Decline and Fall of the English Murder

The front page of today’s Daily Mail asks: Why was wife killer [Garry Weddell] bailed? This is also the first day of Steve Wright’s trial for killing five prostitutes in Suffolk.

We are just as fascinated with violent and untimely death as we were in 1946, when George Orwell wrote his great essay Decline of the English Murder.

The question is: has the quality of our murders improved since then?

The problem with automatic organ donation

BBC News: Gordon Brown says he wants a national debate on whether to change the system of organ donation. He believes thousands of lives would be saved if everyone was automatically placed on the donor register.

I see the use of default options becoming an increasingly common trend in coming years – it has already been suggested as a remedy for pensions problems, and may well end up being the way we fund our political parties.

It is undeniably effective. But I can’t help wondering if it is really the best way to go about things.

Why Barack and Brown aren’t that different after all

There aren’t many things that connect Barack Obama to Gordon Brown. But Obama has just gone and made the same mistake in New Hampshire that Brown made at last year’s Labour conference. He believed the polls, and the hype, and he forgot the golden rule of politics: when deciding on your strategy, think, think twice, then downplay expectations.

1. Obama and his team looked cocky before the caucus. “The Obama Wave”: where did that come from? Even the famous Iowa speech sounds very hubristic now. Before Iowa, a two-point victory for Hilary in New Hampshire would have been a victory for Obama, one he could rightfully say was within the margin of error (as this post by the director of polling at ABC makes clear). Now, it looks like a big loss.

2. The print media went to town on an Obama win, and now they look like the biggest bunch of idiots this side of an Arsenal home game. Some will take it on the chin (Gerard Baker in The Times: grace in error). The rest will be looking at avenge their humiliation. At the moment, they’re turning on the pollsters. Will they also go for Obama and his over-confident team? That’s what happened to Brown; he’s still paying for his error.

Next week: why David Cameron is the new Hilary Clinton. (Hint: it’s all in the hair).

Kant attack ad

It’s getting vicious in New Hampshire:

Poor old Immanuel. It must be because of his recent conversion to environmentalism.

High oil prices are no environmental benefit

Gerard Baker comments in the Times today that we should “cheer” oil reaching $100 a barrel as it will help “wean us off the petroleum fix”. He argues that expensive oil will break our dependence on some of the world’s worst regimes, encourage energy efficiency, and lead us to seek more environmentally friendly ways to feed our energy habit. This is the classic market-liberal environmental panacea: let the markets run free and – hey presto! – we end up with better technology, higher output, and nice green planet to top it all off.

Sadly, reality is a little less perfect. Dear oil isn’t making investment in green technology the automatic choice of the rational economic actor. No, the winner from oil price inflation is the worst possible option from a green perspective: the renewed economic viability of coal.

Over the next eight years it is expected that China will add 562 new coal-fired power stations, India 213, and the US 72. The US considers itself the “Saudi Arabia of coal”, with a guaranteed 250-year supply. Even Britain, with the environment now a key political battleground, is on the point of commissioning its first new coal-fired station in 24 years. As the price of oil becomes prohibitive, the smart money does not go into untried and expensive green technologies, it goes into the pit.

So the hard fact is, we can’t rely on markets to solve this problem. Markets will push money in the direction of the best deal, and with current regulation, that deal is coal.

We must not believe that the environmental problem is an economic issue which will solve itself. It is at its core political, and can only be tackled through a demonstration of political will. Instead of a blind faith in markets as they are, it requires leaders with the courage to make markets serve our environmental priorities, to make the best deal economically also the best deal morally. So let’s not do this contortionist’s trick and pretend that expensive oil is really a great thing; let’s not, Mr. Brown, talk green to our faces but commission coal-fired power stations behind our backs; the only real solution to this problem is for brave leaders to make tough choices, and until they do, we’re nowhere.

Matthew Taylor on the perception gap

Now being described as “one of Britain’s top thinkers”, here’s Matthew Taylor writing on the perception gap in the New Statesman.

Not a bad piece, I thought. The peroration didn’t quite make sense to me, though.

Matthew writes on hope: “It is the attitude of the spectator that induces pessimism, the experience of the participant that induces hope … The problem is not that change brings fear and disorientation (there’s nothing new in this), it is that we lack the spaces and places where people can renew hope”.

Given the death of the old collectivism (as embodied in political parties, TUs etc), Matthew thinks we need to find a new collectivism, one that is fit for the demands of the modern age. This might seem like wishful thinking, he says, but look at the existing forms of social action out there – against predictions, cinema and live football are flourishing. “For all the talk of the decline of social capital, people are doing more stuff together.”

Or are they? I haven’t seen much communal activity at the cinema recently. And, despite the attendances, football is an increasingly spectatorial affair. People arrive late and leave early at all but the biggest games, putting their private convenience before the demands of the collective. At White Hart Lane, the loudest noice you’ll hear is the sound of guy behind you telling you to sit down. Same at Old Trafford, it seems.

In their focus on private desire, these activities are profoundly apolitical. Matthew wants political action that will “keep up with modern tastes and expectations”. But I have a feeling that this means politics that takes on board the techniques of mass commercialism – inviting people to come together as consumer-spectators, not as active citizens.

So, really, we’re back to where we started from. Ten out of ten for effort though.

Daily Mail tragically wrong on ecstasy deaths

Lots in the news yesterday about ecstasy, following Richard Brunstrom’s latest publicity drive.

The Daily Mail weighs in with its usual care and moderation. Rounding up the usual photogenic tragedies with comments from the grieving mothers, they put them under the headline: “Safer than aspirin, Mr Brunstrom? Tell that to the 50 families a year who lose a child to this insidious drug”.

The hypocrisy stinks – talk about taking advantage. So do the statistics.

50 deaths a year is accurate if you take the bare figures. But the bare figures conceal far more than they reveal.

Any fair examination of drug use facts shows that ecstasy is not what we should be worried about – not at all.

American pessimism and the perception gap

The Christmas edition of The Economist features an article on American pessimism. Americans are gloomy at the moment, they say, but this isn’t warranted by the facts.

Fair enough – insofar as facts relate to our cultural consciousness at all. But they forget to mention the perception gap – without which, any discussion of this issue is half empty.

Or should that be half full?

Happy New Year everyone.

China, Europe and the US dollar

Following a recent post here on the use of the dollar weapon against the euro, it was pointed out to me that if the US was in the process of using the dollar weapon, the real target was not Europe but China. That the US is trying to force a revaluation of the yuan is almost certainly true; but I believe that both currencies are, in fact, in America’s sights.

In defence of my earlier post, it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the US trade deficit with China. In 2006, the total US deficit stood at $759 billion. Of that, $177 billion was with China. Whilst clearly a huge sum, it is not large enough to support claims that changing the terms of trade with China would solve America’s deficit problems. Moreover, it is not clear that a revaluation of the yuan would make a huge difference to America’s overall deficit. A stronger yuan would not make the US import less, merely source its imports from somewhere else.

Nor would it make America export more. US exports are largely capital-intensive (and so expensive) and consumed primarily by rich countries. Given China is not yet part of this group, a revalued yuan would make little difference to demand for US-made products in that country. A stronger euro, on the other hand, would increase demand for US exports amongst wealthy Europeans. For this reason, reversing the $116 billion deficit with the EU is the priority for the US in its attempts to improve its balance of payments position. 

Mind the gap: modern society meets the stone age brain

The most critical division in our politics this year won’t be between left and right, or between Labour and the Tories. It won’t even be between rich and poor. In 2008, we will find the most important split in public life within individual citizens. Inside ourselves, we see a gap – profound and entrenched – between private optimism and public gloom.

For a long time now, politicians and policy-makers have been aware of a startling schizophrenia in British life. Known in Westminster as the “perception gap”, and in Washington as the “happiness gap”, the split between private optimism and public pessimism is one of the most serious problems of current political life. Resolving this cognitive rupture must be the task of 2008, or we will end the year once more paralysed politically, unable to deal with the challenges that face us.

Time and time again, opinion polls reveal a dramatic gap between what people say about their personal experiences, and what they say about the state of things in general. On the whole, people are confident, even buoyant, about their individual prospects – witness journalist and 20-year absentee Jon Henley marvelling at “the energy, the entrepreneurism, the ambition, the can-do”, on his return to the country. Yet they insist on believing that the nation as a whole is going to hell in a handcart.

Take attitudes towards public services. In a recent poll, 81% of respondents said that they were happy with their last visit to hospital. Yet when the same group was asked whether they thought the NHS was providing a good service nationally, only 47% felt able to declare that it this was so. Total violent crime has fallen since 1997, and most people report themselves confident with the way crime is dealt with in their locality. Yet the bulk of people think that violent crime has risen, and a strong majority think that crime is handled badly in Britain as a whole.