Now the Party's over

Party conferences have always been an acquired taste, but this year's (even without the McBride and Farrage sideshows) have seemed particularly remote from reality, alien rituals conducted by an alien species.  But is this just the latest chapter in the slow decline of mass party membership, or is something else at play?

The Guardian's John Harris, former chronicler of BritPop and historian of new Labour, has been worrying for some months at how the Conservative Party has lost touch with mainstream conservatism, continuing to promulgate the neoliberal nostrums of open markets and free trade, deaf to a crescendo of grumbling from its once core vote.  Outside the capital, in 'Alarm Clock Britain' (or whichever new-minted de haut en bas descriptor the narrative-mongers have come up with), Harris finds that open markets and globalisation are not viewed as paragons of efficiency and creators of wealth, but as destroyers of jobs and harbingers of instability.

Harris's argument was echoed in Aditya Chakraborty's analysis of falling party membership (and the takeover of the Conservative Party by financiers), and in the Guardian's reportage from Aldi in Worcester, the front line of this new class war, where shoppers proclaimed themselves either terminally disillusioned with all politics, or tending towards UKIP.

My reading habits are admittedly partial, but I don't think this us just a left argument:  Peter Oborne's broadsides at the metropolitan political class are aiming at the same territory. The politicians at their press conferences look increasingly like medieval clerics debating transubstantiation, while the peasants ponder plague and turnips.  The detachment goes beyond silly shibboleths about who knows the price of a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a litre of superstrength cider, or whatever 21st Century staple politicians have to pretend that they buy.

Once you start to look for it, you can see this rancorous detachment everywhere.  You can see it in the 'below the lines' comments in newspapers.  These may invite provocateurs, trolls and other people with nothing better to do with their time, but there is a toxic undercurrent of resentment too.  Sometimes expressed through racism or xenophobia, but sometimes simply presenting as a profound hostility to the political class, and an establishment that is seen as interested only in feathering its own nests.

The sense of alienation is polymorphous, and perhaps hard to analyse clearly, but it's harder still to see where it is going.  The crowds are not out on the streets in the UK, and the protests of the Occupy movement never went far beyond St Paul's Churchyard, so will disgruntled citizens flock to marginalised parties of the left and right that diverge from the shared internationalist outlook of the mainstream parties, as Seumas Milne has suggested? Will unrest and violence erupt, maybe targeted at immigarnts and other easy targets as it has been in Greece?  Or is a more profound change underway?  It seems almost absurd to pose the question, but is Disgusted of Droitwich a British manifestation of the discontent that erupted in Taksim and Tahrir?

Writing in the latest LRB, David Runciman argues that the oil shocks and decaying industrial capitalism of the 1970s gave birth to what we now call neoliberalism, though it was years if not decades before the baby was named or its moment of birth identified.  Flip forward 35 years, and ask whether the crisis of the past five years is a blip in the narrative of neoliberalism triumphant, or the beginning of something new.  If the latter, pace Yeats (it is National Poetry Day tomorrow, after all), "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Policy-based evidence making?

For someone with my politics, reading research from the Institute for Economic Affairs is never less than bracing, not least when you find yourself in sneaking agreement with it.  The recent IEA report - Quack Policy – Abusing Science in the Cause of Paternalism by Jamie Whyte - takes a robustly sceptical cleaver to a herd of sacred cows: minimum alcohol pricing and lower speed limits, for example, fail to trade-off their supposed benefits with the pleasures of drinking and the convenience of driving fast.  In many cases, Whyte argues, policy-makers start with their paternalistic opinions and prejudices, and then find the evidence to support them.  Policy-based evidence making.

At first sight, basing policy on evidence rather than prejudice, blind faith or ideology seems uncontentious, a 'no brainer' even.  But I don't think that scepticism about evidence-based policy should be the reserve of the type of people who will be harrumphing that there is no evidence for man-made climate change until the flood waters start lapping round their ankles.

Evidence-based policy has its roots in the concept of evidence-based medicine, which responded to the tendency of medics (alarmingly commonplace until the 1990s) to base interventions on custom and practice rather than any clinical data about what works. 

The elision from choosing cancer treatments based on their demonstrable impact on specific physiological circumstances, to choosing policies based on predictions of human behaviour is not smooth, however.  To start with, policy interventions are rarely based on controlled, randomised scientific trials that can isolate cause and effect from other factors.  Even where a good result seems to have followed a specific policy - the reduction in heart attack rates following the ban on smoking in pubs, for example - the causal links are not simple.  People and societies are more cussed, diverse and chaotic than cancer cells or bunions.

But there is a more fundamental sense in which evidence-based policy worries me.  It takes the politics out of policy, and creates a technocratic world where efficiency and value-for-money are all; where white-coated analysts can dispassionately assess solutions, tinkering with the apparatus of incentives, nudges and penalties to perfect citizens and society.  Tony Blair’s 1997 mantra – “what matters is what works” – was not just a financier-friendly disavowal of socialist dogma, but also a retreat from conviction politics (until their re-appearance after 9/11).

Evidence-based policy may have progressive aims (safer roads, better health, lower re-offending, fitter, happier, more productive people), but this managerialist approach excludes discussions of principle, of morality, of big ideas.  It cloaks opinions behind assertions of scientific fact. This focus is also inherently conservative; it is about tweaking the current system to optimise the way it moulds individuals’ actions, rather than considering whether it is the system itself that is rotten. 

Cash on the barrelhead

Listening to Alison Munro, chief executive of the High Speed 2 rail project, protesting that costs hadn't risen on the radio this morning, I had a faint sense of deja vu.  In between assuring us that "there is no blank cheque" (which usually means that the numbers involved have too many zeroes to even fit on a cheque), Ms Munro gave a masterclass in the popular sport of capital project obfuscation.  Here are some of the most elegant gambits:

1. 'The previous costs didn't give the full picture'.  Who on earth would expect the bill for a railway project to include trains?  Or an Olympic budget to include policing costs?  Of course these items were always seen as extra, even if not explicitly, so their inclusion does not represent a cost increase. Of course.
   
   
2. 'The increase is in contingency'.  The apparent increase in the budget is therefore the result of prudence, not prodigality.  Ministers have wisely allocated additional funding, sometimes squirelled away in departmental budgets, to allow for any cost overruns, whether from unforeseen circumstances, changes in specification or lax cost control.  
   
   At the beginning of a project, these contingency allowances are 'very unlikely' to be spent.  As the project continues, they gradually shift and slide to form part of the budget, below which the project will therefore be delivered.  In 2007, the revised Olympic budget of £9.3 billion included more than £2 billion contingency.  In 2013, the Government announced that the eventual cost of £8.8 billion was £500 million under budget.  (This explains, by the way, why Government is so reluctant to pass this saving to the National Lottery.)
   
   
3. 'The original budget didn't include provision for Value Added Tax'.  Some government entities have VAT exemptions; others have to pay VAT but cannot reclaim it like businesses would, as they are not selling goods and services to the public.  But surely, you might say, this is just a matter of one government agency adding 20 per cent to costs, so they can pass the money straight back to HM Treasury (who gave them the money in the first place)?  Is this a budget change, is it sleight of hand?  God (and the Chancellor) only know.
   
   
4. 'The original figures were nominal values'.  Public bodies (and many private bodies too) initially present project costs in the prices that would theoretically have been paid had the whole project been built and paid for in a single year (2011 in the case of HS2) rather than over the actual period of time taken to build it, during which costs would inflate.  The use of nominal values helps comparison of different proposals that would be delivered at different times, and revenues should inflate as much as costs do, but outturn costs that are double the nominal costs originally stated nonetheless add to confusion.

The net impact of these manoeuvres is that a project that was originally stated to cost less than £30 billion can rise to £42.6 billion through increases in contingency, add a further £7 billion for trains,  and finally grow to £73 billion to take account of VAT and inflation.  Each of these changes looks reasonable in itself, but taken together they make it look like Government is playing a game of fiscal Find-the-Lady, where virtually any number can be defined or redefined as the cost of a project.  This probably does not do much to boost public confidence in politicians.

Against nature - skiing

The last days of the skiing season have a curious feeling.  As the last visitors sweat down the slopes in sunshine or top up tans in piste-side bars, there’s a slightly wistful tinge as the snow turns to slush and melts back into the slopes.  

But it’s a world away from the intense melancholy that accompanies the shortening days and falling temperatures of autumn in a coastal resort.  The mountainsides are being reborn, not closing down.  The shops want to swap ski gear for hiking boots, and the hotels want to advertise swimming pools not saunas.  As the mountains shrug off the grubby crust of accumulated snow, an illusion lifts.  As cigarette butts, dog turds and club flyers are revealed by the snow’s retreat, so is the deep structure of the ski runs.  This piste is a road, this one a footpath, this one a gentle flower meadow.

This awkward metamorphosis lays bare a complex and intricately evolved infrastructure – the cables that spider up and down hills, and the lifts, conveyor belts, gates and pulleys that transport skiers up hills, like products in a perpetual motion assembly line designed by Heath Robinson.  Ski resorts are nature, but nature improved, primped, preened.   Through the winter, snow machines spew water vapour into the freezing night air, and from the hotels and bars you can see the lights of piste-bashing tractors crawling up and down steep inclines, turning their churned-up surface to uniform white corduroy.  

There’s nothing natural about skiing either.  Encased in polyester and crash helmets, and balancing on a steep hillside, on two wobbly planks of carbon fibre, you are told to lean downhill, against all common sense and years of conditioning.  To turn right, you must lean or shift your weight to the left; to turn left, you must do the opposite.  And all the time, to retain any sense of control, you must point your nose downhill.

But, for those fleeting moments when it works, when you feel the sheer joy of swooping down the manicured winter wilderness, more or less in control, you feel as close to flight as you can without leaving the ground.  Suddenly it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

Come together?

There's a piece by urban maven Richard Florida on The Atlantic Cities blog, summarising some research on the link between urban density and productivity.  What is perhaps more interesting than the fact that there is a link (talented people and businesses benefit from 'agglomeration' and are drawn to the locations that support it) is the fact that this only works for cities with high levels of skills:

"[the report] notes that density plays a bigger role in cities where levels of skill and human capital are higher. Metro areas with below average levels of human capital realize no productivity gains from density, the study finds, while doubling density in metros with above average human capital gain productivity benefits that are roughly twice the average. This "negative net agglomeration effect" found in less skilled metros leads the authors to conclude that the negative effects of congestion swamp the positive effects of urbanization in less skilled places."

That is to say, densification works for you if you live - put bluntly - in a middle-class professional city, but less well if you are in a low-skilled working class city.  This seems to highlight something that is little remarked on by professional density fans like me, even if it is about people and communities within cities, rather than cities as economic entities.  For all the benefits (viability of local services, lower car dependency, lower carbon impact) that high density urban living can offer, high density means different things for different classes: living in the Barbican and living in the Heygate Estate are different experiences, even if cast from the same concrete.  Notting Hill is not Canning Town.

So how does density relate to deprivation?  In London, the most densely populated wards include both some of the richest and some of the poorest (Tachbrook and Green Street East (in Westminster and Newham respectively)), but the poorer wards are denser overall.  The graph below shows London's 620 wards grouped in order of their average rank in the 2007 Index of Deprivation, with their population density on the vertical axis. 

The co-efficient of correlation is -0.48, which implies some relationship between high deprivation rankings and high density, if not a precise one (IMPORTANT HEALTH WARNING: this blog post involves me using statistical formulae and large datasets, so should be treated with something between suspicion and disdain).  So far, so unsurprising.  Poorer areas are more likely to be in the inner city (so likely to be denser), and also likely to include fewer fripperies like parks that would detract from density (when measured as people per square kilometre, rather than as dwellings per hectare).  Prosperous areas that look dense because they are built up may actually be low density in terms of residents (from, for example, single people or couple living in larger flats with spare rooms).

So, if that's our starting point, how has London been changing in recent years?  The chart below shows actual and projected changes in population density (2001-16), against deprivation rank.

 

Three things are immediately noticeable. The first is that London is becoming denser almost everywhere. Secondly, the curve is a lot more ragged: most wards are seeing a relatively steady change in population, but there are places (like Stratford New Town, Canning Town and Fairlfield) where density is more than doubling.  Finally, it is the poorer places that are densifying most intensively (with a correlation co-efficient of -0.40 between deprivation rank and absolute increase in density). These are the places that are densest, and getting denser: Northumberland Park, Bromley-by-Bow and Mile End are all among the places that are densifying by more than 20 per cent in fifteeen years.

So, what if anything does this all mean?  It means that we need to look at the numbers more closely.  How are inner and outer city areas differentiated, and how does densification relate to changes in prosperity and deprivation?   Is greater density a symptom of improving fortunes, or a cause of them?  Or does densification have the opposite impact on richer and poorer places, boosting prosperity in the former and amplifying the problems of poverty in the latter?  In the meantime, you can note that the densest, and poorest, areas in London are densifying fastest.  It's not clear that this is necessarily a good thing.

(Thanks to London's http://data.london.gov.uk/ site for the figures, and to Paula Hirst for the tip off)

DRAFT POST - TO BE REVIEWED

The wrong sort of community

A few years ago, I visited one of the poorer districts of Sao Paulo.  Not a chaotic favela, but a cluster of housing projects in an isolated location on the edge of town, as grim as a concrete structure can be under the blazing Brazilian sun.

The Paulistanos - architects, urbanists, social scientists etc - who were showing us round explained how areas like this suffered from very weak social capital, with few organisations in place apart from well-organised gangs like PCC. What about the huge buildings by the side of the highway? one of our party asked.  Ah, they were just evangelical churches, we were told.  There was a brief pause, and then the conversation moved on, avoiding any further mention of what are clearly some of the most powerful players in Brazil's civil society.

I remembered this a couple of days ago when I read, in Zoe Williams' comment piece in the Guardian, that London Citizens had been one of the few success stories in the Government's dismal Work Programme, getting 1,500 people into work.  I have had dealings with London Citizens over the years; they are an effective community organising and campaigning organisation, which has been assiduous in securing solid commitments from local authoirities and other public bodies, by offering public adulation or denunciation.

But you'd have to look reasonably closely at London Citizens' website to see that this is a group with deep roots in the churches and mosques of London.  My first meetings with the group, almost ten years ago now, tended to involve an Muslim imam or two as well as a multi-denominational smorgasbord of Christian ministers (though one of my colleagues remarked sotto voce as their list of demands were read out, "They're not priests, they're fucking Trotskyites").

These religious roots are politely ignored on all sides, not only because the unified front would fracture if theological matters were brought to the surface.  There is a faint feeling of embarassement among secular middle class liberals (like those sitting the other side of the table in City Hall) when dealing with religion.  The awkwardness increases when the religious belief is manifested fervently, as a central plank of identity, rather than as a private hobby that goes unmentioned in polite company.

But travel on any tube in east London, and you quite quickly see people (usually poorer, ethnic minority people) poring over their copies of the Qu'ran, Bible or other religious text.  And the big razzle dazzle evangelical churches (some, like UCKG, imported from Brazil) can pack out auditoria every weekend.  So I'm not surprised that London Citiens succeeded where private contractors have failed: they are reported to have preached the scheme in church and mosque and to have intervened directly (dressing unemployed people up, and driving them to job interviews).

However unsavoury some of their teachings to liberal ears, these 'faith communities' still seem to be able to touch the parts of society that the best-intentioned outreach programmes fail to get anywhere near.  It seems perverse to ignore them, then to talk of 'hard to reach communities'.

Old Flo, the Bamiyan of Bow*?

In a bland blog in the Huffington Post, Tower Halmets Mayor Lutfur Rahman defends his plans to sell off Draped Seated Woman, the Henry Moore sculpture erected in an east London housing estate in 1962.  The article runs through predictable bromide about ring-fenced funding, Tower Hamlets'  record in providing affordable rented housing and his electorate's support for the sale.

But Mayor Rahman makes an interesting point in passing: 'if only there was as much national media interest in the fact that we are being forced to make £100million cuts by 2015, as there has been over the proposed sale of this sculpture to mitigate the effect of some of those cuts.'  There is something slightly uneasy about the intense focus on the sale of this work of art, when the material conditions for the people of Tower Hamlets, where more than fifty per cent of children live in poverty, are so poor and receive so little coverage in the media.

Of course there is more to it than that (and you can worry about poverty and cultural deprivation).  The sale of the sculpture (affectionately known as 'Old Flo') is understood by both sides of the argument as symbolic.  On the one hand it betokens nostalgia for post-war 'nothing too good for the workers' social solidarity that also gave us the magnificence of the Royal Festival Hall.  On the other hand, there is impatience with this nostalgia, which is largely (but not exclusively) being expressed by middle-class liberals like me: when will we start protesting as loudly about poverty and exploitation; when will we value flesh and blood, as much as bronze?

The comparison needs to be cautiously made, as Tower Hamlets is not the Afghanistan, but the terms of the debate remind me of when the Taliban government of Afghanistan blew up the great Buddhas at Bamiyan in 2001 - an act that scandalised the world.  The Taliban said that they did so after Swedish scholars offered money to repair the statues, but refused to let it be used instead to provide food for starving children.  Their gratuitous act of vandalism was a dynamite retort to westerners worrying about material heritage more than current poverty.

The sale is probably a done deal now, and a scandal of sorts. The issue is what sort of scandal it is: one of a callous council ready to sell its heritage for a mess of pottage, or one of tough choices between selling artworks, or cutting back services, exposing to greater risk local people already leading precarious lives.

* or Stepney, actually, but the rhyme works better if shifted a little further eas