Month: February 2018

I saw them before they were famous you know.

I’m disappointed that David Davis is reassuring people that Britain will not be “plunged into a Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” after Brexit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43120277 I was rather looking forward to it. That might seem strange, but I am fond of Croydon so I know what I’m taking about.

I heard a couple of things on the radio this morning that made my ears prick up. The first was to do with the steel industry of which the person being interviewed was a representative. The logic was most strange, with an assertion that poorer parts of the country need the steel industry because it offers jobs that pay significantly more than the average in those areas, while at the same time acknowledging that globally there is oversupply of steel. Let’s make it clear: you cannot sustain well-paid jobs in an industry with oversupply, at least not without eliminating most of those jobs and automating in order to reduce costs. A proper industrial strategy (yes I know, it’s the way I tell ‘em) would focus on identifying something else that could bring decent jobs to former steel areas.

The other snippet concerned post-Brexit agricultural policy https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/20/brexit-farming-standards-nfu-trade-eu and I suppose we have to accept it’s pretty unlikely that one would have come up with something sensible. So far I haven’t seen much apart from Gove’s idea of rewarding animal welfare rather than ownership of land per se. However, I’m going back to my default Plan A: penalise the behaviour you don’t want to see rather than subsidise that which you do. If it’s a good idea to enforce payments that discourage the use of disposable plastic – and in my view it is – then it is probably also a good idea to impose a levy on livestock farming that doesn’t meet appropriate welfare standards. If this is done properly then farmers follow those standards will be able to get higher prices for what they produce and make it more likely that compassionate farming is economically self-sustainable. And yes, the impact of such an approach would be to drive up prices for cheaper products, but since a subsidy regime is also a charge to the public the end result is unlikely to be, in overall terms, more expensive.

Apologies for being so shallow, but I find the KFC saga really funny:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43124259

It would be foolish to start out with any optimism that a new government (or opposition for that matter) policy announcement would be especially sensible. However, the latest efforts regarding tuition fees have managed to fall below already low expectations. Specifically, the idea that universities might be forced to charge lower tuition fees for courses with lower earnings potential is absolutely barking, for the simple reason that making them cheaper will have the effect of making them more attractive. It’s a basic rule that if you want to discourage undesirable behaviour you have to make it more expensive. That’s far more effective, incidentally, than trying to subsidise the behaviour you wish to encourage.

The other big (geddit?) news is that we Britons are eating 50% more calories than we say we are. Apparently 34% of respondents to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey claimed to be eating so little that they wouldn’t survive. In one sense this might surprise nobody much but in another it matters: the idea that we consume fewer calories now than in the 1970s but are far more overweight has been used to support the argument that the problem is lack of activity, not food intake. This in turn has been used to support food industry propaganda that what we eat doesn’t matter; we simply need to move more. The one thing the industry really doesn’t want people hearing is that they should eat not only less, but also better.