It is these poor people, this common folk, this riff-raff, whose prosperity, combined with the growth of their numbers, enhances the democracy. Whereas, a shifting of fortune to the advantage of the wealthy and the better classes implies the establishment on the part of the commonalty of a strong power in opposition to itself. In fact, all the world over, the cream of society is in opposition to the democracy.

The quote it taken from the Project Gutenberg edition.
Consider how much has changed since. Democracy was destroyed and reinvented. Of course, contemporary democracy is better in many ways than Athenian: we do not have slavery, and women can vote, and so on. In other ways our democracy is weaker and power is far more removed from the voters.

While things are undoubtedly better overall, there are also some things that never seem to change. Human nature does not.

I have heard it defended as necessary for security (i.e. to enable racial profiling to catch terrorists) by people whose other views were sufficiently social liberal to fit in with the most woke of western institutions: it was entirely normalised.

I was born in Sri Lanka, and the racial categories used will be unfamiliar to westerners: I am Burgher (of European ancestry) because my father is – in Sri Lanka race is patrilineal. Of course, in the UK, I am British Asian. I am a demonstration that race is defined by culture, not biology.

The three biggest racial groups in Sri Lanka are Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim. As you may guess from the last (which lumps together people from multiple origins from Arabia to India to SE Asia) race is strongly linked to religion: Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim respectively. The only one of the countries four major religions that crosses racial boundaries is Christianity.

This may have changed in the last few years, but when I last lived in Sri Lanka your race and religion were regularly recorded: for example if you made statement to the police (even if it was for a car accident). If you had a non-standard combination (if your religion was not an acceptable one for your race) it invited disbelief.

Race is strongly linked to identity: to Buddhist fundamentalist nationalists the only real Sri Lankans are Sinhala Buddhists. These are not fringe views: I can, for example, recall a government minister saying that the country belonged to the Sinhalese, and the Tamils and Muslims were “guests”.

I have lived most of my life in the UK. The big difference is that overt racism is almost entirely unacceptable. While there are undoubtedly racists, there are far, far fewer than in the 1980s: over my life I have seen a continual decline in racism.

The biggest problems are stereotypes and there are complexities to these. For example this study shows (see table 2) that the group most favoured by employers are white British women, and the next South and East Asian men. The most discriminated against groups were Pakistani and Nigerian. It is clear that the factor that matters is not skin colour, but national and religious stereotypes.

I once spent a few months working in Kenya. There the most apparent racism is the resentment by the majority of the relatively successful South Asian (all of us called “Indians”) groups. Unlike elsewhere educated professionals seem to be more racist: they feel out competed. As in some western countries, Asians are the “new Jews”: a group resented because of its success.

It is also apparent that the “Indians” live somewhat separately from the majority. Much like European Jews did.

Finally, a country that I have not lived or worked in, but that has the most influence (and a harmful one – that will be the subject of a future post) on how the world perceives and deals with racism. The USA.

It had long been obvious to me that racism in the US is far more entrenched in its culture than in the UK. This has been commented on by many people including Frederick Douglas:

They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin. Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man’s skin. This species of aristocracy belongs preeminently to “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” I have never found it abroad, in any but Americans. It sticks to them wherever they go.

There are a number of similar quotes in the chapter about the two years he spent in the UK in My Bondage and My Freedom

I had long been aware that the American perception of race is very different and rooted in the “just one drop” laws of segregation. It had long struck me that it was peculiar that Americans who wanted to be anti-racist could not get away from this. People who have no problem accepting the idea of self-assigned gender, usually regard race as an immutable characteristic. People who are obviously mixed race (President Obama) or look white to my Asian eyes (Meghan, Duchess of Sussex) are still “black”. There are other peculiarly American classifications of race such as “hispanic”.

I only really understood this when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing book Caste. American racism is a caste system: the only difference between the US and India is that the entirely arbitrary markers of where you belong are different. In both you are assigned to a group on the basis of your ancestry.In both there is a hierarchy. In both your descendants cannot escape their assigned place. In both those who are mixed are assigned to the “inferior” group. Both are (or have been, in the US) by both the authorities and by systematic violence.

This makes it very different from personal prejudice, or prejudice within particular institutions. It is pervasive and it is inescapable. Even people who want to be anti-racist cannot escape it because they cannot truly free themselves of the underlying assumption that their culture’s definition of race is an eternal truth.

India has, of course, other racial and religious discrimination on top of the caste system, which makes it somewhat different from the US.

Five countries, at least five different types of racism.

Europe and North America have reduced their emissions, but that has been more than offset by increases in other countries, and to a large extent, by moving high emission activities to those very countries. With their growing prosperity rooted in this these are exactly the countries that are unlikely to actually reduce emissions.

CO₂ emission are far more important than either offsetting or other greenhouse gas emissions. I have not always been all that concerned about climate change because (like most people) I thought of the primary effect as being temperature rises, which will have regional variations, have some benefits, have varied quite a lot (at a regional level, possibly at global) in the last few tens of thousands of years, and which both we can adapt to (and hopefully natural ecosystems too). I have recently been reading about ocean acidification, and I find that scary. It could wipe out or impoverish  whole ecosystems, globally.

A lot of the commitments have been to achieve “net zero”. This encourages greenwashing, because it leaves leaves room for doing things that make the numbers look better, but do not actually benefit the environment. You can plant some trees to offset emissions over their life, but what guarantee is there they will survive all political, economic and environmental change over decades? All the more so given many are monocultures so whole tracts could be wiped out by one disease.

Then look at some of the actual pledges. China and India have agreed to net-zero in 2060 and 2070 respectively. Nearly 40 years and nearly half a century. Will a commitment hold that long? Thinking about how much the world has changed in the last half century, I am very sceptical.

One of those changes has been that the influence of the west has dwindled, and it is in the west that there is the strongest political and popular support for limiting emissions. This will continue as Asian economies grow. In thirty years time this will all depend on Chinese and Indian politics – and China is a dictatorship that has never shown much sign of caring about the environment. India and other major growth economies have a lot to do.

Another problem, which is global, is that capitalism has a built-in bias to promoting economic activity over lack of activity, and the best thing for the environment is to do less: consume less, produce less, not do things. This encourages the sale of green products – so there is a strong incentive to do things like replacing energy infrastructure, but little incentive to preserve eco-systems by leaving them alone, so we both chop down forests, and then generate “carbon credits” by planting trees.

There are other issues with forests as well – e.g. claiming carb credits for forests no one had any intention of cutting down in the first place.  Offsetting has other problems – you can claim the offset for planting a tree when it is planted on the assumption that it will grow to maturity, but there is no guarantee that it will do so, or even that it is likely to do so. All this is encouraged by commitment to metrics that are easily cheated.

There are many other examples of things that are sold with a false promise of being “green”, or that people could do that are not done because there is no profit in it (and therefore no profit in promoting it).

I suspect some people will say that the cure for the bias in capitalism is more government control. The problem is that the biggest growth in CO₂ emissions has come from China, a country where business is controlled by the government.

Other state controlled economies do not have a great record either. The worst instance of climate change we have seen so far has been the death of the Aral Sea, which has not only turned most of what was once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water into near desert, destroying its rich ecosystem, and the economies it support, but also devastated the climate of a huge region around it. It will be extremely hard to reverse because one of the effects has been reduced rainfall feeding it. Who caused this devastation? The centrally planned Soviet Union.

Some will argue that the increase in CO₂ emissions and other pollutants by countries like China is still the fault of the rich countries, because that is where they export to, and they manufacture to export. This is true to an extent, but is far from being the whole truth. Chinese exports are about 18% of its GDP, and it exports to virtually every country: India imports more from China than the UK does.

There is also a lack of willingness to do anything about this. For example, carbon border taxes (i.e. import duties based on the emissions used to produce imported goods) have been discussed for a long time, particularly by the EU. So far, the only progress has been a (not yet implemented agreement) to require the trading of emissions trading certificates for a small number of goods from 2026. Of course, emissions trading certificates will just lead back to the same problem of greenwashing.

There are also ways around this, and it could even make the problem worse. The current proposals will only tax input products like steel and hydrogen. This will encourage the import of finished products instead. Back to step one.

There are many things people can do that will make a difference, but these are not pushed – there is no incentive to. For example urban plants, including gardens, are a significant carbon sink. It is relatively easy to make them far more effective a carbon sink and very good for wildlife. Less effort than maintaining a conventional lawn. Very few are willing to do this. In fact, the general trend in the UK has been to make things worse by replacing gardens with tarmac and decking in order to reduce maintenance.

Many people are willing to buy a new electric car (a dubious improvement given the environmental impact of manufacturing), but very few are willing to change their shopping habits or “neglect” their garden.

All the net-zero targets in the world maybe achieved, but they will not change anything. It is interesting that Greta Thurnberg has been in the news far less since she called out the greenwashing of COP27. As with many things, the metrics have now become more important than the reality. I told you so.

I have a diesel car. We do low annual mileage and much of our driving is through open country,  so I am pretty sure the environmental costs of scrapping it and replacing it with a new vehicle would massively outweigh any gains from running a cleaner car. I suspect that eventually the government will encourage people to scrap regardless of this: because it helps meet the numbers.

The British government defended the policy on the grounds that “it was not known” at the time that diesel was bad? The EU did not know about diesel particulates? Really?

The EU still requires that diesel contains a proportion of bio-diesel. This, again, meets the treaty targets because it is a renewable. The fact that we are chopping down forests to achieve this. In case it is not obvious this policy is that the forests that  remove CO₂ from the atmosphere are being cut down, and we are causing localised climate and other environmental damage, and  we are worsening the already terrible mass extinction.

The British governments subsidises the Drax power plant in Yorkshire because it uses “renewable” wood instead of dirty coal. This, once again, means chopping down priceless forests and increasing CO₂ emissions and using the only fuel that is actually dirty than coal. Once again, the underlying problem is that the metric is out of touch with reality, and the metric is what matters because it has become a treaty obligation.

There are two political problems:

1. The need to have fixed targets, which requires a metric, and a metric will never reflect the reality of as complex a problem as this.
2. The influence on government policy of vested interests such a businesses that have products to sell to solve the problem.

The latter problem is worth expanding on, Have you ever wondered why there is so much focus or reducing the use of fossil fuels, and so little on preserving the forests that are vital to removing CO₂ from the atmosphere? The answer is simple. There is money to be made in selling new power plants, new cars, and all the rest. A lot of money. There is no money to be made in not doing something. Guess which the world’s invariably “business friendly” governments prefer?

Globalisation is to blame for two reasons. Firstly it encourages centralisation. Secondly it encourages imports which makes it harder for anyone to anticipate or plan for the problem and cuts domestic production even further. It makes central planning (which does not have a great track record) even harder.

The reason we have this system is supposedly the pursuit of efficiency, and it is possible that prices of ammonia (of which CO₂ is a by-product) and CO₂ are lower as a result. I have some doubts (there are other motives for scaling up, and there is plenty of evidence that agency conflicts and the advantage to managers is the real motive), but we can leave that aside for now.

A clearer problem is that the costs of the shortage are widely spread out across the economy, rather than falling on those who operate the plants. In other words, the risk and reality of shortages are externalities.

Combine externalities with the market fundamentalist ideology of the “invisible hand” and the, again ideological, taking of homo economicus not just a useful simplification in economic models but as a guide to reasonable, even moral, behaviour, and we have all the ingredients for the problem. It is not the manufacturers duty to even warn of the problem, let alone try to ameliorate it. If people are expected to have a selfish motivation, what duty is expected to customers, let alone wider society?

So, in summary, if we had lots of small firms, instead of a few big ones, we would avoid this sort of problem. If we had a bit less free trade, it would help as well. Finally, if we had different ideologies and attitudes, we could plan for it. However, these are not three separate issues: they are all products of the market fundamentalist/neo-liberal/pro-business (call it what you will) ideology.

This is a rough summary, and I welcome corrections, but the overall picture is pretty accurate.

What is the difference in motives of end results? The main difference is one of rhetoric. Trump has said, in that past, that he wants to keep out Muslims, British politicians use more subtle language, but they make sure that racists are reassured that immigration will be reduced.

Consistently favoured corporate interests over public interests

The EU is far more insulated from public pressure than national governments but even more prone to listening to corporate lobbyists. It is not transparent enough about lobbying for us to even know what the real expenditure is, but we know it a lot.
The greatest single case of this is in the supposedly free trade, but really corporate welfare, TTIP treaty which the EU is pushing hard, despite widespread public opposition. Who wants the treaty? Corporate lobbyists. It also binds countries permanently to particular policies, undermining democracy.

Made the financial crisis a lot worse, and that is just the start

The Euro ties many, very diverse economies, into a single interest rate. Without full political union (e.g. the EU cannot directly raise tax, and there are limits on its spending power) means the EU cannot quickly take money away from countries where Euro rates are too low and give it to countries where rates are too high. This weakness is what lead to the crisis in countries like Greece.

Most single currency areas are countries, and that redistribution happens and it largely happens automatically (regions that are doing well pay more tax, regions that are doing badly get more welfare). The EU has a currency union without the political union that is needed to make it work.

The UK was lucky to be outside the Euro, which reduced the damage – but it still suffered some indirect damage. It also faces the prospect of this happening again and again, and on top of that EU policy will increasingly be set by the needs of the Euro area – so the UK can stay out of the Euro and have unsuitable policies, or join and get the full blow of each crisis. A great choice.

Helped crooked politicians and paedophiles keep their past secret

The EU’s right to be forgotten (part of EU law, not human rights under the entirely separate European Convention) has allowed people with unsavoury pasts to remove references to their offences on the web. In the case of the politician this undermines democracy (because information about how a candidate behaved in office is hidden from voters) and in all cases in undermines free speech.

What is even better is that people outside the EU can find this information.

Imposed stupid and harmful regulation

Those in favour of the EU point to tabloid examples of bad regulation that turn out to false. However, the fact is that the EU does create a lot of harmful, and down right stupid, regulation. Two that I have dealt with is the cookie law and VATMOSS.

The cookie law was supposed to protect privacy. With a very few exceptions, the best it ever achieves is that sites pop up notices that tell you that if you continue using the site you agree to their cookie policy.

The only way sites can track whether or not you have agreed is to set a cookie, so anyone who turns cookies off, or only allows selected sites to set cookies, gets bombarded with notices on every page or every EU based site. This is deterrent to protecting your privacy with things like Cookie Whitelist. I have also notices a sharp increase in the sites I use that will not work without cookies since the cookie law was passed.

It has also encouraged tracking without cookies, by using browser fingerprinting, which is much harder to protect against.

VATMOSS is even worse. It is more expensive to comply with, particularly for small businesses that are below the VAT in their home countries, who now have to register for VAT if they make a single sale (of affected products) to another EU country. Some small business have stopped selling digital products to other EU countries, others have closed or faced huge costs. Here is the story of a company that relocated from the UK to Singapore as a result.

In short, the EU’s regulations seem to achieve the opposite of the stated purpose of the EU. It undermines trade, and complete fails to understand small business or technology.

Made books, and a lot of other things, more expensive and less easily available

The EU requires a minimum copyright duration of life + 70 years. This is great news if you are a publisher, or a successful author’s or painter’s grandchild who wants a pension boost. For the rest of us, it makes books and other works, more expensive, and it also means that anything that remains in extended copyright that it is not commercially attractive to publish (e.g. will sell in large numbers) will simply be unavailable, as free ebook distributors will be unable to give away copies.

The EU’s excuse for this was that it would harmonise copyright laws, so we could freely trade copyright works across the EU without worrying about legal differences. The odd thing is that it did not make life + 70 a fixed copyright duration, but a minimum, so countries like the UK and France can have extended copyright on some works, so the law is not actually harmonised.

I will not discuss the ludicrousness of a duration that means works created while Queen Victoria was on the throne remain in copyright in the 21st century (for example, many of Shaw’s works were written then, and remain in copyright until 2020).

Caused floods

The EUs counter arguments are that recent changes (“greening” measures) to the regulation mean that this is either no longer true, or less true, or and harm is now down to how national governments implement things. However all these relate to changes in the last few years, ignoring the damage done over many decades.

The dominant value is that everything can be measured in terms of money, so governments fund what will make money for someone (very often, what will make money for big business).  A good example is the shift in Canada’s research priorities, that explicitly chose to shift away from basic science, to subsidising the development of products that will be commercially viable in the near future. This is mirrors what has been happening in every major economy; forget about expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and focus on making things we can sell.

The same thing is happening in education. There is a lot of emphasis on the skills needed for the workplace. While we may not be there yet, the logical end point of this is that we teach nothing other than what makes good citizens (in the eyes of the current government) and what is useful at work: there is no point studying drama unless you are going to be a professional actor.

The same logic applies to arts funding: it is all just entertainment. Playing a musical instrument or appreciating a poem has no special value over gambling or watching TV – the major difference is that gambling makes the government a lot of money, while theatres and orchestras are often non-profit (so pa no taxes) and (in the UK and most of Europe) keeping asking for money.

Given that it is just entertainment, it was perfectly logical for the British government to limit prisoner’s access to books and guitars.

Of course this is not entirely universal, or unopposed, or even entirely believed even by those who practice it. Hardly anyone educated wants their children to be educated as philistines. Governments still give occasional lip service to the importance of at least some of the humanities — but they are increasingly reluctant to put their money where their month is, and would far prefer a tax cut.

This is not a matter of party politics, or left versus right. A real socialist may have different attitudes, but they not longer exist in developed countries. A real traditional conservative may think differently, but they have long been replaced by non-conservatives. Both sides regard the arts, education, and fundamental research as unnecessary luxuries. Where they diverge is that the most left wing may deplore them as bourgeois indulgences, while the most right wing may simply be opposed to state funding of anything regardless of whether they matter of not.

What I suggest is a charge in the low to mid thousands of pounds for an annual visa, to high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands for a lifetime one: I am not sure how much of a premium the security of the latter is worth.

Consider the impact. A million people (i.e. a less than 2% increase in the population) paying £5,000 a year would be enough to pay the cost of servicing the national debt, making the deficit effectively free. Furthermore anyone who found it worth paying that much would have to have an income high enough to pay a substantial amount in tax as well (of course that would need to be netted off against costs, but it would be strongly positive).

There would be some costs, and these would have to be minimised by filtering out some people. I would suggest those with criminal records, criminal connections, and not in good health. Excluding the former would be a significant tightening compared to current visa requirements which, in practice, often welcome rich crooks and criminals.

Alternatively a million people who pay a £100,000 each would pay enough to pay off large chunk of the national debt and would pay even more in tax.

Then consider the economic stimulus that would result. The extra government spending and the extra money being spent by all those extra people would inject a huge amount of money into the economy.

It would also drastically reduce illegal immigration: it is definitely preferable to pay the government and enter legally, free to take any job, than to enter illegally, with no guarantee of success, and no security once in, than to risk paying smugglers.

Many people will claim that there is not enough room, or not enough housing. I have addressed these points before in my posts on the UK’s population density and on planning laws.

I will leave aside my view that the government should not protect people from themselves, and, just for this post,  and, for the moment, accept the consensus that the role of the government includes forcing people to do what the government judges best.

Lets start with the missing information. What is meant by “More than 200,000 people could die early from alcohol-related diseases, accidents and violence over the next 20 years”? Does it mean that the death rate will be 200,000 more than if no one drank any alcohol? Does it mean that 200,000 people will die from diseases, accidents and violence in which alcohol is one of (many) avoidable risk factors?

Of course, as always, The Guardian, fails to but the numbers in context. 10,000 deaths a year is not a huge number in a country the size of the UK: barely over 1%. Depending on he exact meaning of the numbers, the actual number of deaths caused by (as opposed to “related to”) alcohol could be much lower and comparable with, for example, the 3,000 suicides a year. Given the distressing nature of suicide, and its impact on the friends and families of its victims, I think that is sufficient to argue it should be a higher priority.

Compare the impact of alcohol with that of bad diet (too much sugar, too much, and harmful types of, fat, etc.): . There are at least 30,000 deaths a year related to diabetes, and that is almost certainly an underestimate, and it is worsening rapidly, and it is only one of many diseases caused by unhealthy diets.  Worsening rapidly is something of an understatement: the number of people who have diabetes has doubled over the last thirty years.

Diet bring us to another issue. The health effects of different alcoholic drinks is very different:  the amount of carbohydrates in one pint of beer is comparable to an entire bottle of red wine.

That is one possible reason for the lack of correlation between alcohol consumption and life expectancy. Given that, what reason is there to think that reducing overall alcohol consumption will improve public health. In fact a WHO study found that the countries with the lowest level of alcohol related health problems are the wine drinking countries of south western Europe, many of which have very high levels of consumption.

In fact, it may even worsen public health. Moderate drinking improves life expectancy, so price increases that deterred moderate drinkers would lead to lower life expectancies. Heavy drinkers, especially very heavy drinkers, may be addicted, and will therefore be likely to spend more rather than reduce consumption. Abstaining entirely from alcohol carries a similar risk to heavy drinking, why are there no calls for government action to encourage teetotallers to start drinking?

The criticism of a government strategy that relies on voluntary cooperation from the industry, has two serious fallacies. They claim that “the primary requirement for these industries is to deliver shareholder value by maximising consumption”. This is wrong. Individual firms want to maximise profit, which is not the same as maximising consumption: the profit on one bottle of expensive wine is likely to be far more than on many bottles of plonk. It is even possible that a minimum sales price may may the industry more profitable by killing the lowest margin products.

The other fallacy is that because a businesses aim is to make a profit, it is entirely uninfluenced by anything else. Companies are run by individuals who are just as likely to act from ethical motives as anyone else, they are subject to public pressure, and the ability of governments to coerce companies to act “voluntarily” is enormous. Consider the success the government has had in getting internet service providers to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s controversial, secretive, undemocratic, ineffective and unaccountable censorship scheme.

I have become very cynical about the reasoning behind calls for action on alcohol. It seems to reflect a fixed, and puritanical, idea that alcohol is bad, rather than an assessment of evidence and likely benefits.