A not very cheeky Nandos

You might recall the article calculating the exact amount of banter in the photo of the Eton boys who met Putin. You do? Good. Well, here is a similar and in some ways even more insightful article calculating the exact amount of banter in the photo of the Independent Group MPs at Nandos.  This part gives you some idea of quite important this article is:

"There is a lot to process here, but most importantly I see this as a violent affront to The People: Nando's is vital to us, and they are doing it wrong. If you broke British culture down now – dismantled the Queen and the corgis and the teapots and the RAF – and built it up again from the bones anew, it would be this: Nando's and Dairy Milk and having a complicated relationship with Cheryl Cole. Having a favourite series of Big Brother and sneaking Haribo into the cinema with all the adrenaline of a violent crime. Loving or hating the 2018 World Cup run with all the energy in your body. Mums in long dresses, complaining in Debenhams. And, for fuck's sake, it would be built on a cornerstone of peri-peri salt on your chips. Broadsheet galactic brains like to pretend they don’t get Nando’s, as if there is anything to get beyond this: it is spicy chicken that always tastes good at an affordable price point. It is literally never not a bad idea to offer everyone out to the Nando’s. It solves every argument about where to eat ever had. It is the only place vegans and half-a-chicken protein lads can eat elbow-to-elbow. It is Britain."

The future

The future is already here, but unevenly distributed. Here are some glimpses of what lies in store.

First, science and technology are (again) going to do some amazing thing. Here is (the terribly sad) Scott Alexander to tell us about artificial intelligence. Read this first, then this. And here is Dominic Cummings, of all people, on genomic prediction, but also on related political thoughts. These developments have huge economic and political consequences that we have not started to grapple with.

Next, geopolitics. For the Eurasian future to come, here is Bruno Maçães on China and Russia. His twitter feed has interesting links and comments too. Also, one country with nuclear weapons has just dropped bombs on another country with nuclear weapons. Note that India attacked Pakistan proper, not merely Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Now consider this: what matters more - what China thinks about that or what American thinks about that?

If you are more interested in matters closer to home, you might want to note that the British element of the undergraduate Oxbridge intake is down by 5-10% over the last decade. (For graduates, the figures are entirely different: in postgraduate courses at Cambridge, there are now more overseas students than British ones.) Just consider what that means for the practical chances of British people from under-represented groups getting to attend Oxbridge in the first place: it's time for someone to endow a new college or two! (Also, it means that the standard of British Oxbridge rejects is increasing.) I see a similar pattern in applications for pupillage (i.e. to become a trainee barrister), namely that applications from non-British applications are increasing. We are already well aware that the City of London is like Wimbledon - a venue for foreign talent hosted by locals. Perhaps the universities and other professions will follow suit.

Friends and Neighbours

(Trigger warning: Brexit.)

I have been considering this (in The Economist) and this (in The Guardian), a couple of pieces by Jeremy Cliffe that make similar points about the mutual UK-EU misunderstanding. You might want to read them.

Cliffe's central point is that the EU sees itself as the guarantor of a "recognisably European way of life": long holidays, universal healthcare, a quiet, safe, calm world made manifest in "well-heated social housing blocks in Utrecht or Vienna, in comfortable houses with gardens on the outskirts of Barcelona or Prague, in safe streets and decent hospitals".

Cliffe's theory is similar to (and indeed in some respects overlaps with) my theory that the EU genuinely sees itself as guaranteeing peace in Europe: Cliffe and I both posit an EU that is doing something different from – and rather more ambitious than – what the UK imagines.

Below the break, I try to explore how this idea of the European Way of Life (EWL), and its centrality in the EU's conception of itself, has created problems for UK-EU relations.

 

Shock and severe shock

You might remember that the Treasury produced an assessment of the immediate economic impact of a vote for Brexit. You can find it here. Below is the summary table from the report.

Looks pretty bad, doesn't it? Well, it turns out that the severe shock was suffered by the Treasury, not the economy.

The Guardian has a series tracking how the Brexit vote has affected the economy. The January 2019 edition is here. Below are the graphs showing what in fact happened during the two year period covered by the table above.

On the one hand, inflation has indeed gone up ...

... which is not surprising as sterling has indeed gone down.

On the other hand, every other Treasury prediction was completely wrong, not just in magnitude but in direction.

Let's start with the biggies. 

The Guardian puts it like this: "The average wages of British workers rose at the fastest annual rate since the financial crisis in the three months to November as unemployment fell to the lowest rate since the mid-1970s. Average weekly earnings, excluding bonuses, increased by 3.3% in the biggest rise since 2008. Meanwhile, the number of people in work also rose after an increase of 141,000 people entering employment to a record high of 32.54 million in the three months to November." That is pure unadulterated good news. See graphs below:

(Note that the unemployment graph shows a percentage of the population, while the wage growth graph shows growth rates, i.e. the graph on the left shows quantities and the graph on the right shows a first derivative. So wages have increased - wage growth has been positive - for every three-month period since the Brexit vote but there was a reduction in wage growth - the second derivative went down while the first derivative went up - in early 2017. Second derivatives are not so evident in the first graph. I don't find the juxtaposition of these two different types of graph terribly helpful.)

Also, Government borrowing is down:

(I think this is in £bn. This graph is quite helpful once you understand it. As a self-employed person I am pleased to see that my bi-annual income tax payments make a material difference to Government borrowing.)

I had to go to the ONS for GDP figures, but they are also up, not down:

(Graph taken from here, discussing the UK's long recovery from the 2008 recession. The period we are interested in is from 2016.)

I also went to the Government for house price data. As at November 2018, house prices had been rising every year since well before the Brexit vote and were continuing to do so, although the rate of increase has been declining in England (not in other UK countries) - click through to the link to look at those second derivatives, guys!.

I've said before that talking about Brexit means not talking about worse things. But it also means not talking about the wonderfully good run the economy has had over the last few years. I'm sure the Treasury is ringing with shouts of joy that its considered, entirely neutral, predictions for the results of a Brexit vote have been so utterly confounded by glorious reality.

Sarcasm aside, what do we learn from this failure of forecasting? It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future? Sure. Motivated reasoning doesn't help? Sure. But the Treasury (whose forecasts were not hugely out of line with other people) got it right about inflation and the exchange rate. Why so?

Getting both of those right is not that surprising, as I mentioned above. If the value of the pound in other currencies goes down then the price of imports to the UK goes up. The UK imports a lot of stuff, and the amount of importing was not going to change much in the short term, so predicting that the exchange rate would go down would give you a good steer that inflation would go up.

I think the key is that the financial markets' reaction to news is reasonably easy to predict, at least in the short term: the currency graph is the only one where the Brexit vote is noticeable in the data. If the Anti-Brexit Fairy arrived today and announced that Brexit would not take place then it's a decent bet that the pound would jump and there would be a big uptick in the FTSE 100 too. It's not too hard to spot what people who work in financial services think about Brexit. Equally, I can be pretty confident that a visit from the Anti-Brexit Fairy would be welcomed by a leading article in the Economist discerning the beginning of a turn against populism and favour of openness, perhaps coupling it with the Democrat successes in the US mid-terms. When we are talking about these subjects we are really talking about small numbers of people with clearly expressed views, and it is reasonably easy to know what they think. But when it comes to the country as a whole - or the trading world as a whole - working out what people think is necessarily much harder, and it is numbers on this scale that determine GDP, jobs and so on.

There's another point to consider here. What the Treasury was describing in 2016 as a shock or a severe shock is broadly the same magnitude of event as reversing the economic gains that the country has made since 2016. For example, the number of people in work around the time of the Brexit vote was about 31,757,000 and is now about 32,535,000, an increase roughly equivalent in magnitude to the number of people who were predicted to lose their jobs in the 'severe shock' scenario. So that's what the Remain campaign would threaten if there were a second referendum: vote Remain or be cast back into the dark days of 2016! It's not the feariest Project Fear, is it?

The Integration Paradox

I. A Just So Story

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, some New Peoples came to the Land of the Right People and the Left People.

The Right People said, "They must follow our ways! How else can we live together happily?"

But the Left People said, "No. Let them live their own ways. We shall live in our ways, and they shall live in their ways, and there shall be so many ways that everyone will be happy!"

And the Right People said, "But then we shall not be One People any more."

And the Left People said, "Good. We shall be Many Peoples."

So the Right People went back to their houses and their ways. In quiet, among themselves, they said that the New Peoples were very welcome to become Right People. Many of the New Peoples wanted to become Right People. They knew the difference between leg spin and off spin, and they knew all the words to "Immortal, Invisible". They knew about afternoon tea and Guy Fawkes and the Magna Carta and fair play and Oxbridge and lawyers' wigs and Dadabhai Naoroji. They thought that all sounded rather nice. But the Right People stayed in their houses and the New Peoples stayed in theirs: Right People (even the New People who were secretly Right People) like staying in their houses.

In quiet, among themselves, the Left People said that the New Peoples must not become Left People or Right People at all but must carry on doing things in very different ways, which will involve eating strange foods, dancing strange dances to strange music and wearing strange clothes. They said it would be quite wrong to make them do things like the Left People.

But the Left People did not stay in their houses. They busied about among the New Peoples telling them about people called Huguenots or Flemish weavers (although no one ever got to meet any of these people). They ate the foods of the New Peoples, but did not learn their dances, and they made up rules to explain why eating the New People's food was Good, learning their dances was Optional and wearing their clothes was Bad. They made up lots of rules for how Left People and Right People and New Peoples have to talk to each other. They made up new words to describe the New People. They made up new taboos and new heroes.

In the end, some of the New Peoples learned all the ways of the Left People and all the words of the Left People and all the taboos of the Left People and all the heroes of the Left People. They forgot all the ways of the New Peoples, and forgot the ways and words and taboos and heroes of their fathers. They became One People.

Then the Right People came out of their houses and said to the Left People, "You have become One People! You do not want Many Peoples at all. You just want One People who all follow the same ways!"

And the Left People said, "Yes, we must all be One People who follow the same ways, or how else can we live together happily?"

II. After the Just So Story

There is a paradox here. It is a standard right-wing objection to (what I would now regard as) old-fashioned multiculturalism that, by requiring no more of citizens than an adherence to 'tolerance', it produces a culture too thin and unappealing to deserve the loyalty or respect of immigrant communities. The host community, so the right-winger says, is not offering a real culture for the immigrant community to integrate into: contrast that situation with the Huguenots (who have the privilege, afforded also to Nazis, terrorists susceptible to torture and 'terminally ill people who are going to die anyway', of finding themselves usefully employed in any armchair-thinker's arguments), who came to England to practice the same religion as the host community and eventually assimilated into it.

That objection might make sense in theory, but it's becoming much less plausible in practice. (That is bad for a right-wing argument: such arguments need not work in theory, but they must work in practice.) A sufficiently thick culture has now grown up around what started out as mere 'tolerance' such that there is a host community culture, entirely different from the cultures of (say) Jamaica, Nigeria or India, that can plausibly demand the loyalty of people descended from immigrants.

Traditional culture has complicated rules, for example, about the order of precedence between the Lord Privy Seal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, or about whether mediatised princesses can marry royalty. These rules can be tricky to learn. But the same is true of the new rules. So you can change gender without making any changes to your body but you cannot change race no matter what you do to your body - got it? It is not cultural appropriation to eat curry (I am pretty sure), it might be cultural appropriation to make up your own jerk rice, and as for wearing ethnic clothes ... who knows?  I genuinely have no idea what the correct reaction is to the revelation that Elizabeth Warren's DNA test shows her to be between one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth and one one-thousand-and-twenty-fourth Native American: Mark Steyn commented, "I know the old-school Democrats kept careful track of their quadroons and octoroons, but I don't think even they got up to centum-viginti-octoroons, never mind mille-viginti-quadroons", which is sort of my point - the new order of precedence is every bit as tricky as the old ones. There are complicated taboos to navigate that go well beyond simple 'tolerance' or just being nice to people.

Again, terms like 'BAME' or 'minority' or 'brown': these are (a) loaded words that have to be employed correctly and (b) entirely alien to the ancestral cultures of the people to whom they are applied. To be at home in the rules and terminology of the new ruling classes is to have left traditional cultures, whether indigenous or immigrant, well behind and to have integrated (or even assimilated) into a new, English-speaking and Anglosphere-based, elite group.

The Right does see this, albeit through a glass darkly. They point out that modern 'diversity' recruitment does not mean having people with different political opinions or different socio-economic backgrounds in the same workplace, it just means people who are all expensively-educated and believe the same things, but who might have different colour skins or enjoy different activities in the privacy of their own bedrooms. But isn't that near enough exactly what the Right wanted in the first place? Everyone believing the same things, with different skin tones and different activities in the privacy of their own kitchens? The Right had its chance to make its beliefs the ones that everyone shared -  books like Small Island show that easy it would have been - cricket and Christianity and Royalty were pretty easy to sell. The Right had its chance - and blew it.

Equally, the Left sees, again through a glass darkly, that it is destroying the diversity it sought to preserve. That is why questions of cultural appropriation are so fraught: the melting pot is very hot, and few cultures can withstand it. But maintaining the divisions of caste, or the rules of purdah, or the West Indian attitudes to homosexuality, is simply not compatible with what is now meant by 'tolerance'. You can try to belong to both - you can try 'code-switching', or keeping your new lifestyle secret from your grandparents - but that's hard. It's easier just to conform to the new ways.

Perhaps the moral is just that, as has been the case before, what the conservatives said was right and what the liberals did was right.

Personal injury fraud

Not long ago, Twitter had a thing in which people were encouraged to say something that was obvious to people within their profession but which would be surprising to people outside it. My example from working as a barrister would be the scale of fraudulent personal injury claims - and the nature of the people involved in it.

Here is a case that exemplifies the point. Indeed, I regard it as unusual only in that the insurance company got the chance to uncover the fraud (a junior employee in a law firm sent the wrong document to the other side by mistake). The judge found both a solicitor and a doctor to be guilty of conduct which interfered with the administration of justice.

Here are some observations on the guilty men. First, Mr K, the solicitor. "When I asked him to explain this error, he said it was a mistake. When I pointed out that he appeared as comfortable and fluent advancing the first version of events as the second, he said he was "nervous". When pressed, he said that when explaining his first answer, to the effect that the email preceded the letter, he was "blagging". I confess I found it extraordinary that a solicitor, facing a contempt of court allegation, should, even for a moment, think it sensible or appropriate to attempt to "blag" his way through his evidence."

Second, Dr Z. "Dr [Z] is, as Mr Goldberg QC put it, a self-made, professional man. He is a GP with an NHS locum practice. He has also built up a highly successful one-man medico legal career. He works extremely long hours examining claimants in personal injury cases and producing reports. He allows himself just 15 minutes, in total, to conduct the examination and produce the report and is able to produce an astonishing 32 medical reports every day. Mr Goldberg QC describes his client as producing medical reports on an "industrial scale". [...] He has been able as a result to generate an income from his medico legal work of £350,000 per annum, on top of his NHS salary."

A self-described "blagger" of a lawyer and a doctor who is described by his own QC as producing medical reports on an "industrial scale". The professions at their worst.

Getting it right is hard

The Economist had a good article on single minded people - the patient tendency - tortoises.

It goes like this. The Brexiteers, exemplified by Sir Bill Cash, were a bunch of crazy loons. Everyone who was anyone in the Conservative Party tried to shut them up. But the loons stuck at it - and look where we are now. Similarly, the Corbynites "were kept going by a burning faith that history would eventually move in their direction, a faith well illustrated by Mr McDonnell’s comment, during the financial crisis, that “I’ve been waiting for this for a generation.”".  They were crazy loons too. But, patiently, tortoise-like, they stuck at it. And look where they are.

This leads the writer to the conclusion that "long-termism can be overrated. It is conventional to decry the tyranny of short-term thinking, a tyranny that is supposedly getting more oppressive in a world of Twitter mobs and one-click consumers. But long-termism can be coupled with monomania and utopianism. And short-termism makes for constant adjustments to an ever-changing reality. Britain’s patient tendency is doing far more harm to the country than short-termists ever did."

There is something in that point, and it is this: there are no shortcuts to working out if someone is right.

Let me put it this way. From time to time there are attempts to show that certain political opinions are correlated with some other, more or less quantifiable, intellectual or psychological tendency, e.g. that conservatives are more fearful or liberals are more flexible. The underlying idea seems to be that one can tell that flexible thinking is better than inflexible thinking and therefore that liberals are right, or one should be able to see that conservatives are just people blinded by fear. It's all rather like the character in the Woody Allen film Everyone Says I Love You who was becoming right-wing until his brain condition was diagnosed and treated - although Allen understood that that was a joke. The Economist's is another attempt along the same lines: look for the people who change their minds and avoid the people who stick to their guns, and you'll get to the right answers.

This sort of meta-approach doesn't work. Being right or sensible about one thing doesn't guarantee being right or sensible elsewhere. Indeed, finding Bad Things that Great Men Believed is a modern parlour game - try Einstein on the Chinese, or Gandhi on all sorts of things. And I should probably apologise for even mentioning Woody Allen.

Even when it comes to political opinions, "constant adjustments to an ever-changing reality" (what The Economist somehow resists calling "when the facts change I change my mind, what do you do?ism") is not an inherently better approach than the alternative. The Economist is right to point out that people are quite capable of demonstrating the virtues of patience and self-denial by holding on to unpopular beliefs for many years, in the face of all the temptations and blandishments that society can offer to abandon those beliefs, and yet those beliefs can be just plain wrong: you can pick from Cash and Corbyn as you please to prove the point. On the other hand, it's not hard to find people who stuck to the fight against apartheid, or slavery, or Communist dictatorship, or fascism, and whose 'monomania' is much to be admired. Nor is it hard to find those who adjusted to ever-changing reality far too readily: "be reasonable," said the moderate, "the complete abolition of slavery is a step too far, but we should do what we can to make it nicer for the slaves". "Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue," said a man with a large collection of Kachina dolls and a keen interest in UFOs, but who was nonetheless also right about Nixon.

I pause at this point to bring in some thoughts prompted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "Dissidents are always a little crazy by definition. Everyone has an urge to truth-telling and an urge to self-preservation that, in most cases, outweighs it. A person ready to stand up to a system that has for decades inflicted maximum harm on its critics is, in this sense, an abnormal person. His urges are disordered. There is a cruel paradox of political oppression: The less humane, the more ruthless, the more violent a system, the easier it is to cast someone who opposes it as off his rocker. Whether he overestimates his personal persuasiveness or the public’s backbone, a dissident is wrong about something, and his more cowardly fellow citizens can cling to this wrongness as an excuse for ignoring him, mocking him, informing on him."

I prefer to give patient, monomaniac outcasts the credit for showing a bit of imagination and a bit of backbone. These funny creatures have some virtues even if they are wrong, and we should be open to the possibility that those virtues inform their views. On the other hand, the Vicar of Bray's conduct is understandable, but he's not a model to emulate.

Moreover, it's not always obvious who the monomaniacs are. You saw the word 'utopianism' in the quotation above. Did that make you think of Utopia and Sir Thomas More? More was a man whose beliefs were utterly conventional, in tune with modern thinking and consistent with comfort, preferment and worldly success. He was far closer to being the Tony Blair of his day than its Corbyn or Farage: the Tudor Economist would have loved him for his liberal and humane views, utterly unlike the extremist Protestants spreading fake news in foreign lands. Then More's beliefs stopped being conventional and convenient. Nonetheless, he stuck to them, even when they led to his imprisonment and death. And isn't Blair himself, originally reviled as a sort of Tory-lite man without principles, cobbling together wishy-washy platitudes to inveigle New Labour into the hearts of the middle classes, now proving that he really believes in all his Third Way liberal international centrism? 

All of which leads me to the somewhat dispiriting conclusion that if you really care about being right then you have to steel yourself to the possibility of finding yourself in company with some odd or repellent people. The people who are the loudest and most right might be the oddest, even off their rockers; or perhaps those most right are the utterly conventional squares, a thought which can be equally repellent, if you are romantically inclined. Equally, some lovely people, whom you like very much, are wrong. Nowhere is it written that getting to the truth is easy, and I'm afraid there are no short cuts.