Telegraph.co.uk: From paedophilia to speeding, bureaucrats need a sense of proportion over the risks

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Written by Dr Eamonn Butler

The Government is overcautious about the risks not just from paedophiles but from all aspects of modern life.

Watford Borough Council’s decision to ban parents from the playground in case they are paedophiles are another case of the Bully State gone mad. We’ve seen it in the past week with the Independent Safeguarding Authority (whose .gov web address shows it to be anything but independent), telling piano teachers and others that they ought to get CRB checks, or parents might ask why not.

So now we are living in a Britain where all adults are presumed to be paedophiles unless they can prove themselves otherwise. It’s the precautionary principle gone mad. If you can’t prove something safe, you have to treat it as dangerous. That thinking also gave us the EU's Reach directive, which prescribed in-depth tests on "hazardous chemicals" – such as salt – before they could be licensed for our use.

Why do bureaucrats act like this? Because there is no upside for them. A business person will take a risk because the chance of failure is balanced by the chance of making a fortune. Civil servants aren’t rewarded with fortunes when their decisions go right, but they are sidelined or barred from promotion when they go wrong. So they focus on stopping the downside, not boosting the upside.

That is why we are being softened up for a 20mph speed limit in towns, particularly near schools. Yes, pedestrians are much less likely to be killed at this speed than 30mph. But today we have a third of the child road deaths that we had in 1922, when the national speed limit was 20mph. Why? Because parents warn their kids about traffic. They remove their kids from the risk. What the bureaucrats want to do is to remove the risk from the kids.

But we take risks for a reason. There are benefits too. With a 0mph limit you could eliminate road accidents entirely. But at huge cost to the community.

Why does Network Rail spend billions on train safety systems? Because train crashes are spectacular news, while car crashes aren’t. In 2007 about 24 people were killed on the railways, including pedestrians at level crossings. Nearly 3,000 died on the roads, but that’s less obvious.

Seat belts are another celebrated case. Strapped into their cars (which are advertised for their safety), drivers feel safe. So they drive more riskily, and more pedestrians are killed and injured. We’d be better installing a huge spike in the middle of each steering wheel. Accidents would plummet.

We take risks for a reason. Life would be impossible without it. The idea of a risk-free world is futile. And unless we – parents, children, drivers, and everyone – are exposed to risk, we will never learn to cope with it.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here.

Telegraph.co.uk: Lord Stern is wrong: giving up meat is no way to save the planet

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Written by Dr Madsen Pirie 

Lord Stern, whose 2006 report set out the consequences and costs of various levels of global warming, has now called for humans to stop eating meat. His reasoning is that our farm animals, especially cows and pigs, expel methane, which is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, making meat-production account for 18 percent of all carbon emissions. He says that it will become as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is to drink and drive.

The proposal is not surprising, since it is but the latest in a series of proposed behavioural changes which are claimed to be essential to the planet's survival. People have been told they must eat locally-sourced food, abandon their cars for public transport, and drastically cut their air travel, among many other 'essential' changes. Giving up meat is only another step on the 'live more simply' road.

At the heart of the environmental lobby lies an unease at progress and change, and a veneration of a calmer, slower lifestyle. It goes hand in hand with a disregard for the material goods which extend choices in the rich nations, and even for the economic growth which offers the poorer ones a ladder out of subsistence. Although 'saving the planet' is advanced as the reason why these lifestyle changes must be implemented, it sometimes seems as if the simpler life is an end in itself, and that global warming is a convenient excuse to force acceptance of it.

Lord Stern, whose 2006 report set out the consequences and costs of various levels of global warming, has now called for humans to stop eating meat. His reasoning is that our farm animals, especially cows and pigs, expel methane, which is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, making meat-production account for 18 percent of all carbon emissions. He says that it will become as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is to drink and drive.

The proposal is not surprising, since it is but the latest in a series of proposed behavioural changes which are claimed to be essential to the planet's survival. People have been told they must eat locally-sourced food, abandon their cars for public transport, and drastically cut their air travel, among many other 'essential' changes. Giving up meat is only another step on the 'live more simply' road.

If we give up animal husbandry and eat the vegetarian diet Lord Stern advocates, it would be one devoid of milk, cheese and butter, and the world would have to get along without leather for its shoes or jackets, or wool for its clothes. This is not going to happen, any more than the other 'essential' changes.

What will happen instead will be new technologies that solve the problems without behavioural change. There will be emission-free transport, cleanly-produced energy, and minimal-impact production. Human ingenuity and resourcefulness are quite capable of achieving this, and can even be accelerated by suitable incentives.

It is highly likely that animals will be genetically engineered to emit less methane, and highly unlikely that human beings will give up a large part of their diet. The one is easy to do; the other is probably impossible, as well as undesirable. Some in the environmental lobby oppose this kind of technological change precisely because it will make behavioural change unnecessary. It will enable people to live as they want to live, rather than as others think they should live.

But technology will win, and the constricted lifestyles advocated by Lord Stern and others will lose. A look at human development suggests which course is the more likely.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here.

Scotland on Sunday: The Budget will be a fiction on a scale of its own

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Old Teaser

Not only has the basic rate since fallen to 20 per cent, but the amount of our income we get to keep has also risen to a 36-year high. Tax Freedom Day, which is the day you stop working for the government and get to keep your salary, came on 14 May this year, 135 days into the year. But this marked the lowest contribution made by taxpayers to government expenditure since 1973, another period of economic turmoil.

However, the Adam Smith Institute, which calculates where Tax Freedom Day falls each year, warned that if the government had raised taxes to take account of the money we owe, this year's Tax Freedom Day would have been postponed until 25 June. From the taxpayers' perspective, this would be the longest they would have had to work for the government in any year since records began in the 1960s.

The only one to come near was 1982, when taxpayers only stopped working to pay for government expenditure on 20 June, a time when the economy was similarly recovering after two years of recession and trying to pay off huge debts.

Published in the Scotland on Sunday here.

Telegraph.co.uk: Competition in postal delivery is the solution

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Old Teaser

Written by Dr Madsen Pirie

Customers must be offered an alternative to the service which has been constantly interrupted by unofficial action, and which now threatens them with a total stoppage.

The impending mail strike makes it clear how near-monopoly services seem to breed dinosaur unions. The ability to shut down a service ups the ante for the unions. In services where there is a competitive market, customers can turn to other suppliers. Lord Mandelson rightly points out that a mail strike now will turn customers to alternative communications technologies, customers who will probably not return.

Some will turn to other mail deliverers, rather than other technologies, but the problem here is that the Royal Mail does the end delivery, the so-called 'last mile.' Other firms such as the Dutch-owned TNT, use Royal Mail postmen and women for the final delivery through letterboxes. This means that the Communication Workers Union (CWU) has the power to shut down the service totally, giving it a massive industrial muscle it has shown itself quite prepared to use.

One reason why this state of affairs has continued is that the Post Office is uniquely exempt from paying VAT on its services, as its would-be competitors have to. This means that a rival has to be 15 percent (and soon 20 percent) more efficient to compete effectively. Most markets are won or lost on much smaller percentage margins than that. TNT has a case pending before the European Court protesting the unfairness and calling for a level playing field. Until then, though, it is effectively priced out.

The strike is about modernization, as postal services have to streamline to take on the challenge of electronic communication. The government and management know that more efficient and automated practices must come if mail delivery is to survive.

It would be a good move now for the VAT rule to be changed, putting a level playing field into place for postal services. This would give firms like TNT the chance to set up end delivery and keep the mail services running despite the CWU shutdown. This would give the customers an alternative to the service which has been constantly interrupted by unofficial action, and which now threatens them with a total stoppage.

The CWU has been intransigent and antiquated because it has the power to be so. If alternative delivery systems were in place for customers to turn to, the union would soon change its behaviour. The time has come for government to rescue its citizens from the grip of an over-mighty union by opening up the field to firms which can compete on an equal basis.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here.

The New York Times: Biofuels Push Britain Toward Wheat Imports

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Old Teaser

Written by Pete Browne

Commenting at his blog, Madsen Pirie, the president of the Adam Smith Institute, Britain’s leading free-market economic and social think tank, said:

Of all the insanities committed in the name of green politics, one of the most insane is the production of biofuels from food crops. In pursuit of increased proportion of energy from renewable sources, governments have realized that wind and solar power cannot make sufficiently large contributions. They have therefore turned to biofuels, a move that hugely delights their farming lobbies.

Published in The New York Times here.

guardian.co.uk: Postal strike is an act of desperation

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Written by Peter Lazenby

"And what about the little old lady who wants to post her Christmas cards?"

The question was put to me by a Sky TV News interviewer as I engaged in a live spat with Dr Madsen Pirie, co-founder and president of the Adam Smith Institute, the rightwing thinktank that pioneered privatisation of our formerly publiclyowned industries and promotes the free market.

Published on guardian.co.uk here.

WSJ: Just Don't Call it Thatcherism

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Old Teaser

A 2008 report by Nigel Hawkins of the Adam Smith Institute offers a hint of what could go, including the Royal Mail, British Waterways and (our favorite) BBC Worldwide.

Published in the WSJ here.

Britain's financial crisis was 100% home grown, says leading Tory

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

One year on from the part-nationalizations of Lloyds-HBOS and RBS, a new report by leading Tory John Redwood MP has pinned the blame for the financial crisis squarely on the government and the Bank of England.
 
In Credit Crunch: The Anatomy of a Crisis, published today by the Adam Smith Institute, Redwood attacks the notion that the UK economy was well run, and that its problems were imported from the US. He blames bad monetary policy from the Bank of England, bad regulation from the Financial Services Authority, and bad fiscal policy and crisis management by the British government for the severity of the crash. Britain's crisis may have had much in common with America's, Redwood says, but it was very much home grown.

Britain's fake boom
The report traces the roots of the banking crisis to the "false boom" of 2001-2007. A boom fuelled by ultra low interest rates, lax credit controls, and an explosion of lending, rather than real, sustainable growth. These economic conditions encouraged banks, like Northern Rock, to pursue an aggressive growth strategy based on selling securitized mortgages and borrowing short-term from the money markets to finance new lending. As well as driving a house price bubble, this approach sowed the seeds of later disaster.
 
Blame the Bank of England
The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England must take a major share of the blame for the crash. Redwood explains that having first kept interest rates too low for too long, it then raised them too far and too fast in 2007. They starved the money markets of cash and triggered the first phase of the financial crisis, as Bradford & Bingley, Alliance & Leicester and HBOS had to be bailed out, and Northern Rock, ultimately, nationalized. Incredibly, Redwood points out, in the year that followed the run on Northern Rock, the Bank of England acted as though nothing serious had happened, keeping interest rates relatively high when they should have been cutting them.

The government got it wrong
The report argues that the worst policy mistake of the crisis was the government's. In autumn 2008, just as world markets were showing serious signs of strain, they suddenly decided to insist that the banks hold more cash and capital than they had required during the boom years. As Redwood points out:

"That was the worst possible moment to make such a request, and the worst possible thing to do when markets needed reassurance from the authorities that the banks would survive. As soon as the regulators' demands became public, confidence in the major financial institutions was undermined, and RBS and Lloyds-HBOS were forced into semi-nationalization, at huge taxpayer risk."

Reforming Britain's banks
The result of this disastrous intervention, Redwood says, is that Britain has been left with a banking sector with too few competitors and too many weak balance sheets. He argues that the prime task facing the next government will be to remodel the state owned banks, splitting them up into smaller institutions to encourage domestic competition, and return them to the private sector as soon as possible. The report also suggests that banking regulation should be returned to the Bank of England, who would in future focus on the 'big picture' and set counter-cyclical cash and capital reserve requirements for the banks.

Click here to read the report.

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Telegraph.co.uk: The Archbishop of Canterbury caricatures consumers and fires at token targets

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Old Teaser

Written by Dr Madsen Pirie

Most people are not like Rowan Williams' caricature of consumers who find no room for life's finer experiences

The Archbishop of Canterbury has urged families to get in touch with "the natural rhythms of the seasons," and have "a sense of connectedness to natural processes." Instead of a consumerism which "treats each person as essentially a hole that you have to keep stuffing things into," he urges "a life that is balanced, that is at home with its material and human environment." These are fine sentiments, in that most of us would want balanced lives rather than unbalanced ones, and most of us would rather be at ease with the world than at odds with it.

The good bishop moves onto more controversial territory, however, when he mentions specifics, in that he seems to have bought the entire agenda of "token environmentalism". This is where green lobbyists pick out token targets to vilify, regardless of the actual degree to which they affect things.

So-called "food miles" provide one example. Dr Williams urges us to grow food in our gardens and on allotments rather than importing foodstuffs from places like Kenya. Many of the foods we import could indeed be grown at home, but with much more energy use than is required in warmer countries. Kenya, for example, is effectively exporting sunshine with its food crops.

Furthermore, many foodstuffs are more expensive to grow locally, so we would be banning cheaper foods from poor countries that are desperate to sell us them, simply to tick off token environmental boxes.

Dr Williams also appears to have taken on board the notion that air travel should be avoided to save the planet, and tried to make his own last year flight-free. In fact flying makes a much smaller contribution than do ocean or surface transport. It just makes an easier target for the tokenists. Budget airlines, which they denounce, in fact fly greener by using newer aircraft with engines that use less fuel, and by flying with fuller passenger loads.

Even the bishop's notion of consumers as holes to stuff things into is a caricature. We all have our values and our priorities, and we express these in terms of the things we spend time and money on. The time spent working for the school bazaar cannot be spent on reading or listening to opera. The money we spend on music cannot also be spent on clothes.

Every action is a trade-off against the things we could have done instead. Of course we look down on people driven by a crass materialism which finds no room for life's finer experiences, but most people are not like that. They express themselves through their choices, in lives that do indeed balance aesthetic and sensitive experiences with material comforts.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here.

Telegraph.co.uk: Privatisation is no way to sustain Britain's runaway spending

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Written by Dr Madsen Pirie

The Government's asset sales will provide a year of bounty but doesn't address the British state's excessive spending.

First there was "borrowing our way out of debt" which raised the eyebrows of sober-minded accountants. Then there was "printing our way out of debt," as quantitative easing magically created money out of nowhere. Now the latest round is "selling our way out of debt," as the Prime Minister announces the sale of £16bn worth of state-owned assets.

First will come the Tote, the Thames Dartford Crossing, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and student loans. The sale of the state's 33 percent stake in Urenco, the uranium enrichment company, will follow. There are good and bad features of the sale. The good point is that most, if not all, of these will sit happily in private ownership. It has never been clear why the state should be involved in race-course gambling, while transport crossings and loan agencies are often handled elsewhere by private firms.

The disappointing feature is that these are all to be done by private sales. The sale to a single private buyer is the easiest and quickest to implement, but does least to secure public support or to secure improvements to the industry or service.

Many of the 1980s privatisations (now called by the mellower name of "asset sales") featured public offerings with discounted shares available to workers so they could become part-owners of the new enterprise. Significantly, the Government has already tried a private sale of the Tote, but was rebuffed by the European Court as representing poor value for the public. It would have been bolder (and better) to involve employees and the public in the new round of sales.

Secondly, it is by no means clear that the proposed sales will actually be used to reduce the Britain's huge debt burden. It is quite legitimate to use capital sales to reduce capital debt, and the sales would deserve support if that were the case. But this looks like the Government's way of postponing reality until after the election.

Britain has to cut its spending, and that will involve some hard and unpleasant decisions. Asset sales are a one-off. They might be used to fund spending programmes but only for one year. Crucially, that one year will see a general election, and the suspicion arises that the sales revenue will be used to continue with spending that really should be cut until after the election.

The Government has not come up with realistic proposals to cut spending to what can be afforded. Nor has anyone else, to be fair. The budget deficit (£220 billion this year) means that debt is increasing. Asset sales are not, and should not be, a way to sustain high spending; they should be a means of reducing debt.

Published on Telegraph.co.uk here.