctrine of Original Sin) in favour of that old lie: that at least some of us can perfect ourselves.

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The Year UnPacked

Religion

#35

The infinite screen

In 2018, we found out that smartphone sales for 2017 were down on 2016 – the first year-on-year decline. Is this the beginning of the end of the smartphone and, if so, what might replace it as the core technology of the digital age?

Benedict Evans makes a strong case for AR (augmented reality) – a wearable device that allows you to see what you want to see – not as a distracting image hovering in your face, but as an apparently real object at an appropriate depth and location within your field of vision:

“Your glasses can show you the things that you might look at on a smartphone or a 2000 inch screen, but they can also unbundle that screen into the real world, and change it.”

Evans calls this the “infinite screen” and it would replace all the finite screens that we currently use.

He compares the development of AR to that of the multitouch smartphone, and suggests that the stage at which AR is now is equivalent to where multitouch was in the run-up to the 2007 launch of its breakthrough commercial product – the Apple iPhone.

We’ll see.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#34

Pub culture versus cafe culture

According to John Harris in the Guardian, British pubs are closing down at a rate of 18 every week.

But for every pub that closes down, a coffee shop seems to open. But for Harris these are no substitute for the loss true community institutions:

“If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.”

Pubs and churches may seem poles apart in purpose and atmosphere, but both are shared spaces that aim to appeal across the community. They have much more in common with each other than what Harris sees as the 21st century culture of “ever smaller social niches.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#33

The end of reading

In an article for The Conversation, Jean Twenge has bad news for booksellers:

“…In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school… By 2016, only 16 percent did.”

One doesn’t have to look far too find the culprit:

“By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.”

When you hear that ‘young people these days’ are doing less of X, Y or Z it’s because they don’t have the time.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#32

The great scientific slowdown 

How many discoveries made since 1990 have been honoured with a Nobel Prize in Physics? The answer, according to Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen in a fascinating essay for the Atlantic, is just three.

It’s not like we’re starving science of funding. Quite the opposite, in fact – there’s been a ramp-up in resources since the 1960s. Even if scientific progress isn’t slowing down, it’s not keeping up with what we’re investing in it:

“When Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom in 1911, he published it in a paper with just a single author: himself. By contrast, the two 2012 papers announcing the discovery of the Higgs particle had roughly a thousand authors each. On average, research teams nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that increase continues today.”

Even if science isn’t slowing down, it is having a productivity crisis. The big question is whether that’s because we’ve discovered all the easy stuff or whether we’re looking in the wrong places.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#31

How to build more houses in global cities

Why don’t global cities build more homes? Clearly there’s the demand, otherwise they wouldn’t be so expensive.

Is it just too difficult? No, Because as James Gleeson explains on his blog, there’s one global city that’s getting on with it:

“Tokyo’s housing stock is growing very fast – roughly 2% a year, about twice as fast as that of Paris, London or New York…”

What’s more they’re not doing it through sprawl or by packing ever more people into each dwelling. Indeed, Tokyo is getting denser in terms of dwellings per hectare, while providing more living space per person.

The secret of their success is demolition: It’s much easier in Japan to knock-down old development and start again. That doesn’t mean that London and New York have to bulldoze their most beautiful neighbourhoods. There’s plenty of post-war rubbish to get started on first.

Suggested reading

Proof that a global city can build enough new housing

By Peter Franklin

#30

Scandalous link to Russia exposed

With America under Trump, Britain mired in Brexit and France having a riot, Germany looks like the responsible adult of international politics.

But is it? Consider the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a link between Germany and Russia that undermines the security of the countries in between. A Bloomberg editorial explains:

“Due to be completed in 2019, the pipeline will double the amount of gas Russia transports directly to Germany across the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 1, completed in 2011, supplies 55 billion cubic meters a year to Germany; the second pipeline would allow Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas company, to funnel an additional 55 billion cubic meters over the same route.”

This is bad news for Russia’s immediate neighbours:

“Gas that gets to Western Europe [via land-based pipelines] from Russia also passes through countries such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, all NATO members. They… are at risk of being denied supplies and transit revenues once Nord Stream 2 comes online. Poland’s government has called the pipeline a ‘hybrid weapon’ created by Moscow to divide the EU and NATO.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#29

Where are the clones? There are no clones

2018 began with a very special delivery at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai: the birth of two crab-eating macaques called Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. What made these little monkeys special is that they are the first cloned primates to make it beyond the Petri dish and the womb.

People are also primates, but no human clone has ever been born (we think). In a fascinating, if somewhat horrifying, report for MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado explains why. Basically, it’s hugely impractical – most attempts fail and each attempt is costly:

“…[Yi Zhang, a leading stem cell biologist] notes that Chinese teams used 63 surrogate mothers and 417 eggs to make two monkey clones. Just imagine arranging for dozens of human surrogates and egg donors.

“‘No society could accept this,’ says Zhang.”

Well, one would hope so.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#28

China is electrifying

“If you want to know the future, look at the past”, said Albert Einstein. Alternatively, look at China.

For instance, the scale of the country’s environmental problems may shock you, but so might the effort going into solving them.

In April, Jeremy Hodges took a look at China’s electric bus revolution for Bloomberg:

“The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country’s entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters—the equivalent of London’s entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.”

If we want to stop catastrophic climate change then we will have to electrify our transport system within a generation. China shows it can be done.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#27

America: Not divided, just disappointed

America appears to be a deeply polarised nation. And it is – but not for the reasons you might think, argues George Hawley in the American Conservative:

“The Bible-thumping, pro-war, free-market purist is a rare creature. So is the gun-grabbing, abortion-loving, socialist atheist. Perfect conservative and liberal stereotypes are hard to find in the real world.

“Especially on economic issues, Americans exhibit a remarkable consensus…”

As shared institutions decline, we become more loyal to unshared institutions like political ideologies and cultural identities. This allows emotionally manipulative, but otherwise incompetent, politicians to rise to the top. In power, they let their supporters down – creating psychological stress that needs a release:

“…we can resolve the tension between our party identifications and our frustration with our parties by increasing our antipathy toward our parties’ opponents. In other words, we can justify our vote choice if we believe the opposing party is worse…”

Utter madness, but it explains a lot.

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The Year UnPacked

Groupthink

#26

Whatever happened to Web 3.0?

Ethan Zuckerman is a key figure in the development of the internet. Interviewed by Noah Kulwin for New York magazine, he believes that ‘Web 2.0’ – the internet as dominated by the giants of search and social media – is stagnating:

“I really feel like we’ve lost about ten years of innovation. I feel like this last decade has been pretty boring for the web.”

He’s right. Think about the development of internet in decade-long chunks. In 1988, most of us hadn’t even heard of the internet, but by 1998, email was widespread and websites commonplace. Fast forward another ten years to 2008 and broadband had become the norm. Google and Facebook were also achieving default status – indeed pretty much everything that dominates digital in 2018 was in place ten years ago.

Thanks to the smartphone, the internet has gone fully mobile over the last decade – but it’s still basically the same internet, only on a smaller screen.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#25

Stop fiddling with the gene machine

The first ‘gene edited’ babies were born in China this year. But as Veronique Greenwood reminds us in a piece for Quanta Magazine, an individual’s genome is not so much a list of instructions as a complex machine whose different parts interact in complicated ways that we’re nowhere near to fully understanding:

“Joel Bader, a systems biologist at Johns Hopkins University, says… that ‘[The] closer we are able to look, the more we are able to see that perturbing one gene or pathway has effects that propagate throughout the entire system,’…”

Thanks to techniques like CRISPR, we can knock-out and splice-in genes with ever greater precision. But though we know how to perform these manipulations, to a very large extent we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s worth bearing in mind before we genetically re-engineer our descendants.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#24

Sheffield A and Sheffield B

The great geographical divides that define the politics of our time – for instance between ‘red state’ America and the coastal cities, or between the Eurozone’s core and periphery – don’t always involve great distances. Sometimes, the same applies to a single city. In an eye-opening piece for CityMetric, Sam Gregory provides a guided tour of what he calls “Sheffield A” and “Sheffield B”:

“Uniquely for a British city, where pockets of deprivation are usually nestled uncomfortably between well-to-do suburbs, Sheffield’s dividing line runs directly through the city like the Berlin Wall. How did this happen?”

Gregory describes a bus route across the city where, between the neighbourhoods at each end, “average life expectancy falls by 7.5 years for men and almost 10 years for women”.

There’s no physical barrier between the two Sheffields, but that doesn’t stop them from being worlds apart.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#23

The birth of two nations

In the New York Times Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller describe another great divide, this time among American women:

“First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21…”

Across the nation as a whole, the average age of first birth is now 30.3 for college educated women but 23.8 for those without a college degree.

When Benjamin Disraeli wrote about the two nations of Victorian England – “the rich and the poor” – he said that they were “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners…”

In a different time and place, it’s still true.

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The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#22

The great GDP con

Over the last few decades, there’s been a marked slow down in economic growth across the West. However, things could be even worse than the official GDP figures would lead us to believe.

In an article for the Global Poverty and Inequality Dynamic Research Network, Jacob Assa and Ingrid Harold Kvangraven show that some dubious tweaks to the way the figures are calculated mean that we’re not as rich as we think we are.

Not only does GDP include the rent paid by tenants to landlords, it also includes the imaginary or ‘imputed’ rent that “homeowners would have paid to a landlord had they [the landlord] owned their home…”

This means that escalating rents and runaway house prices – which contribute nothing to productivity and make a lot of people poorer – shows up as a boost to GDP.

No wonder governments are so reluctant to solve the housing crisis.

#21

Families need fathers and so do entire neighbourhoods

The inequality in life outcomes of black boys and white boys in America is well known. But a new study featured in the New York Times shows just how pervasive the effect is – it doesn’t matter how rich the household or how ‘good’ the neighbourhood, black boys are more likely to end up in a lower income band as adults than are white boys (and correspondingly less likely to end up in a higher band).

And yet the fine-grained geographical detail of the study did pick out certain neighbourhoods where the effect was much weaker. What was it that made these areas different? Crunching the data revealed various factors, but the most significant had to do with fatherhood:

“…these pockets… were the places where many lower-income black children had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.

“‘That is a pathbreaking finding,’ said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist whose books have chronicled the economic struggles of black men.”

Fathers aren’t just good for their own families, they can also provide boys in other families with “role models and mentors”.

Suggested reading

New evidence on race and inequality in America

By Peter Franklin

#20

The widest longevity gap

At a time of intense debate about inequalities between men and women, rich and poor and between other groups and identities, there’s one social divide that goes largely unseen.

Writing in the New York Times, Dhruv Khullar opens our eyes:

“Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younger than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing…”

Obviously, suicide risk plays a part, as do other “unnatural causes”, but that’s not the only reason why people with severe mental illness live shorter lives:

“…they’re much more likely to die of the same things as everyone else: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and respiratory problems.”

Far from diverting resources away from general healthcare, investing in mental health services is a vital preventative measure.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#19

How beer could save capitalism

In sector after sector, we see monopolists squeezing out the competition and robots squeezing out the human workforce. Is this the technology-driven future of capitalism?

In the Atlantic, Derek Thompson cheers us up with news of one industry moving in the opposite direction – the US beer industry:

“…in the last decade, something strange and extraordinary has happened. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of brewery establishments expanded by a factor of six, and the number of brewery workers grew by 120 percent. Yes, a 200-year-old industry has sextupled its establishments and more than doubled its workforce in less than a decade.”

Are workers drowning their sorrows? Actually no, Americans are drinking less beer by volume, but they’re paying more for it. Quality has triumphed over quantity, and craftsmanship over automation.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#18

Digital self harm

Anyone who doesn’t see the dark side of social media should acquaint themselves with the concept of ‘digital self harm’.

It’s defined and tentatively quantified in Aaron Kheriaty’s briefing for First Things:

“In the first systematic investigation of this behavior among adolescents, recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja report their findings from a large, randomly sampled population-based study of 12-to-17-year-olds in the U.S. Of the 5,593 adolescents surveyed, one in twenty admitted to engaging in ‘digital self harm’. Specifically, 6 percent reported that they had ‘anonymously posted something online about myself that was mean.’ Among these, 36 percent said they had done it a few times, and 13 percent said they had done it many times. Likewise, 5 percent responded affirmatively to the statement, ‘I have anonymously cyberbullied myself.’ Among these, 37 percent had done it a few times, and 18 percent had done it many times.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked

Technology

#17

Peter Thiel complains about the rent

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is a very rich man, but even he thinks that rent is too high.

Reporting for Yahoo Finance, Julia La Roche quotes remarks Thiel made at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York:

“One thing I’ve been thinking about as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is the vast majority of the capital I give to the companies is just going to landlords. It’s going to commercial real estate and even more to urban slumlords of one sort or another. And that’s an odd thing to be doing as a venture capitalist. That’s so disproportionate…”

Thiel is a libertarian – he’s got no problem with people getting rich through their own efforts. But the landlords of Silicon Valley and other super-productive areas aren’t contributing to that productivity, they’re taking away from it.

Their profits should be taxed accordingly.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#16

Xue Liang 

You’re being chased through a city. Your pursuers are closing in. What do you do?

Standard procedure is to lose yourself in a crowd. Except that might not work for much longer.

Earlier this year, a fugitive from Chinese justice was arrested at a pop concert in Nanchang. How did the police spot him in a crowd of 60,000 people? In a report for the Washington Post, Amy B Wang explains:

“Details about Ao [the suspect] had been in a national database, and when he had arrived at the stadium, cameras at the entrances with facial-recognition technology had identified him — and flagged authorities…

“‘He was completely shocked when we took him away,’ police officer Li Jin told Xinhua news agency…”

Inevitably, the Chinese state has plans to extend these capabilities – to create a “comprehensive, nationwide surveillance system known as ‘Xue Liang,’ or ‘Sharp Eyes’.”

Sauron would be proud.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#15

Merkel contemplates a European civil war

In a fascinating piece for Spiegel Online, René Pfister reveals that Angela Merkel has been thinking about the Thirty Years’ War – a devastating conflict that raged across Central Europe from 1618 to 1648.

It was preceded by a long period of calm, ushered in by the Peace of Augsburg, a compromise between the Protestants and Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire, signed in 1555:

“To Merkel, the Peace of Augsburg is much more than some distant historical date. Rather, it is a warning of just how thin the varnish covering civilization really is. Just as people in the late 16th century were erroneous in their belief that the Peace of Augsburg would be enduring, we could be just as mistaken today in the belief that the postwar order, with all its treaties and alliances, serves as a guarantee that the scourge of war will not return.”

The end of the peace can be blamed on the Hapsburg Emperor, Ferdinand II, who tried to impose the will of the strongest power – and its ideology – on the other states.

I wonder if Angela Merkel can think of anything like that in today’s Europe?

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#14

The self-driving future is a bus(t)

2018 was the year when optimism about automated vehicles turned to pessimism. In March, a pedestrian was hit and killed by a self-driving car in Arizona – a tragedy that symbolises just how far the technology needs to progress before we can trust it. Some experts wonder whether road vehicles will ever go fully driverless.

But if that’s true, what should we make of the news that the Chinese company Baidu has begun mass production of its Apolong self-driving minibus? According to the BBC, the 14-seater vehicle has “no driver’s seat, steering wheel or pedals”, which sounds pretty driverless to me.

The catch is that the Apolong is designed for controlled environments “such as airports and tourist sites.”

But perhaps that’s how we’ll get to the driverless future – via segregated bus routes and not on the open road.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#13

How technology divides rich from poor

Access to technology has always divided the rich from the poor. It continues to do so today, only now it’s question of whether the latter are overexposed. Writing for the New York Times, Nellie Bowles notes that the children of the poor spend more time glued to screens than the children of the rich:

“Lower-income teenagers spend an average of eight hours and seven minutes a day using screens for entertainment, while higher income peers spend five hours and 42 minutes, according to research by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media watchdog… Two studies that look at race have found that white children are exposed to screens significantly less than African-American and Hispanic children.”

In another article for the NYT, she reveals that nannies employed by Silicon Valley professionals are instructed to “keep phones, tablets, computers and TVs off and hidden at all times”.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#12

Liberal nationalism

Liberalism and nationalism are portrayed as opposing philosophies – one seen as being ‘open’ and the other as ‘closed’.

Writing for the Guardian, Ivan Krastev reminds is us it wasn’t always this way:

“Remember how nationalists and liberals were allies in the overthrow of communism in 1989… Appealing to national sentiment was critically important as a way of mobilising society against the communist regimes. Poland’s Solidarity movement was not liberal, but a mixed – social and nationalist – coalition that endorsed the values of liberal democracy.”

The history of liberal nationalism goes back much further – it was, for instance, a vital force in the European revolutions of 1848.

Europe’s liberal elites need to rediscover the virtues of positive national self-expression, because in refusing to do so they’ve left open a political space that populist politicians have eagerly exploited.

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The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#11

China has tech giants too

America’s tech giants are sometimes referred to as GAFA (i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple). If you include Netflix then they become the FAANGs.

Writing for Wired, Christina Larson implores us not to forget the BATs:

“China’s established internet titans – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, sometimes called ‘BAT’ – began as clones of US companies like Google and eBay. But these giants have since evolved in distinct new directions, rather like megafauna evolving new breeds within a Galapagos Islands ecosystem.”

China protects this ecosystem behind various barriers, but it is also aided by the fact that technophilic Chinese consumers provide markets for digital services that are massively bigger than those in the West:

“In a country where personal cheques and credit cards never went mainstream, paying with your smartphone has become the norm: in 2016, China’s mobile payment market was 50 times the size of that in the US, according to research firm iResearch.”

Meanwhile Europe, which has neither BATs nor FAANGs, is looking rather toothless.

Suggested reading

The innovation game: Can China regain its lead over the West?

By Peter Franklin

#10

China’s chip addiction

UnPacked features a lot of stories about China –  and especially its game-changing use of technology. But for all the ways in which the Chinese as moving faster into the future than we are, there are some big gaps in the country’s technological prowess.

One of the biggest is the subject of an Adam Minter piece for Bloomberg:

“Although China long ago mastered the art of making products with semiconductors produced elsewhere (the iPhone is the most famous example), it wants to move beyond being a mere assembler…

“…China is currently the world’s biggest chip market, but it manufactures only 16 percent of the semiconductors it uses domestically.”

China’s influence over the global economy and geopolitics can only grow in the decades ahead, but its vulnerabilities – technological, social, environmental and demographic – are as significant as its strengths.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#9

The Centrist Paradox

Is political polarisation a threat to democracy? Are the ‘wings’ – Left and Right – drifting towards authoritarian extremism?

That’s the standard account of what ails the body politic, but in a fascinating piece for the New York Times, David Adler presents evidence to show that the most disillusioned voters are those in the centre of the political spectrum:

“I examined the data from the most recent World Values Survey (2010 to 2014) and European Values Survey (2008), two of the most comprehensive studies of public opinion carried out in over 100 countries…

“Respondents who put themselves at the center of the political spectrum are the least supportive of democracy, according to several survey measures…”

This is so counter-intuitive that Adler calls it the Centrist Paradox. Who, then are these ‘centrists’? Are they latte-sipping liberals aghast at the rise of populism or are they working class populists who’ve become disillusioned with the parties of the mainstream Left and Right?

It could, of course, be both – meaning that the centre is also incoherent.

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The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#8

The gaping hole in the party system

Here’s another possible explanation for the Centrist Paradox: there’s a large group of voters who are unrepresented by the conventional party system. Traditionally, there are progressive parties that lean to the Left on economic and social issues and conservative parties that lean to the Right. You can also find liberal parties that lean Left on social issues and Right on economics.

But what about voters who do the opposite – leaning Left on economics and Right on social (and, especially, cultural) issues? A fascinating report by Lee Drutman for the Voter Study Group, suggests that there are a lot of these ‘Left conservatives’ – indeed they heavily outnumber the economic and social liberals who have such an outsize influence on politics.

This gaping hole has allowed populists of Left, Right and centre to disrupt the party system, but without offering a coherent policy platform.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#7

The deflationary Death Star versus healthcare

In a piece for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson refers to Amazon as a “deflationary Death Star” – a brilliant description of the company’s effect on any market it enters into.

If there’s one market whose prices definitely need deflating, it’s the ruinously expensive US healthcare industry. Therefore, the fact that Amazon is teaming up with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway to sort it out may prove the most important business news of the year:

“The surprising trio of the nation’s largest online retailer, largest bank by assets, and most famous investor (Warren Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire) riding to the rescue of the beleaguered health system already rocked insurance stocks and thrilled health-care experts who have long dreamed of a technological solution to ‘bend the curve’ of inexorably rising medical costs.”

The immediate interest of the three companies is obvious – reducing the cost of providing healthcare benefits to their combined workforce. But if they succeed in developing a new and much cheaper healthcare model, I doubt they’ll keep it in-house.

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#6

The opioid epidemics

America’s greatest public health crisis is the opioid epidemic – and according to Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times, the latest figures show it getting worse:

“Drug overdoses killed about 72,000 Americans last year, a record number that reflects a rise of around 10 percent, according to new preliminary estimates from the Centers for Disease Control. The death toll is higher than the peak yearly death totals from H.I.V., car crashes or gun deaths.”

In the Atlantic, Ashley Fetters brings us news of another American epidemic:

“…reported cases of three sexually transmitted diseases in the United States had reached an all-time high in 2017. Rates of gonorrhea rose by 67 percent, syphilis by 76 percent, and chlamydia by 21 percent, to a total of almost 2.3 million cases nationwide… the fourth year in a row that STDs increased steeply in the U.S.”

Inevitably, the “rise in high-risk sexual behaviors [is] associated with opioid use and addiction”.

Suicide is also on the rise again in America, and that too can be linked, in part, to opioids.

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The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#5

The polygenic revolution

A strong contender for book of the year is Blueprint: How DNA makes us who we are – by the geneticist Robert Plomin. It guides us through the accumulating evidence that genes have a major influence on behavioural traits, not just physical ones.

Quoted by Andrew Anthony in the Guardian, Plomin is at pains to point out that the genetic influence on how we turn out is polygenic – i.e. hundreds, even thousands, of genes can be involved in influencing a single trait. We don’t understand exactly how these complex interactions work, but we can measure the correlations between the presence of particular genes and the expression of particular traits. On this basis, polygenic testing could be used to make predictions about behavioural outcomes.

Whether this tool is used to tailor support to individuals or to discriminate against them will be down to society, not science.

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

#4

Amazon Go

Amazon is best known as an online retailer. But in 2018 it opened a new store in Seattle called Amazon Go. In a fascinating piece for Stratechery, Ben Thompson tells us about it:

“The trick is that you don’t pay, at least in person: a collection of cameras and sensors pair your selection to your Amazon account — registered at the door via smartphone app — which rather redefines the concept of ‘grab-and-go’.”

Think of all the different systems that have to be coordinated to make it all work. But then that, in a nutshell, is Amazon’s grand strategy – expanding in all directions, not just to achieve unbeatable economies of scale, but also to create a unified retail ecosystem in which it controls and seamlessly integrates all the interfaces between each bit of the overall operation. No other retail or logistics company will be in a better position to fully automate just about everything it does.

This year, there’s been a lot of debate over how Amazon treats its workers. In ten or twenty years time we could be asking ‘what workers?’

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The Year UnPacked

Capitalism

#3

Yes we’re richer, but where did all the wildlife go?

The counterpoint to the crisis of capitalism in the West is the massive fall in global poverty. And, as well as the world getting richer, we also see long-term trends on literacy, violence, longevity and access to sanitation all moving in the right direction.

Yet the good news is no excuse for ignoring the trends heading in the wrong direction. In the Guardian, Damian Carrington writes about an especially dramatic and disturbing example:

“The Living Planet Index, produced for WWF by the Zoological Society of London, uses data on 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, representing more than 4,000 species, to track the decline of wildlife. Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%.”

At what point do we call a halt?

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The Year UnPacked

Global Affairs

#2

Americans against hate speech… and political correctness 

One of the most encouraging stories of 2018, was a study, published by More in Common, which demonstrates that Americans do indeed have more in common than one might think.

In a must-read piece for the Atlantic, Yascha Mounk highlights the key findings:

“Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that ‘political correctness is a problem in our country.’ Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24…”

These majorities were pretty consistent across ethnic groups too.

Meanwhile 82% of Americans “believe that hate speech is also a problem.”

It’s great that’s there such an overwhelming constituency for common-sense and against bigotry. If only there was a politician ready and able to represent it.

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The Year UnPacked

Flyover Country

#1

Social Credit System

I’m afraid I’ll have to conclude on a dystopian note; but there’s no other way of seeing China’s Social Credit System. This is the government plan to quantify and gamify the ‘good behaviour’ of every Chinese citizen in the form of a single score – a bit like a financial credit rating or points on a driving license, but applied across a whole range of different activities.

In a report for ScienceAlert, Peter Dockrill says that citizens will get a higher score for acts “like paying bills on time, engaging in charity, and… recycling” and a lower score for “[being] late with payments… jaywalking or smoking in non-smoking areas.”

The rewards of a high score will likely include “better credit facilities, cheaper public transport, and even shorter wait times for hospital services”. Low scorers will be second class citizens, restricted in movement and opportunity.

Quite clearly intended as an instrument of social control, the regime is making no attempt to hide that fact:

“According to China’s Communist Party, the system will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.”

Pilot programmes are already in place with the system due to go national in 2020.

How long, I wonder, before we get something like it too?

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The Year UnPacked

Technology

That (global) statistic is from Jake Swearingen’s report on the future of the smartphone industry for New York Magazine.

If you don’t give a fig for the future of the smartphone industry, then don’t hang-up – because it illustrates something of great importance to the future of the entire economy.

We’ll begin with a little recent history:

“From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession. They were the good years… millions and then billions of smartphones going out; billions and then trillions of dollars in rising company valuations; every year new models of phones hitting the market, held up triumphantly at events that were part sales pitch, part tent revival.”

Double-digit growth during the deepest recession since the war? Who wouldn’t want to be in that business? But remember the wise words of Herbert Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, then it will stop.”

Why smartphone sales growth can’t go on forever (or at least for a while yet) is an interesting question. Market saturation is one answer – pretty much everyone has one of the blasted things (I’ll come on to the developing world later). Another factor is that we’re not upgrading as fast as we used to:

“…there’s no doubt that the replacement cycle for phones is elongating. ‘Over the last five years, the replacement cycles of smartphones in the U.S. has has increased from an average of 20.6 to 24.1 months,’ says Jennifer Chan, global insight director at Kantar. More worrying for smartphone manufacturers is that desire for new technology doesn’t really spur consumers to buy new phones.”

The underlying problem is that the latest smartphones are both too good and not good enough.

They’re too good because they do just about everything you’d want from a smartphone – and do it with increasing reliability

“Durability has vastly improved; waterproofing is now standard on smartphones, so a brief dip in the sink or toilet doesn’t mean you need a new phone, and the weakest links in smartphone hardware — batteries which tend lose their ability to hold a charge over time and screens that crack and shatter — have improved.”

These are near-perfect products, so why would you want another one next year?

And yet smartphones also aren’t good enough because new models have ceased to offer breakthrough, must-have features.

Thus the industry is left to compete on price or luxury. Price – and therefore commoditisation – is what’s driving competition in an as yet unsaturated market in developing nations. The luxury, high-end product strategy has worked out pretty well for Apple so far, but without those breakthrough advances, where does it go next?

The trouble with beautifully made, ultra-reliable products is that they’re keepers – and at Apple prices one would hope so. As for super-luxurious products, there’s only so many people rich enough or foolish enough to want a gold-plated iPhone, which in any case, is more about jewellery than technology. Even worse for the tech companies, the real status symbol among the elites has become not having a smartphone.

Suggested reading

Do you have to be rich not to have a smartphone?

By Peter Franklin

As I’ve argued before, the most dangerous word in economics is enough. One of the worst things that an industry can do is fully satisfy what we want from it. And as more and more industries do that there are profound implications economic growth itself.

Imagine that an omni-capable electronic gadget hits the shelves in 2019. Let’s call it the Acme ‘Everything’ – because that’s literally what it does: everything you could possibly want. Furthermore, it never wears out or breaks down, so each person only needs one of them. Effectively, we’d all be immensely rich, our material needs and wants abundantly catered for. The effect on the economy, however, would be disastrous. In fact, after the last sale to the last customer, GDP would fall to zero as there would be no need to buy anything ever again.

Obviously, we’re nowhere near to such a device, but collectively the many devices we currently depend on are getting closer to a state of sufficiency than they were. By producing extra functionality and reliability at no additional cost, they increase their value to us, but without increasing consumer spend, producer revenue or GDP.

Suggested reading

Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, not having to buy another smartphone or have your car repaired, frees up money that can be spent on other goods and services. But for a particular industry – and ultimately the whole economy – that requires the development of products that can cater to previously unmet needs and wants. Moreover, consumers have to recognise that they actually have these needs and wants.

This gets more difficult the less obvious they are. Jake Swearingen mentions the manufacturers who hoped that we’d want “3-D televisions and curved TV sets” – but for the most part we didn’t.

It’s hard persuading people to desire something they’ve never felt the lack of. And in some ways the bigger the technological breakthrough represented by a new product, the harder it is. It requires an intuitive breakthrough on the part of the consumer.

It helps to work with familiar concepts. For instance, the motorcar was initially understood as the ‘horseless carriage’. Mobile phones are the great example of our own time. Consumers intuitively grasped the relevance of the technological leap because it combined the idea of telephony with that of mobility. Similarly, smartphones combined the idea of the mobile phone and that of the internet (not to mention the camera).

Suggested reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Eliza Filby

The next leap forward, however, is less obvious. Swearingen mentions augmented reality, but a device that combines all the things that a smartphone gives you access to with your natural field of vision is not especially intuitive or attractive.

And that, in a nutshell, is a fundamental challenge to economic growth in 21st century: while advanced economies are getting better at improving the familiar; they are getting worse at envisaging the new.