I have a webcam for Skype calls, so I thought I’d use it to make a response on YouTube to one of his dafter videos.

His original:

My response:

Not too bad for a first go, if I do say so myself.

xD.

The idea that the descendant must be fundamentally the same as the ancestor philosophy, or other descendants, is flat wrong. Aristotle studied under Plato, but said “so good riddance to Plato and his forms, for they make no more sense than singing la la la”. The Young Hegelians were at odds with the Old Hegelians, and neither would have agreed with Marx. Even amongst followers of Marx, you have to account for the likes of Georges Sorel.

To say, then, that Tony Blair is in hock to the thinking of Lenin is about as fair as to say that all conservatives would have supported slavery.

The specific example – that liberalism and fascism descend from progressivism – is similarly a load of rot. Progressivism is an ill-defined word, but starts to come into play in the late nineteenth century. Liberalism in one sense dates from rather earlier – Locke’s Two Treatises date from 1689 – while the ‘other’ form of liberalism (in the American sense of the state supporting the unfortunate) could, after a fashion, be said to date from the 1597 Act for the Relief of the Poor. If that is too much, the Corn Law Rhymer, Ebenezer Elliott, was able to write in the mid nineteenth century

What is a communist? One who hath yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings:
Idler, or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his penny, and pocket your shilling.

If that is too abstract, Thomas Paine was arguing for a welfare state and progressive taxation to prevent the creation of a hereditary aristocracy in The Rights of Man of 1791.

Fascism is a similarly piebald term, but it is, I would argue, the third to emerge as it is only possible, as I understand it, in a modern, industrial society. In short, his analysis is conceptually and factually wrong.

In any case, Progressive Conservatism is nothing new. John Diefenbaker was elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1957 as a Progressive Conservative, while Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican and then a Progressive.

Blaney continues:

Progressivism is diametrically opposed to everything that conservatives believe in

The Conservative Party has always been a coalition of interests; at the moment, it has one-nation, traditionalist and Thatcherite¹ wings. This is true of the other parties (the LibDems have the Orange Bookers and social democrats, while Labour has Campaign Group, Compass and Progress). What’s interesting is the source of Blaney’s rights:

‘God-given or natural, fundamental freedoms inherent in my being a free-born Englishman’

It would be fascinating to hear an enumeration of those rights; I suspect that they would be neither natural nor fundamental, but contingent on the existence of a state. Unless the almighty gives different rights to those born English and Ethiopian, they cannot be natural; unless the creator brands at birth the slave and lets the yeoman go free, they cannot be fundamental.

In other words, the source of Donal’s rights is verbiage. The question is whether he speaks just for the Thatcherite part of his party, or the others.

Much of Donal’s paean to conservativism is then a roll call of people and quotes. I would simply answer: what of Havel, Walesa, Dubcek and Horn?

I have a quote, too:

O Liberty, liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!

- Mme Roland.

Blaney sets up a dichotomy between conservatism and progressivism and tries to say that the latter is tantamount to fascism, thus coming awfully close to an invocation of Godwin’s Law. As I hope I’ve shown, this is bunk as descent does not mean what he thinks it means and, in any case, isn’t there. From Donal’s point of view, Cameron’s positions mean he cannot be a conservative; I think it’s rather more likely that the positions advocated by Blaney are pretty far from the mainstream of conservatism. I hope so, as if I’m wrong, the zeitgeist of the British Conservative party is similar to the GOP in the US.

xD.

1 – I deliberately say ‘Thatcherite’ rather than ‘neo-liberal’ as the emphasis on liberty in neo-liberalism is at odds with the social conservatism of Thatcher.

De Gray set out a paradigm whereby metabolism causes damage, and damage then causes pathology. In this model, gerontology attempts to intervene in the first step – problematic because of the great complexity of metabolism – and geriatrics intervenes in the first step – problematic because damage has already caused pathology and is at best palliative. He sought to reverse accumulated damage before it became pathological.

Initially, this would allow for an extension of the useful human lifespan by perhaps thirty years. Once that first step was accomplished, refinements in technique would allow, excepting being hit by cars and so on, to continue for arbitrarily long periods, through the possibility of increasingly eficacious treatments before the eficacy of repeated cycles of previous treatments lost eficacy.

You can get a flavour of his speech from this TED talk.

Broadly, I would raise three problems with de Gray’s plan.

Firstly, the scientific. I can’t assess his science, but a number of people there raised fairly substantial problems with his paradigm and with the conclusions he drew from it. That is probably one for the peer reviewed papers.

Secondly, the technological. The very long, four-figure lifespans suggested depended not just on continuing improvements in the (speculative) set of technologies, bit that those improvements happened faster than people died because of a loss of eficacy as described above. The examples de Gray cited in support of his position were the motor car and the aeroplane. Unfortunately for him, the equally plausible alternative of the jet pack was raised: theoretically possible, desirable even, and can be turned into a prototype that can fly for half a minute, but can’t be turned into a production model (because the amount of fuel that can be loaded onto a human is finite and less than what’s needed for useful flight). Another example would be power from nuclear fusion, which has been ten years away for fifty years. It is a prediction based on little more than fiat.

Thirdly, the socio-economic. In answer to a question from yours truly about the cost of the treatments, de Gray was quick to observe, thousand-year life spans would have major effects on world society, meaning that we could throw much of traditional economics out of the window. If we do that, though, we throw political economy out of the window. Thus, de Gray’s assetion that the state would pay for its citizens to have these treatments is distinctly problematic as the state, as we know it, would not necessarily sill exist. Even if we accept that the state still exists in a recognisable form and that it makes economic sense for states to pay for these treatments, it does not follow that they will pay for them. As de Gray thought equality was a major issue, it’s worth going into at slightly greater length.

The basis from which de Grey works is that regenerative medicine is medicine like any other, albeit with remarkable effects. As we know from the current debate in the US, there are plenty of people who see taking money from them to pay for the healthcare of others as morally wrong. There are also plenty of countries that would like to provide comprehensive healthcare, but cannot afford it. De Grey provided no explanation of how we would roll out this treatment when we cannot at the moment give people with economic potential very cheap drugs – say, hydration salts for diarrhea – that would have similar economic benefits to the de Grey treatments but at vastly lower costs per dose. From the point of view of the state, it doesn’t matter whether a day’s work is done by a thirty-year-old or a three hundred and thirty-year-old. Given that states do not have to provide pensions or old age healthcare now, and that the mechanism by which they will be convinced to do so is absent, it seems as reasonable to conclude that arbitrarily long lives will remain the province of the wealthy as to conclude that we will enter this brave, new world. A nightmare scenario would be lots of people having access to these treatments but not making the necessary lifestyle changes. If we kept dropping kids every twenty or thirty years over a thousand year life, we’d very quickly overpopulate the planet.

I hope that de Gray’s science is more thorough than his statecraft.

Of course, if de Gray is right, I look forward to seeing you at the February 2317 meeting of Sceptics in the Pub London – assuming someone hasn’t already booked the room.

xD.

Polly Toynbee
Sunder Katwala
Jon Cruddas
James Purnell
Dave Cole

Polly Toynbee Original

To live on the left is to live optimistically, believing in progress despite set backs, hoping despite frequent disappointment, urging progress against right wing nostalgia for illusory “better yesterdays”.

No, that’s Whigishness and defining ‘the left’ as ‘not the right’ is a counsel of despair.

Life on the left means trusting that the better side of human nature can prevail against selfishness and greed.

Actually, I think the right would say that, too. They’d say it’s because of that – say, charitable giving – that we don’t need as much social protection.

Good argument can always persuade enough people to see that a more socially just society is in everyone’s best interests.

Assertion. I’d say there are plenty of good arguments that wouldn’t convince the Taxpayers’ Alliance who would probably say that a more socially just society is one where the state doesn’t interfere.

Life on the left means an instinctive defence of the underdog against the over-privileged, rooting for the have-nots against the power of the have-yachts.

There are no right-wing Yeovil Town fans?

To be a social democrat is to understand the value of good government as the best expression of collective social success against rampant anti-state individualism.

That’s about being a social democrat, not about being on the left. You could say that social democrats are a part of the left, but I don’t think anyone would define them as being all the left.

Paying taxes towards good government is not a ‘burden’ but the most communitarian thing we do – and it buys the good life, all the things we care most for, such as health, education, safety and a pleasing environment. Yet we are wary too of any government’s potential for stifling freedoms and crushing individual initiative, seeking that delicate balance between liberty and equality. The right regards freedom to seize unjust rewards as party of human nature. The left resists all claim of “nature” as justification for winner takes all, eat-what-you-kill capitalism, while understanding the dynamic power of well-regulated markets.

But the Christian left might use a claim of nature for other political purposes. I’m willing to be convinced – it wouldn’t take that much, in all honesty – that Bentham was correct when he said that natural rights were nonsense on stilts. If we’re going to go for that, great, but we’re not going to take all the left with us.

Life on the left is a perpetual journey where definitions of social justice shift with the times. Social democrats have no ultimate egalitarian end-game, only the constant pursuit of better, fairer, kinder, more honest, more democratic ways to live together.

I don’t think the right would say that they are going for worse, harsher, less honest, less democratic ways to live together. Unless you are going to define the good life – and, hell, I remember having discussions about that in my first year undergrad classes on Plato and we still don’t agree – and by doing so demonstrate that there is no left.

Sunder Katwala Original

That we are for a fairer and more equal society.

Sorry, Sunder, but, unless you define fairness and equality, that sentence has no meaning.

Any successful left is a broad church, not a narrow sect. To be ‘left’ is to be part of a political conversation both about what equality and fairness mean and how we try to bring it about.

I would say that the right consider themselves part of that conversation; they’re talking to and hearing from different people and have different ideas about what is fair and equal, but they still think about it.

Each generation of the left needs to engage with perennial questions about our ends and how we translate them into practice: ‘equality of what?’, ‘how much equality is fair?’, ‘how do we narrow the gaps which matter most?’ and ‘how do we persuade people in a democratic society?’ so that we mobilise the movements and coalitions which can make change happen.

We so nearly get an answer there, but then we fall back into platitudes. We are told what some of the questions are that might help us to define this nebulous concept, but are not given any answers unless we consider leftness to be a focus on process. While that is valuable, it is not the whole story

I think it is still the value of equality which separates the broad left from most of the democratic right. We have a philosophical difference with the ideas-based ‘less government is always best’ right about what freedom and autonomy substantively mean. And we believe that freedom, rather than privilege, depends on our all sharing it. We can also now show that a fundamental anti-government fails the evidence test: wealth and opportunity have become more concentrated, and is too often in denial about climate change and failed states.

Tell the anarchists that. Sunder talks about using the state in a good way, whereas they, who might agree with him on some aims and methods, would see the state as necessarily corrupt and corrupting.

Some on the right may now accept a moral argument for equal life chances – in which case, we need to persuade them of the scale of change that demands. But very few voices yet acknowledge the evidence that inequality, and relative position, matters, though we should welcome those who do.

This smacks again of definition by what the left isn’t. That doesn’t narrow the term down enough to be useful.

We should respect the traditions and ideas of political opponents on the democratic right. The conservative tradition represents one significant strand in our society, defending established institutions and articulating the interests of those who benefit most from the way things are. (Though conservatives might not want change; they do often show a talent for living with change if others can bring it about). I expect the Conservative Party to be motivated primarily by those conservative ends and instincts, and so to be a force for conservatism rather than progress. I imagine most conservatives feel the same.

Is the Conservative Party the totality of the right? Are there no libertarians, no Thatcherites? While Sunder & I might agree that the conservative tradition has the function of “articulating the interests of those who benefit most from the way things are”, I suspect Conservatives would say that there positions help the life chances of the disadvantaged more than heavy-handed stateism.

Jon Cruddas Original

The most important philosophical insight that defines the left is the recognition that real freedom requires not just the absence of constraint but also the opportunity and capacity to act. This is not so much the dividing line between socialists and non-socialists as the dividing line within the liberal tradition. It is the distinction between Manchester School liberalism and the more developed strands of liberal thought articulated by Hobhouse, Keynes and Beveridge in Britain and FDR in America.

Along with social democrats and socialists, progressive liberals understand that equal liberty cannot co-exist with high levels of poverty and wide inequalities of wealth. This is because the capacities required to take part in society on an equal basis are socially defined and relative rather than abstract and fixed. Broadly speaking, the left appreciates that the pursuit of meaningful equality of opportunity cannot be detached from considerations of wealth distribution.

I think Jon Cruddas’ is the best answer given so far. “Real freedom requires not just the absence of constraint but also the opportunity and capacity to act” is something I could really get behind. However, Jon talks about socialists, social democrats, progressive liberals and not the left. The high quality of his answer shows the poverty of the question and its premise.

James Purnell Original

I’ve tried to do this without creating a right-wing straw man against which to define myself. Many goals are shared between political traditions – such as freedom or equality before the law – although the priorities we give them and the methods by which we pursue them differ.

Not just that; there are disagreements, including within what would be called the left, about what freedom and equality mean.

But below are some differences which I think are about direction, not just priority:

First, the Right tolerates inequalities that the Left hates. I’m on the Left because I worry about inequalities of capability – some people have it very easy in our society, others far too hard. The goal of policy should be to correct these inequalities in power. This is partly but not only about redistribution of income.

There are, as James doubtless knows, many people who would say that the language of equality of opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome, puts him on the right.

Second, I believe that governments succeed more often than they fail. People on the Right are more sceptical of government’s effectiveness. The Right also worry that more government means less community or individual action: we think that government helps communities be more active and individuals more powerful.

The left is not necessarily statist and the right is not necessarily anti-statist. Indeed, these are relative, as someone of James’ (or many others!) version of the left would say there was too much state in the USSR while a right-winger might say there was not enough in Afghanistan.

Third, I’m utopian. People on the Left tend to have a vision of what society could be like, and believe it’s the role of democracy to try to make that a reality. People on the Right are more likely to value the status quo, believing it represents the tested wisdom of previous generations.

Actually, I think the right often harks back to a golden age that it seeks to recreate. Utopia means ‘no place’; More’s little joke was that Utopia, the non-existent, is a homonym in English of Eutopia, the good place. I feel we should deal with what we can – yes, with regard to the future – and recognise that the best is a shifting goal.

Dave Cole

I couldn’t give a fig whether I am ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’; I would rather do what I think is appropriate. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless in current political discourse as they are relative to the user’s position, non-exclusive, change over time and are far too large.

The term left wing could include the BNP, the SWP, George Galloway, black bloccers and James Purnell.
The term right wing could include the BNP, UKIP, Edward Heath, Andrew Rosindell and James Purnell.

If I have to give my political positions a nomenclature, I will give them one that doesn’t tie me into a crescent where far left and far right meet at the top. We’ve all see the political compass; even that is over-simplifying things. Two people could both be in (say) the top left corner (“left authoritarian”), you could end up there for nationalist, religious reasons or internationalists, atheist reasons and have very different approaches to politics and society.

This is not just a semantic question.

If we say that Labour are the left wing party of Britain, we mistakely give British politics immutability and tie it down into arguments that are not necessarily relevant to the modern world, and so on and so forth. If we want to exclude communists from the left and fascists from the right, we need a justification. Any such justification will also exclude others that would be otherwise in one of those groupings.

The terms left and right wing oversimplify and have neither predictive nor descriptive value. They don’t tell us where we’re going or where we came from, bring people in that we don’t want and exclude people we shouldn’t. They suggest we need fixed coalition by putting in place a philosophical floor that must be crossed. They imply that anything that isn’t the other is the good.

Let us call ourselves socialists, social democrats, progressive liberals, anarchists, communists and various people against nasty things; let us stop pretending that there is an overarching theme that unites us all.

xD.

PS – I have written on whether the BNP can be reasonably considered left or right wing here.

Update: Chris Dillow weighs in with a useful contribution.

I took away a few things from it all.

- Firstly, I was gratified that the nutty left wasn’t there but that there was a broad range, from government ministers through ordinary Labour party members, trades unionists, Greens, Lib Dems and that they were largely willing to come together for an occasion like this. I did see George Galloway floating around, though, but without any groupies.

- Secondly, there was an acceptance that, the rights and wrongs of high finance notwithstanding, London (and the UK) had been overly dependent upon them and that we would now have to find, ahem, alternative employment. A lot of people thought this could be to do with green innovation.

- Thirdly, a lot of people seem to understand that we have to work to maintain the vibrancy and toleration of our city.

- Fourthly, it wasn’t just the free market ideology that had been hit; progressives needed to re-evaluate their positions, and quickly, in this brave new world.

- Fifthly, there was a widespread feeling that we should work across London, not just focussing on the Mayoralty. That having been said, progressives would have to work hard to remove Johnson in 2012.

Below the fold are my notes and thoughts on the sessions I attended. I don’t know if anyone’s collating these, but it would make sense, if there are future events like this, for something like Liberal Conspiracy to have someone at each breakout session. Some of the other bloggers I saw there include the Tory Troll, Mayor Watch, Boris Watch, Peter Kenyon, Dave Hill, Sunny Hundal and Steve Cowan.

xD.

This is not going to be chronological; if anyone’s that interested, the schedule for the day is here. It’s probably a good sign that for each of the breakout sessions, there was more than one I wanted to attend.

First plenary
Second plenary
First breakout – Learning lessons from London Votes 2008
Second breakout – Transport
Third breakout – Blogging London

First plenary

Ken ‘the once and future king mayor’ Livingstone gave the first talk. He mentioned a generational turning point. There had been a broad, social democratic consensus in the quarter-century following the Second World War. I think that point is debatable; the situation constrained state actions to a great degree, but the effect is perhaps the same. Following that, Friedman et al came to popularity (and a particular mention for mobility of capital being increased) but that era has now passed with the current financial crisis.

In a rather witty remark, Ken said that he was sad Reagan hadn’t seen the collapse of his dream before saying

I expect an apology from Thatcher imminently

The question, then, was as to the new structures that should be put in place. One that drew near-universal applause was that every person should pay tax on money in the country where they earn it and, similarly, corporations should pay taxes on profit in the country where they make them. This would have to be done through global and international agreement, effectively closing off tax havens.

It could not be denied, according to Ken, that the economies of London and the UK would be damaged because of the problems in the City. As a solution, he proposed that London should be at the forefront of the new technologies that we, as a species, need to deal with the serious environmental situation; on this, Ken painted a bleak picture, largely agreeing with the Tyndall centre.

Closing, he mentioned the need for greater support of London’s dynamic cultural centre and a need to recognise the importance of happiness – and so to put in place a progressive consensus for the future of the city.

Second up was the playwright, Bonnie Greer, who started by recalling two huge, generational shifts through which she had lived; the Sixties and now. In both instances, a part of the shift is technological. Then, it was the television, now it is the internet and mobile technology. In both instances, older people colonise the space made by young people who either very quickly adapt or grow up with these new technologies.

Greer went on to say that, soon, most humans will live in cities, which will have consequences for how we view race. Nevertheless, manufacturing will return but it will be high-tech. There will have to be greater cross-generational cooperation as the idea of a passive pensioner changes to that of an active senior who may have retired but still has two or three decades of living ahead of them.

Greer concluded by opining that political parties would more and more be vehicles for charismatic individuals unless they learned to communicate – properly – with Gen-Y, Gen-Z and the Millennial generation.

Next was Eric Hobsbawm.

If I understood Hobsbawm correctly, he argued that the ideologies of the ‘short twentieth century’ – socialism unbound and capitalism unbound – were both, now, bankrupt. The former failed at the end of the eighties while the latter’s thirty year dominance, although we don’t know how severe the current crisis will be, had ended with it. The future, in short, belongs to a mixed economy.

He added that even the left parties of Europe of rich Europe were attached to this free-market fundamentalism, describing Blair and, until recently, Brown as ‘Thatcher with trousers’.

Certainly, the central idea of parties like Labour had not been soviet socialism, but rather that the market would take care of growth and the government of distribution. That position had been undermined by globalisation. It therefore needed refitting, but instead swallowed free market ideology whole. Because of decisions then and the balance of the economy now, the recession will be harder for us.

The question, then, is whether we use old tools like nationalisation. The answer was ‘not necessarily’ as, in something I thought slightly contradicted his opening, Hobsbawm thought we didn’t know how to get out of the current crisis because our leaders are addicted to ‘free market schmaltz’, questioning whether we had really moved away from the idea that profit-making companies were always good; that a large gap between rich and poor was acceptable; that increasing GDP is the sine qua non of good governance.

In order to do this, it was necessary for people to understand that GDP is a means and not an end and that the end – or something closer to the end – would be jobs, house, schools and the like. A good quip: “Poor secondary schooling isn’t changed by the fact that UCL could field a football team composed solely of Nobel prize winners”.

He finished, in his gloomy manner, by saying that climate change would mean a big shift from private to public, bigger than that envisioned by the Government and sooner than we all think. “Time is not on our side”.

Harriet Harman had the unfortunate task of following on from Hobsbawm. I say unfortunate because he really seemed to hold the audience. Nevertheless, Harman did well, starting by identifying people’s presence at the conference as part of a new zeitgeist, related to the real apprehension people felt, particularly about jobs. Although we are in uncharted waters, the Labour deputy leader said that the government would not be like Thatcher about losing jobs.

Something I found particularly interesting was the to- and fro- about Obama. Harman said that not only was Obama not going to fail, but that he had already succeeded in changing both how the world sees the USA and how people see themselves. A large welcome should be organised for him. A later question challenged Harman on this, saying that Obama should be judged on action rather than rhetoric. Harman simply replied that we should support him in building a progressive future – which he was doing – and received strong support from the audience.

Responding to Hobsbawm, Harman said that all tools would be used, and gave a list of what the government was doing to ameliorate the crisis. Specifically, bringing forward capital infrastructure expenditure was mentioned, in contrast to the Tories who wanted to cut those back at the time of a recession.

Harman emphasised the need for coordination of international action and the multiplier effect of states working together and accepted Hobsbawm’s point that a strong economy was a means and not an end. Agreeing with Greer, Harman added that our new economic arrangements would have to be fairer and based on high tech industries; £20m bonuses would no longer be acceptable.

To that end, what Polly Toynbee described as ‘socialism in one clause‘ – the duty on public bodies to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Harman closed by saying that there were those who would exploit the current situation to build racial divisions. At the June 4 elections, it was imperative to work for a high turnout because there is a real chance of the BNP gaining an MEP. Labour would be building on the work of Jon Cruddas (who chaired the session) and Margaret Hodge; Martin Salter would be coordinating that with support from Frank Dobson.

I found it interesting that people listened to Harman really quite attentively. I’ve often seen people shout abuse at any New Labour minister, but the couple that did received very short shrift from the audience. That’s not to say that everyone necessarily agreed, but that they wanted to listen. I assume that Harriet Harman was invited in her capacity as deputy party leader, but it does seem she was acceptable to the assembled.

There was a lot of support from the audience for questions on the need to repeal anti-trades union legislation and in opposition to trades unions’ support for the third runway at Heathrow. Hobsbawm did not directly answer a question on which member of the government could lead the country out of its current crisis, but did say that long periods of effective isolation from normal, run-of-the-mill society at the top of politics did mean that senior politicians lose contact with the ordinary.

Harman liked the idea of resurrecting the ‘Claimants’ Commission’ from GLC days. This, apparently, brought together people who claimed benefits to work out responses to proposed changes in benefits arrangements. A sex worker wanted to ask Harman a question; unfortunately, the one turned into five and the questioner was shouted down, the chair having immediately previously asked people to keep their questions short. The response from Harman was, essentially, that although a small percentage of sex workers freely chose from amongst other options to sell sex, the allowance of that particular market would force a lot of people into it who did not have a choice.

A few closing remarks. Hobsbawm felt that Labour and the unions had sold the traditional idea of a class struggle down the river as they didn’t strike and didn’t demonstrate. Lots of BNP voters thought they were voting for a class struggle; we cannot say that any class struggle is good.

Bonnie Greer said that old left-right paradigms were not working and that the Brits ‘did themselves down too much’.

Ken said that a lot of the questions had been looking backward. The progressive movement was in a weaker position than Thatcher and Reagan had been at the end of the Seventies. They had had a project; ‘we’ need to recraft our traditional ideals.

Second plenary

First breakout – lessons from the London elections

Second breakout: Transport for a progressive London

Third breakout: Blogging London

1. The government wants children to learn about the slave trade. But in 18th century England, how much different were the living conditions of the average slave from those of the average unskilled worker? I mean, both got a bare subsistence living and neither had political rights. But slaves had more job security. So how bad was slavery compared to free labour?

I know the passage from Africa was horrific, and there are examples of terrible mistreatment of both slaves and workers. But I’m asking about averages. Anecdotes aren’t enough. And don’t give me any nonsensical effort to empathise from today’s perspective.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence – the pictures of beaten slaves and of (free) children pulling heavy carts through narrow mineshafts – that life for most people in the 1700s was not pleasant. That, however, doesn’t answer Chris’s question. To do that, we’d need detailed breakdowns of the socioeconomic situation of the various types and classes of people at the time. They are not, so far as I know, available.

However, slavery was not just an economic condition. It is very much tied in to race and religion; the question of whether non-whites even had souls was prevalent. While the economics of the situation are worth studying, the moral justifications that were deployed and the attempt to keep slavery out of sight and out of mind are worth studying too; after all, “one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.”¹

In any case, the eighteenth century was one of great change that saw the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the move from the countryside to the city. I would add that, although villeinage had disappeared in England by 1700, villeins existed in Scotland until 1799.

2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? And if we don’t apply such reasoning, why not? Why is the restrictive CBA of Nice only applied to drugs, rather than to all public spending?

Actually, NGS doesn’t want to do that or, at least, if they do they haven’t told anyone. I telephoned the NGS’s contact for the Sutherland purchase and they have not announced how they propose to fund it. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they want to take it out of general taxation.

Using QALYs would, in time, almost by definition suggest that the spending is justified. It is a one-off purchase of two paintings that will also secure a long-term loan on a further fourteen pieces of art. If we say that, on a scale of one to zero, one is perfect health while zero is dead, we can give a figure to the change in QALYs from the expenditure.
I quote from the entry on NICE’s website on QALYs:

Patient x has a serious, life-threatening condition.

If he continues receiving standard treatment he will live for 1 year and his quality of life will be 0.4 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If he receives the new drug he will live for 1 year 3 months (1.25 years), with a quality of life of 0.6.

The new treatment is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: 1 (year’s extra life) x 0.4 = 0.4 QALY

New treatment: 1.25 (1 year, 3 months extra life) x 0.6 = 0.75 QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to 0.35 additional QALYs (that is: 0.75 –0.4 QALY = 0.35 QALYs).

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £10,000, standard treatment costs £3000.

The difference in treatment costs (£7000) is divided by the QALYs gained (0.35) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £20,000 per QALY.

Let me substitute a little.

Person y has a serious, life-threatening condition; they are alive and therefore will die in n years.

If they continue receiving standard treatment they will live for n years and his quality of life will be m, where 0? m ? 1 (0 = worst possible health, 1= best possible health)

If they receive the new drug they will live for n years (assuming that art doesn’t affect length of life), with a quality of life of m + b, where b is the benefit in terms of quality of life derived from viewing the art

The new treatment, art, is compared with standard care in terms of the QALYs gained:

Standard treatment: n x m = nm QALY

New treatment: n x (m+b) = nm+nb QALY

Therefore, the new treatment leads to nb additional QALYs

The cost of the new drug is assumed to be £50,000,000, inaction costs £0.

The difference in treatment costs (£50,000,000) is divided by the QALYs gained (nb) to calculate the cost per QALY. So the new treatment would cost £50,000,000/nb per QALY.

Let us say that a nice trip to the gallery to see the picture is equal to a positive change of one one-thousandth, or 0.001. We very quickly see that the cost, given that n is constant, per QALY is an astronomical number: 50000000000. That, however, is for one person. To bring it down to the £30,000 limit suggested by the NHS, 1,666,667 people would have to see the paintings. That’s not per year; that’s in total ever. NGS tell me that one and a half million people visit the National Galleries of Scotland per year, a million of which go to the National Gallery of Scotland where the Titian is.

It may be that my assumption of one one-thousandth of a QALY is too high. It wouldn’t matter; you’d have to wait longer to derive the benefit, but it would happen. It is also, of course, possible that it is too low. Not everyone who sees the paintings (the total is fourteen) is going to be someone off the street. Some will be schoolchildren on guided tours who may have a lifelong interest sparked in art; I’m sure you can think of other, equally unquantifiable examples.

You could also add into the calculation the benefit of the continuation of these major works of art to the local economy, including the increased publicity they will receive from the coverage of the possible purchase.

I wonder if Chris has been reading Bentham; the QALY method is the descendant of the felicific calculus and I’m sure that he would like to think he’s had an impact. The reason, I suspect, that this form of CBA is only applied to medical treatments for two reasons. Firstly, medical types tend to have a decent grasp of statistics and so are more likely to come up with ways of quantifying abstracts like ‘quality of life’. Doing the same thing for, say, Trident would be a lot harder as you have to make unprovable, untestable assumptions about the effect of having nuclear weapons. You could say that having a bell on a stick would prevent us from being nuked and it would be just as hard to prove. It is also hard to test the effect, if any, of things like prestige. I suspect, though, that the main reason is that the budgets for the NHS in general and medicines in particular are so large that they cannot be ignored and that, as the Government wanted to move responsibility away from itself, both to avoid the demands of political exigence and thereby to give a fairer result, NICE was set up and went about things in the best way it could.

3. How can academics be so quick to close down free speech? Surely, any proper teacher must know that the solution to mistaken beliefs is to correct them through discussion – that’s what teaching means. Academics must therefore support free speech, by definition. Does this episode merely corroborate my prejudice, that a close interest in the Israel-Palestine question is dangerous for one’s mental health?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of academics who don’t sign up to the scientific method; I point to many of the people involved in promoting creationism or intelligent design and, for some excellent rebuttal, Thunderf00t’s YouTube channel.

Mistaken beliefs should, in theory, be correctable by teaching so long as the belief is honestly held on a misappreciation of facts or misapplication of argument. Often, the aim is not to find any sort of ‘truth’ or answer but to ensure that your side wins; the fervour behind that aim, whether religious or secular, is such that any methods are justified leading to a lack of understanding in why what can be broadly termed the scientific method is important. That leads to lazy citation and research and quoting David Duke.

In answer to the final point, yes. I agree with much of Dave Osler’s thinking about the problems around discussing the area at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean.

4. Companies are moving their head offices to Ireland or Luxembourg to save tax. So, is there something to be said for a cut in corporation tax, financed by higher top income tax rates? The idea here is that companies’ head offices are more mobile than individual high-earners, and it doesn’t matter much anyway if a few of these leave or retire anyway. So we protect tax revenues without increasing inequality. What’s wrong with this?

In a unitary state, not much. However, in a country like the USA, where a slight rise in corporation tax could allow for a reduction in income tax in a given state, making people move to a state next to the state where they work. Indeed, it could make sense for a state to try to ride the Laffer curve if they have a nearby headquarters. Ultimately, it depends on whether the costs of moving justify the rewards of lower taxes for a given high-earner.

As to what might be wrong with this, we well know that the majority of the press will not report such subtleties other than as ‘tax rise’ or an attack on anything resembling progressive taxation.

I have wondered what would happen if we scrapped all taxes except income tax, adjusting the total take accordingly; I suspect, though, that whatever we did companies and other states would play the system to their advantage.

5. Merrill Lynch has lost a quarter of the profits it made in 36 years in just 18 months. Does this show that the profits to investment banking are a reward for taking black swan risk? You make decent profits, on average, in exchange for massive losses on rare occasions? Were Merrill’s profits (and those of other investment bankers) in good times merely a reward for taking this obscure risk? Did they – and their rivals – really fully understand what they were doing, or were they just lucky punters? What would count as persuasive evidence here?

Persuasive evidence here would be pretty hard to come by as we are only looking, for the most part, at the actions rather than the rationale. The turnover in staff may also mean that people came in without sufficient time to analyse the situation and those that did thought that the expectation of the low probability event given a short time at that company was low enough to take the risk. I would add that Merrill Lynch and others may have actually had a role in causing and worsening the crunch that has led to their losses.

Are there interesting, non-trivial answers here that are well-founded in evidence? Or is it that there’s a lot we don’t know?

Both, I’d say.

xD.

1 – cited from a judgement of 1569 by counsel for Somersett, a slave, in Somersett’s Case (R. v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett) of 1772 which “held that slavery was unlawful in England (but not other parts of the British Empire”

Firstly, I will be interested to see how Mr Davis, now re-elected, keeps the issue in the public eye. I dislike single-issue elections as Mr Davis will represent his constituency on the whole range of public issues. Although David Davis (according to ConservativeHome) has said that he “return[s] to the Commons with a mandate to fight Gordon Brown’s vision of Big Brother Britain”, the polling picture is rather different. The only like-for-like poll I can find (again, via ConservativeHome) is the Phi 5000 which suggests no significant change. Equally, I wonder whether Mr Davis, now a backbencher, will attract the same sort of media coverage that he has of late. In short, I wonder whether the change, if any, is lasting.

Secondly, we need to reassess the left and right dichotomy. Clearly, it is not accurate, but many people – Tony Benn – supported David Davis on the issue at hand and the principle of single-issue elections. As I have said, I feel that the belief that “socialists and libertarians sometimes meet round the back” is inaccurate, particularly as Mr Davis isn’t really a libertarian.

Thirdly, congratulations to Shan Oakes and the Green Party for coming second with a creditable 7.4% of the vote. While I know the elections are very different, it is only 0.8% less than the share of the vote they achieved for the GLA earlier this year, and in much less fertile territory. Full results are below the fold.

xD.

David Michael Davis (Conservative Party): 17,113 votes (71.6%)
Shan Oakes (Green Party): 1,758 (7.4%)
Joanne Robinson (English Democrats): 1,714 (7.2%)
Tess Culnane (National Front Britain for the British): 544 (2.3%)
Gemma Dawn Garrett (Miss Great Britain Party): 521 (2.2%)
Jill Saward (Independent): 492 (2.1%)
Mad Cow-Girl (The Official Monster Raving Loony Party): 412 (1.7%)
Walter Edward Sweeney (Independent): 238 (1.0%)
John Nicholson (Independent): 162 (0.7%)
David Craig (Independent): 135 (0.6%)
David Pinder (The New Party): 135 (0.6%)
David Icke: 110 (0.5%)
Hamish Howitt (Freedom 4 Choice): 91 (0.4%)
Christopher John Talbot (Socialist Equality Party): 84 (0.4%)
Grace Christine Astley (Independent): 77 (0.3%)
George Hargreaves (Christian Party): 76 (0.3%)
David Laurence Bishop (Church of the Militant Elvis Party): 44 (0.2%)
John Randle Upex (Independent): 38 (0.2%)
Greg Wood (Independent): 32 (0.1%)
Eamonn Fitzpatrick (Independent): 31 (0.1%)
Ronnie Carroll (Make Politicians History): 29 (0.1%)
Thomas Faithful Darwood (Independent): 25 (0.1%)
Christopher Mark Foren (Independent): 23 (0.1%)
Herbert Winford Crossman (Independent): 11 (0.0%)
Tony Farnon (Independent): 8 (0.0%)
Norman Scarth (Independent): 8 (0.0%)

Turnout 23,911 (34.03%)