Some short (and often negative) book reviews

As I have repeatedly said, I'm a great believer in the useful book review. Please consider these reviews in that spirit.

Shy, Max Porter

I'm a fan of Max Porter. I'd say a big fan: I thought Grief is the Thing with Feathers was amazing and I loved Lanny too. But I'm sorry to say that Shy is only for the Porter completists. It's a Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem-England type thing, with Porter-esque quirks. Fine, but you may well have better uses for your time. 

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer

The title story is quite good, probably worth your time, but that one's head and shoulders better than the other ones in the collection, a surprising number of which feature demons. (Surprising to me, anyway, given that I was expecting charming, anecdote-ish stories of the old shtetls.)

The Fraud, Zadie Smith

God gives burdens, also shoulders, as Gimpel says. One of my happily-shouldered burdens is to review all of Smith's work (see this blog, passim). I would describe The Fraud as a careful book: it's entertaining and interesting enough, light and readable, but it lacks something of the zip and energy - the sheer aliveness - of her best work. The pros include her imaginative sympathy for different people, always one of her strengths: in this book, it's the second Mrs Ainsworth who stands out in this regard, as Smith can't help but turn someone we might laugh at into a real person. The cons include the sex life of the main character, which seems under-motivated, to my (male) mind. I described The Autograph Man as rather indulgent of the literary male: perhaps The Fraud is in part an attempt to redress the balance, although even in laughing at the various literary male, Smith can't help seeing something of value to him.

Babel, RF Kuang
Prepare for a slightly longer review here.

Babel is, in many ways, one of the worst books I have ever read. And it surely must be one of the worst books to get a glowing review in the British broadsheet press and to win multiple prizes. Don't worry - I'll get to the 'buts' in a bit, but I can't let you loose on a book set in a (slightly) alternative reality Oxford of the 1830s without warning you that it is absolutely chocka with Americanisms and anachronisms: a character says "just a tad", there is sticky toffee pudding, there are docents and postdocs, the female undergraduates (there is an explanation for the very existence of female undergraduates - it's not that silly) hang out in male undergraduates' bedrooms, a "Professor" says that she won't get "tenure", every thought appears to involve 21st century racial categories and so on. I don't know that every page contains a howler, but I'm pretty confident that every chapter does. At one point someone says (in effect) "when you were in London, did you see the King?" and receives the reply "William? No, what with the Poor Law and the Factory Act, there's been a lot of rioting so he stays at home" (yes, the "William?" is genuinely in there). The whole thing is terribly woke as well: everyone who is non-white (including some "Black" with a capital B characters) is a goody and almost everyone who is white is a baddy (the main exceptions being Luddites and a few other honest working class characters); killing innocent people is bad if you're white but, I think, ok if you're not; the British Empire is super-bad in every way, including being maybe responsible for the state of Haiti, but somehow also incompetent and idiotic; oh, and I almost forgot to mention that British people boil their food too much and don't use seasoning (although our cakes seem to be ok).

It's high time for the "buts", of which I have two. The first "but" is that the book is an fascinating glimpse into a modern worldview in which universities are massively powerful. For reasons that make (somewhat) more sense in the alternative reality of the book (in which silver plus skilled translators equals powerful magic) than in real life, the climax of the story comes when a group of undergraduates seek to overthrow the British Empire by [if you're going to read it, turn away now] ... seizing control of a university building! Other glimpses of this worldview are also evident: for example, an Oxford Professor is seen as a high-prestige job that might plausibly come with a high-status wife (yes, I know - married professors in the 1830s ...), a house in Hampstead and a country estate. At one point we are shown some 'aesthete' undergraduates, almost all of whom are set on having careers in the professions after Oxford: again, the idea is that universities control access to power and wealth and, allied to that, that high-prestige jobs are the source of power and wealth. 

That may be just a sociological insight you weren't terribly interested in, but my second 'but' is a more literary one: it's actually not a bad read. Not bad at all. I read it all the way to the end, despite everything that was silly and annoying about it, and at each point I wanted to know what happened next. The action was well-paced, the characters, twists and so on were all well-done. (In fact, it had such merit that I half-suspected that there was going to be a really big twist - e.g., that China were to replace Britain as imperial hegemon - and turn out just as bad! But sadly no.) I am not the target audience for an anti-colonialist tirade, but I enjoyed it. If you took the book, removed all the wokery and replaced the historical details with something plausible (or perhaps set it in a sci-fi world where it made sense) then it would just be a cracking good read. 

So my final verdict is that Kuang is a writer of real talent. She's still young and I expect that her mature work will be pretty solid.

The Ebb Tide, Robert Louis Stevenson 

Cracking good novella. Would make a great film (indeed, I see that it has been filmed a few times, although the still from the French adaptation here gives you precisely the wrong idea of what the book is like), although I'd change the ending for the big screen. Also, it is a more effective attack on colonialism than Babel. 

What does the political Promised Land look like?

There's a recent advertising campaign I've seen that I don't think is very good.

The campaign features two identical photos of someone enjoying a fun activity: going on holiday, say, or eating out. The punchline is that we're told that one of them is getting the experience "on points" while the other isn't. The concept is that, if you have the right credit card, you can get these great experiences for free. 

Now, I can see that getting free stuff is a Good Thing in the abstract, but the reason that the campaign doesn't impress me is that the impression one gets from looking at the posters is that having the credit card makes no difference to one's life: one can eat gourmet food, enjoy adventurous holidays and smile a wide, white smile just as easily without the credit card as with it. I think it would have been better to show the same person in two different photos: in one, looking tired, despondent and stuck in their boring home because they've run out of money; and, in the second, looking delighted and enjoying brunch because they've got points to spend. The contrast here is with the Duracell bunny: consider how much less effective that advertising would have been if the other bunnies had continued to run because their batteries had been replaced - the point that Duracell gives you more power is far more vividly illustrated by the other bunnies dying.

But I don't want to talk about the advertising of consumer goods and services. Instead, I want to talk about the advertising of political ideas. 

Political ideas - and I'm using that phrase in a pretty broad sense - tend to have two components: (1) what the Powers that Be (or Should Be) ought to Do About It All and (2) the wonderful things that will result from them doing it - the Promised Land that awaits. So, for example, the proletariat ought to throw off the shackles of bourgois oppression via revolution (component (1)) and, if they do, a glorious egalitarian communist age will be ushered in (component (2)). 

It's possible to imagine a political idea that only has component (1). Back in the good old days of the post-Brexit British national soul-searching moment (remember that?), I wrote a series of posts, starting here, about Matthew Parris' idea that the Leave campaign knowingly rode the tiger of racism to its victory. In part 5 of that series, I described what I called Power-Transfer Policies, i.e. policies that aim to achieve the transfer of power from one group to another, and I said that such policies might be supported purely on the basis that it is only right and proper that the second group rather than the first group should have the power, however that group chooses to use it: think of those supporting independence for a colony who say that the locals should choose their future even if they choose badly. But even in these cases it's rare that the supporters of the policy don't attempt to set out a component (2) Promised Land as well: the Leave campaign famously had plenty to say about more money for the NHS, for example, and independence movements tend to say that the locals will do a better job of ruling than the distant imperial metropolis.

But recently I've become worried that I don't understand quite what the Promised Land of various policies is meant to look like. I'll give you a couple of examples.

Neil O'Brien MP, a lively participant in online debates, published a piece over the Christmas break about the scandal of "Deliveroo visas", i.e. visas granted to immigrants, purportedly to study in the UK (or for other worthwhile aims), which result in a large number of young people spending their time delivering fast food. The responses to the piece that I have seen from pro-immigration people have been either "yes, this is indeed a problem worth looking at" (e.g. Rob Ford, Sam Bowman) or else "O'Brien's making it all up" (e.g., Jonathan Portes, Jonathan Portes and various people less well-known than Jonathan Portes). What I did not see was people saying "hooray!" - yet that, I thought, was precisely what the pro-immigration Promised Land was meant to look like: young, keen, thrusting immigrants, toiling away at the bottom of society to work their way up, creating a vibrant but chaotic employment market something like fictional depictions of 19th century New York.

Another example is this, the ever-interesting Peter McLaughlin accusing Kate Forbes of telling "pious lies" for giving public reasons in support of a position which are not her primary, private moral/religious reasons for supporting that position. Again, as I said at the time, I thought that was what the Promised Land of liberal debate looked like: people deploying publically-available arguments based on the shared values to be found in the Venn diagram intersection of the circles of beliefs held by the numerous religious, ethnic and moral communities that make up a diverse and multicultural society. You can't refer to what Allah tells you, I can't refer to what God tells me, but we can all refer to the principles of prudent budget management. Again, aren't "pious lies" precisely what liberals want political debate to be about in a multicultural society. Or rather, while I might call them pious lies, liberals should call them "appeals to public reason" or something of that kind - although we all know that secretly we're talking about the same thing.

This all started with Brexit, I think. Before the Brexit debate, free movement of capital, goods and labour and restrictions on public subsidies were the kind of thing that right-wingers favoured, while left-wingers wanted markets to be subject to democratic control, capital to be reined in, government subsidies to industry to be widespread ... and so on, and so on. But in everyone's haste to take sides on Brexit, positions got scrambled and so, for example, "free trade" went from being a Thatcherite right-wing obsession to becoming a left of centre shibboleth ("look at those stupid Brexiteers who want to cut us off from this huge market on our doorstep!"). Who whom?, in Lenin's phrase, took over from principle.

The pattern is wider than that. Take "diversity": is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Well, if you are a right-winger, diversity is a Good Thing when you are attacking Labour for never having women in charge or universities for not having enough intellectual diversity, or when you are celebrating the current cabinet for its ethnic mix. But there's no belief in any principle here, surely, merely a desire to find another stick for "Who" to beat "Whom". I feel my rightist credentials are sufficiently solid that I don't need to give a counter-example from the Left, but you can easily construct your own one for diversity with different examples (gay Muslims - good! conservative evangelicals - white men and bad! Sunak - rich!) should you not already be deeply bored of this kind of debate.

That change has an impact on what one's Promised Land looks like. Is the modern centre-left's Promised Land a world of free-trading capitalists bestriding borders? Does the modern centre-right want people with dark skins or ovaries to dominate politics? Not really. Both sides just want to win.

This is the predominant wider theme of modern politics. The Promised Land is one where Our People are in charge and Those People are not: whether Our People are "good" immigrants or sincere secularists or Remainers or the silent majority or... and whether Those People are immigrants or believers or out-of-touch elites or ... the pattern is still the same. 

To simplify only slightly, modern political debate in this country appears to have reached a consensus that there is always going to be a Blob running the publicly-funded bits of the country - and that there ought to be a Blob directing the privately-funded bits (telling it to do more manufacturing, housebuilding and domestic energy production, everyone agrees and then, depending on your tastes, less pornography or more environmental stuff or more science or more employment of ethnic minorities) - and hence the only real question is "who gets to run the Blobs?" (Or, if you prefer, "whose Long March through the institutions is the Longest and Marchiest?")

(Some examples: we have to have to "influencers", ergo they have to be "our" influencers; we have to spend billions on extra-London mass transit rather than defence or tax cuts, and the only question is where.)

I must admit that this kind of cynical Marxist view has some appeal. "Wake up and smell the coffee," its adherents say, "it's them or us. We've played fair before - and lost - but now it's time to play dirty". It's certainly got more appeal than "you can get avocado toast with points". But, ultimately, the two pictures of the alternative Promised Lands are too similar to each other for either to be tempting. I, for one, would welcome a Duracell bunny offering a wholly different outcome. 

How rationalists can help conservatives

I have seen the view expressed quite a few times recently that the rationalist movement is gradually rediscovering or reinventing conservative ideas. What I propose to do below is to give one example of what that might mean in practice. (Thoughts prompted by the ever-interesting Peter McLaughlin – thank you.) 

Conservatives love to fight the last war - but what will the last war be?

The Conservatives are going to lose the next election.

- We have had conference season but that changed nothing. There were headlines (remember HS2? Suella Braverman's speech?), but none that will linger in the memory or sway the undecided. 

- Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire have fallen.

- Starmer has declared that "a woman is an adult female, so let’s clear that one up", without the heavens falling in, so either the Culture Wars have been won or, more likely, the combatants on the Left have agreed a tactical ceasefire until after Starmer's victory. 

- Gaza has attacked Israel and the streets of England have become alive with people chanting "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", but we all know that Starmer is sound on anti-Semitism. Moreover, to the extent that his party is less than wholly secure in its belief in Israel's right to defend itself (which it is, definitely), it is, I suspect, closer to the median voter than, say, the Conservative Friends of Israel are. 

- The biggest issues - the economy, immigration - continue to trend in unexciting directions that will not rescue an unexciting Prime Minister. 

Do I hear you say that Starmer's Labour is an empty vessel that stands for nothing in particular, that his policies are unconvincing and his solutions inadequate? It matters not. The voters are tired of the full-to-brim-and-overflowing vessels that the Conservatives have presented to them since 2010, each filled with a beverage of an entirely different flavour, and they've decided that it's time for a change. It is nothing to do with Sir Keir that his Labour Party was so far behind the Conservatives in the long-forgotten days of mid-2021, nor it is anything to do him that it is so far ahead in late-2023: the Conservatives have simply lost the Mandate of Heaven.

In short, absent some extraordinary and unforeseeable event, that nice Mr Sunak is going to follow that nice Mr Major's example and lose a General Election to a North London lawyer. 

So far, so obvious. But what's next? 

Predicting the future is a famously a tricky business. I suspect that we can do little better than look at the fundamentals. Major famously left a golden economic legacy to a highly-talented politician; by contrast, Sunak leaves a decent economic legacy to a competent politician. That means that there is a fair chance that the Conservatives will only lose the next one or two General Elections, rather than their previous record of losing three in a row with only a win on points on the fourth. But even if a week is not that long a time in politics, 10 years certainly is: in 2013, the UK was in the EU, Starmer was the DPP and Sunak was working for his father-in-law. 

There is, however, one certainty in life: the Conservatives will come back wanting to fight the last war. 

- "Fourteenth earl" and "elegant anachronism" Alec Douglas-Home lost to impeccably meritocratic go-ahead, modern Harold Wilson; so the Tories turned to impeccably meritocratic, go-ahead, modern Ted Heath to win next time. 

- Ted Heath was destroyed by the unions; the Tories hunkered in their bunker and came back with Thatcher and a steely determination to destroy the unions. 

- John Major was destroyed by Europe; the Tories obsessed about Europe for years, finally decided not to "bang on" about it, then as soon as they won a majority they decided to put the quietus to Europe once and for all. 

The pattern is a fixed one: the defining feature of each Conservative administration is the attempt to revenge themselves on the Big Thing that ended the previous one.

So, what is the Big Thing that is ending this period of Conservative rule? It is not as obvious as it has been for previous governments. For one thing, it's not Brexit: the Conservatives won two elections since the Brexit vote and the 2019 election - the real Brexit one - was a convincing victory. 

I think there two plausible Big Things that are bringing down this Government, one a matter of style and one a matter of substance. The Conservatives have a choice as to which one they consider important. My sincere hope is that they choose the issue of substance.

But first, style. Polite opinion has turned against the Conservatives because of "cake". Not just "cakeism" and "ambushed by cake" but the whole apparent absence of "grown-ups in the room", "steady hand at the tiller", "boring competence" and all of those kinds of thing. Dominic Cummings, on this view, is part of the problem just as much as Liz Truss: too many misfits and weirdos, not enough grey men (and women) in grey suits.

Appearances certainly count, and I don't doubt that part of Starmer's appeal is that he offers the appearance of steadiness. But I don't think this gets to the real heart of the issue. After all, Sunak offers pretty much all the steadiness, neat hair and conventional acceptability that Johnson and Truss lacked (although I accept that Truss' hair is not open to criticism), yet he has not been noticeably rewarded for it in the opinion polls.

No, I think the real problem, the real dragon that the Tories should prepare to slay while biding their time in opposition, is a problem of substance. The "Boosters" will tell you that it's a lack of growth. I think they overdo the pessimism (and I've said so, repeatedly), but they are directionally right: this country could do with improving its citizens' standard of living. If the Tories did nothing during their sabbaticals other than plan how to improve the growth rate then they would not have wasted their time .

But it goes deeper than that. The country is not actually becoming poor or breaking down - yet it feels that way to a lot of people. There is a pervasive malaise that needs addressing. Why is that? 

I think there is a feeling that the Goverment can’t do anything. It can’t build anything (the cancellation of HS2, even if sensible in itself, felt like a capitulation), it can’t enforce the borders, it can’t stop Just Stop Oil making a nuisance of themselves. It can’t even control the public sector: we have had 13 years of Conservative government yet the stories of newly-hire public sector personnel and continuing practices are ever-shocking.

Quite what causes this governmental incapacity is unclear. It may be some combination of the 'Blob', judicial review, human rights law, the prevailing 'woke' mores of young graduates and sheer institutional inertia. But this thing - whatever it is - seems to me like the kind of thing that a future Conservative government would want to revenge itself on, as once it revenged itself on the trade unions and Britain's place in the EU.

On this view, the likes of Liz Truss and Dominic Cummings are not embarrassments to be hidden away and forgotten about as offences against the rules of style and sensible centrism, but rather they are pointers to a different way of doing things, to be considered on their merits. Perhaps things need to be done rather differently and the different suggestions that those two individuals have come up with - and note that they do not at all agree on those suggestions - might be worth a second look. 

We shall see. The Conservative Party is not famous for loving ideas. But it does like to win.

Progress Prize!

TxP, in partnership with Civic Future and New Statesman Spotlight, has launched an essay competition encouraging responses to the question: "Britain is stuck. How can we get it moving again?" 

I am not entering the competition, for a number of reasons: I think Britain is not especially stuck and seems to be moving pretty normally (8 years behind the USA, as usual); even if it were stuck then I don't think that my suggestion for jogging it along would be in line with what the judges want; and I don't think I'm eligible anyway. 

Nonetheless, in the hope that I can inspire others, I have set out 1200 words below with the right answer to the question: feel free to steal it if you want.

Why the Baby Boom happened - and one thing that might help repeat it

The new edition of Works in Progress is out. It's got a few things that are worth a look (e.g., Samuel Hughes on architecture) but I just want to talk a little bit about this one, on the Baby Boom. (I recommend that you read it - it is well done and interesting - but you'll get the important bits from my summary below.)

Long story short: today, as we all know, birth rates are collapsing and no solution is in sight; but we (i.e., the West) were in this position before, in about 1930, and the problem then was solved by the Baby Boom; now, you might think that the Boom was something to do with the end of WWII, but it wasn't - it started earlier and it happened in neutral countries and ones well away from the war just as it did in the US and UK. So: why did the Baby Boom happen? And can we repeat it?

The authors come to the conclusion that three factors made a difference: "advances in household technology, progress in medical technology, and easier access to housing". 

I'm completely unconvinced by the first one: the authors take the clever step of looking at the Amish (i.e. people unaffected by advances in household technology) and point out that they had a baby boom too. Moreover, their evidence of increased adoption of household technology is (a) US-centric (i.e., failing to account for the worldwide effect) and (b) underwhelming for the period we are interested in, namely c.1935 to c.1955, when the only marked change seemed to be in fridges.

As for the last of the three factors - housing - well, we expect to see housing come up in any modern discussion of progress; I suspect that I have said more than enough on the topic recently. For present purposes, let me just say that I would have liked to know more about Amish housing.

But what about the second factor - progress in medical technology? By this, the authors mean in particular improvements in peri-natal care. The collapse in maternal mortality during this period is indeed heartening and remarkable: there's a great graph at the link that I'll let you look at for yourself. It does seem to have made a difference: for example, the Amish use modern medicine, so they benefitted from these improvements too.

So, what's the situation now? Getting worse in the US:

Not looking too good in the UK either:

Comparable data for France is harder to get (blame my English-language Googling and laziness), but infant mortality is not going well:

I tried Germany next and found the more useful and general information that the UN and WHO have released a report called “Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020”, using national data on maternal mortality from 2000 to 2020 that finds that "progress in some countries [in Europe] slowed down or stopped between 2016 and 2020". I've checked the report and it seems to indicate that things have been getting worse in Europe and North America since 2016.

The Gates Foundation has some user-friendly graphs to similar effect. Here is the one for "high income" countries - as you can see, not a happy story.

This is a disgrace, isn't it? Forget about fertility rates for a moment: hardly a week goes by without some great advance in medical science being widely reported - and not just some splashy headline but a real matter of importance to public health (remember covid vaccines?) - and yet maternal mortality is getting worse? What the actual?

Of course - thankfully - the absolute numbers of deaths are still very low. But mortality rates must be the tip of the iceberg: for every mother or infant who dies, there must be many more who come close, which must be very upsetting to everyone concerned and hardly conducive to anyone wanting to repeat the experience. Indeed, anecdotally, birth experiences that involve horrendous loss of blood and medical emergencies are not at all uncommon. That's frankly a bit rubbish for a well-understood, natural process undergone, at a reasonably predictable point in time, by women of (necessarily) childbearing age all of whom are (necessarily) sufficiently healthy to have become pregnant in the first place. One does not have to be a terribly radical feminist to suspect that the brightest and best in the field of medical research are not spending their time on women's issues.

Moreover, horrible scares and serious injuries must surely be the tip of an even larger iceberg, namely generally poor experiences for women in childbirth. Perhaps the story goes a bit like this: in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, new mothers would tend to see shiny new hospitals and wonderful new medical techniques, and they would be impressed; their own mothers would say "it wasn't as nice as this in my day"; their husbands would be confident that they were in good hands; they would come out of the childbirth experience with a feeling that things were on the up and that, if they needed to give birth again, they would be able to do so in decent (perhaps even better) circumstances; and they would tell their friends the good news. But, even if the overall quality of care is better now than in the 1950s, the subjective experience, compared with the expectations that we have for healthcare as a whole, is worse; and the objective measures of quality seem to be going in the wrong direction. How many mothers now come away from giving birth once and say "well, I'm not going through that again"?; how many fathers say "I wouldn't ask you to go through that again"?; how many women hear awful stories from their friends and decide that discretion is the better part of valour? Enough, I suspect, to make at least some difference to the overall birth rate.

As I say, even if you have no interest in the long-term future of the human race, you should at least be appalled to see standard medical care in rich countries getting worse. What to do? I thought that I might give some money to a charity that does research in the field. So I went to the website of the British Maternal and Fetal Medicine Society (seemed a sensible place to look) and looked at their charities page. A bit odd: a cystic fibrosis charity, a charity devoted to "promot[ing] the scientific study, both pure and applied, of all psychological and behavioural matters related to human reproduction", a charity for premature babies in Northern Ireland and a charity "dedicated to improving the quality of life for seriously ill and injured pregnant women, children and babies in countries where there is extreme poverty" (looks good, but I went to their website and they have no news since 2019, so don't look too active). None looking at improving medical care in the delivery of babies. 

Save the Children has a page on maternal and reproductive health, which starts with an emphasis on preventing women becoming pregnant too young. DFID seems to have adopted a similar approach, but the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (a UK agency that scrutinises whether overseas aid is spent effectively) is unimpressed by the results. I suspect that's the Gates Foundation's approach as well. Not what I wanted: I was looking to try to improve the experience of giving birth, not avoid it.

The Medical Research Foundation? Three results for a search for "maternal" (the same as "whiplash").

Anyway, the best I came up with is this: UCLH has a women's health and maternity fund that carries out these tasks (note research in the second bullet point).

 

The research itself looks like the right kind of thing: "Investigate the role of T-regulatory (Treg) cell in maintaining a healthy pregnancy and influencing the development of pre-eclampsia", "improve the quality of imaging from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and ultrasound and use these to develop low risk techniques for diagnosis, treatment and therapy for a range of dangerous conditions of the baby during pregnancy" and all kinds of medical stuff I don't pretend to understand. 

So I gave them some money. Perhaps I have helped invest in the future of the human race; I hope so. But maybe it will just help a bereaved parent spend some time away from the sound of new-born babies; I'd be happy with that too.

Article in The Critic - by me

Living in London is not a human right, I say, which is true.

What I am getting at in this piece - and I hope this comes through - is that people ought to consider what it is that they are really trying to achieve with their housing policies. Presumably no-one thinks that, say, Mayfair could or should be rendered readily affordable to people on, say, upper-quartile incomes. But some areas in Zone 2? or Zone 3? should be. Why? What's the reason for drawing the line there?

I suspect that many people's ultimate answers to pressing this line of questioning will be a combination of factors: that the capital city of a country ought to be reasonably accessible to a fair number of its own citizens; that London has a history and tradition of the classes living in close proximity that ought to be preserved; that the life and soul and energy of a city relies on a good mix and variety of people from different income brackets and different life stages; that crowding out all kinds of people on low incomes - students, the young, artists, charity workers, nurses - is bad for London in all kinds of ways; that it is good for neither the rich nor the poor to be in protected bubbles, whether in terms of their ideology or life-experiences, and so living cheek-by-jowl benefits them all; that an international trading city - long a port and formerly an imperial capital - should have space for migrants from across the world, both those just passing through and those who come to stay, and that both they and the locals benefit as a result; and so on. No doubt you can think of other things too. 

I am strongly inclined to agree with this kind of reasoning. But it adds up to a rather non-free-market set of conclusions. Subsidised social housing surely has to be part of the mix (contra Henry Hill), for example. Gentrification is not purely good: replacing the character and traditions of a deprived area with characterless "luxury flats" above chain restaurants, even if a Good Thing on balance, involves some degree of loss. The charm of any famous big city relies at least to some extent on its inefficient, quirky or decorative features: what would Paris be if the Eiffel Tower were replaced by a housing estate or New York if Central Park were built over? Sure, they would both be excellent cities, but it's hard to imagine that they would be improved. Of course, Manhattan is a better city now than when it was not built at all, but it is a sign of the maturity and success of a city when people - particularly a city's own inhabitants, those who know and love it best - turn to considering how it might be preserved, how its peculiarities and oddnesses protected from further changes. All of this requires something quite different from unrestrained development.

Against all of that is the simple argument that the country could be much richer if London grew and accommodated more people - more productive "knowledge workers". Not only richer in base GDP terms, but in terms of the satisfaction of valuable human desires: there are lots of people who want to live in London but who can't afford to - why condemn them to crushing commutes or second-best jobs? No-one is talking about knocking down St Paul's to build flats or putting a housing estate on Hyde Park - all we want is the chance to replace some proportion of the miles and miles of undistinguished Victorian, Edwardian and twentieth-century development that makes up the bulk of London's housing stock. Forget about cheerful Cockneys and their traditions - all of that has vanished to Essex anyway - we are merely talking about replacing some of the shallow foundation-ed brick terraces prone to subsidence, put up by the speculative cowboy builders of their day, with denser modern developments built to higher safety and environmental standards, and thereby allowing more families the chance to share in the wealth and security of one of the world's great cities.

I don't disagree with that line of argument either! Indeed, the arguments for having a mix of people in London tend to support making room for the middling sort too - people too rich for social housing but too poor for Chelsea - and that surely means tweaking the land use of the outer suburbs (and even the Green Belt) to make room for affordable housing bought with mortgages pay out of normal middle-class incomes. 

But my point is that even that argument does not justify a free-for-all. If it's bad for London that there are no cheap and cheerful places for art students and nurses to live, then it's bad whether they are priced out by international capital building unoccupied mega-flats or by middle-class families who want characterful homes in which to raise their children: either way, a thriving city will require a managed mix, not a blanket YIMBY approach.

Or at least, that is how it seems to me now.