Global Warming - Solution or Delusion?

News Bunny's claims to be too sick to write were scotched when I noticed a posting from him on a mutual friend's Facebook site: "Apparently I just got an fb message through to Obama about how to save the world. Now! That's What I Call Social Networking".

Naturally, my initial reaction was fury that it was indolence, not illness that had sidelined the hypochondriac commentator. On closer inspection I could not help but be intrigued by the substance of his missive. I sallied forth surreptitiously to my friend's warren to hear of the great works he was doing and the global reach that he had clearly found.

With ears erect and nose moist it had been a long time since I had seen the buck look better. I walked over to review the work that was esconsing him on-line. You can imagine my disappointment when I saw the screen logged in to www.play-the-field.com chatroom, with my analytical master attempting to charm the fur off a variety of doe's..

"News Bunny, my friend, you're better than this!", I interrupted as he swivled his chair and failing to hide his last contribution from my horrified gaze: "Babe, I'd coarse you down the deepest hole..." I searched vainly for saltpetre and offered to brew some dandelion tea while asking what had become of the erudite blogger I knew and loved.

"We're all going to hell in a handbasket", the bunny countered as I seived the yellow petals from our tisane. Disappointed by his despair, I suggested News Bunny do something about it. "Make hay while the sun shines. Have you seen the haunches on these hunnies?" His front teeth were twitching in some feral facsimile, I reassured the lecherous leporid that I really wasn't interested. Something in his eyes beseeched me to extricate him from his new ignomony. I changed the subject: "What's this about Barak Obama?".

Oh yeah, Sarah! She's a fox. I mean... I would never... not with an actual fox - modelled for some big fashion house back in the day, palest blue eyes, gamine figure, you should have seen her, way out of my class, but then..." I clicked my fingers to try and bring the hypnotised rabbit out of his reverie , "...so she's in Copenhagen, saving the world like all those pretty chicks do when they get older - Audrey Hepburn and, er, Audrey Hepburn. Audrey Hepburn..."I clapped twice in front of NB's nose "so, I'm on-line with Sarah, nothing naasty, just the suggestion of catching up over a green salad and she says she can't do next week 'cos she's in Copenhagen. My first thought is that she's dating some ghastly Danish hog or catching some catalogue work, so I ask her - all casual - if she's off saving the planet and that turns out to be the case. I assume she's hurling petrol bombs from the barracades, hooked up with some tree-hugging terrorist so I throw a bit of advice the lassy's way about how everybody's got this green thing back to front. Turns out the girl came good, got next to the American president and hit him straight between the eyes with a proper perspective. I still don't have a fix on the fox's status but her news was better than sex." I kept my own counsel on the rampant rabbit's new approach to relationships, prefering to enquire what he had ask his ex to say.

"Oh, you know, everyone's got the wrong end of the carrot on this climate change thing. It doesn't make any difference if I leave the heating on full and the windows wide open. It's a supply side problem. If we step out now and set light to the local gas station, it doesn't change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere one microgram, the deisel was destined to be drunk by a dump truck, the petrol poured into a Porsche. Once a barrel of oil comes out of the ground, it is getting burned, by someone, somewhere and soon. The only way to confine climate change is to stop mining the stuff. Eight of the world's eleven largest corporations are petrochemical companies, two thirds of the world's oil comes from eleven countries. That's where your leverage is. If you want to change anything you have to change it there. Six billion people will suffer from climate change, nineteen organisations need to change - shouldn't be too hard to sort it out."

"And you got this message to the President?", I confirmed. "Oh yes, Sarah seems very tight with the powers that be, it's not who you know, you know, it's what you look like - and Sarah looks great"

As Good As It Gets

News Bunny came down with a dose of myxamotosis but hopes that readers will be happy to hear that he is still alive, if not kicking, at this point. Unhappily the hospital does not provide rabbit adapted internet terminals, so readers will have to be content with relays of News Bunny's thoughts through interviews taken by friends and relations.

News Bunny was particularly cheered by seeing the Bank Of England follow his advice to print shedloads of money. As welcome as this is, news of 'green shoots of recovery' seems completely deluded and News Bunny wondered if some commentators had been stealing his medication. Our poorly Leporid explained that two uncomfortable facts seem incontrovertible: exponential growth is an inherently unsustainable phenomenon and climate change is going to be a major feature of the lifetimes of anyone born this century.

With the human population growing at 1.2% per year any economic growth below this figure means that the average punter is getting poorer. Policy makers, journalists and other commentators continue to see economic growth of around 3% as the norm and anything less as some kind of 'problem' requiring remedy. Voters are happy to hear that it is the responsibility of their representatives to make them a little richer every year. News Bunny pointed out that there is nothing in the laws of nature saying that humans have to get twenty times richer every century, as this assumption implies, indeed nature's laws rather mitigate against this as a steady state.

Through a hoarse whisper my favourite rabbit explained the world we have woken into. In California, the leading edge of most trends, one in every fifty homes is in foreclosure. Banks will either charge their customers or taxpayers for these losses. Working people will be encouraged to pay down debt, pay taxes, pay bank charges and spend less. These virtues, inevitably, will put other working people out of a job and some of them into foreclosure. The end of this year will see a surge in UK repossesions as the first wave of redundancy cheques run out, in turn this will kick off a second wave of economic pain. Europe is going the same way and Japan has been in this place since middle aged people were teenagers.

This self reinforcing cycle of falling property prices, falling debt and rising unemployment will continue through the next decade by the end of which climate change will not be a theory but a fact evidenced by rising sea levels. With his nose moist with ardour and his eyes red with earnest, News Bunny proposed that at this point the world will stop bickering about how to share the cost of protecting ourselves from environmental catastrophe and start to divert resources into actually doing so. This may be good for the construction industry but it cannot imply economic growth as it essentially involves rebuilding the house you already live in further uphill. Rich people will still have somewhere to live but they will be much poorer for it. Poor people will die.

News Bunny was exhausted by this explanation and I crept away as his heavy lidded eyes closed, however he called me back as I turned the door handle to leave. "Tell them there is no 'recovery'" he implored me "This is as good as it gets". Carrying an untouched tray of tired lettuce leaves out with me, I left News Bunny, hoping that 'recovery' was still on the cards for him personally, at least.

Spies Are Human Too

The function of a news blog is to provide a forum in which a commentator can rant about the difference between their perspective and that of mainstream media. Newsbunny shall fail this remit today.

The day began with the former head of MI5, a British Military Intelligence Service quoted as saying "It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state."

Stella Rimmington's stunning outburst, in Spanish newspaper, La Vanguardia, of all places, came a day after publication of a three-year global study by the International Commission of Jurists documented the use of fear to introduce measures inconsistent with established human rights.

In the fifteen minutes that it took for me to get out of the house last Thursday morning, BBC Radio Four's Today programme treated us to the Bishop of Durham defending Darwinianism, a discussion on the limitations of freedom of speech that contained a question on whether incitement to hatred differed from incitement to violence and followed with a general discussion as to culpability of individuals, bankers, regulators and government following the resignation of Sir James Cosby.

Some of may be financially impoverished by the recession, all of us will be enriched by the rebirth of humanism.

News Flash

There was no news on Monday. Top story was that a bank made big losses. This is not news.

Sick Software

On the 15th April 2002 our esteemed Prime Minister, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published a report that he commissioned Derek Wanless to produce about the NHS. The thrust of the report was that the British public health system needed lots of money if the health care experience was to rise above that of treatment at a second world war field hospital.

The opposition had all of twenty hours to digest the document before Gordon Brown announced that in line with the report's recommendations the NHS budget would rise from about £2,000 to £3,000 per year per taxpayer over the next five years and a 1% would be added to taxes to pay for this.

These figures are rounded but, it's not hard to see a problem here. One extra per cent isn't going to yield an extra £1,000 in taxes unless the average punter is earning £100,000 a year on average, which we're not.

A fifth of this extra £40bn was earmarked for improving the IT. This budget has since risen by half as much again, much of the project is late, the local hospital of my childhood has been piloting the multi billion new patient record system and issued a statement of misery yesterday.

Andrew Way, chief executive of the Royal Free Hospital said patient bookings took four times as long to complete, the system made it difficult or impossible to invoice other parts of the NHS for treatment, forty new staff had to be employed and he had had to apologise to the doctors, nurses and administrative staff because the system had caused so much hassle and delivered so little.

Some time around the turn of the millenium my, then, wife walked into a lamppost. She wasn't looking the other way, or talking on her phone, she just didn't see it. Startled and feeling too vain for frames and too squeamish for contacts she forced herself into the local opticians. They gave her the standard test and sent her straight off to hospital for more extensive tests. The local hospital, in turn, sent her to Moorfields Eye Hospital in Old Street and within a week she had been assigned a specialist consultant and sent for an MRI all for free with no forms to fill in, banking convenants or negotiation with insurers.

A week later she returned to discuss the results with her consultant. There was a long delay before we were ushered into his room. He explained that she had experienced a micro stroke and the MRI would show if she were having many more. The treatment would be predicated on this and the balance of cells and nutrients in her blood. Unfortunately, they had lost the MRI pictures and they could not take any more for several months (she was no longer an emergency). An absurd scene ensued in which a technician and I described what we could remember of the pictures when they first came out to the machine and the consultant chose a course of treatment on that basis.

The girl is still alive but it wasn't an ideal approach. I was delighted when I heard that the NHS was getting a proper filing system but increasingly dismayed by the desperately predictable blunders that they have made throughout.

Throwing £8bn at some international consultancies is rarely the best way to solve anything (I work for one). There is lots of software and lots of software developers able to improve bits of the NHS. There is a wonderful standard for getting different bits of software to share information devised by our very own living saint, Tim Berners-Lee.

Software is best written iteratively, in which a second generation adapts to the way that the users have adapted to the first version. The NHS could have provided a set of standards that all suppliers had to follow and let the individual trusts, hospitals, departments do their own thing in their own time at a fraction of the cost. Over time a standard approach would emerge with variations, some of the variations would turn out to be the basis of the next big thing. If this sounds familiar it is the story of the desktop software industry so far and has proved so successful that nature has stolen the idea and called it evolution.

Free Money!!!

The Bank Of England announced yesterday that it will consider 'other measures' when its monetary policy committee meets next week. This is code for printing money. "Quantitive Easing" is a kind of fiscal laxative which allows governments to feel bright and bubbly without having to cut back on the carbs and fat. But right now, in the world outside Zimbabwe, it is exactly what we need.

A Brief History Of The Economy

A nasty recession at the beggining of the eighties and the complete meltdown of an American initiative to support local banking at the end of that decade along with the abject failure of socialism internationally convinced everyone, at least everyone who spoke English as a first language and devised policy for a living, that governments were not best placed to decide which bits of an economy should thrive and which should fail. However, governments were uniquely placed to decide how fast the economy grew. The whole tricky business of managing economic policy could be delegated to an independant unelected body who were simply told to make money expensive when there was too much around and cheap when there was too little.

The measure of too much and too little was taken to be retail price inflation and, in America, unemployment figures. It all seemed to be going rather well. Banks put together people that wanted to earn interest on their excess money with people that wanted to borrow money for things that they couldn't afford today. They found new and interesting ways of seperating the risk that their borrowers would default from the lenders who didn't want that risk. A debt insurance industry took on this risk supported by speculating savers who wanted to keep open the possibility of above average returns.

The challenge for any bank in this situation was, then, to generate as many sales as possible. In the name of doing so they took on some risks themselves. The sales people were good at their jobs and well paid for it. The lenders were delighted with their unearned income and the borrowers empowered by property, possessions and services that their borrowings funded. A virtuous cycle meant the more you worked, the more you could borrow and the more you could pay other people to work. Uninteresting work was farmed out to poor people in China, India and elsewhere. Their people were happy to leave subsistance farming in return for the prospect of bourgeoisification.

There were a couple of wrinkles. The safest thing to lend money against, hence the easiest thing to borrow money for, is a capital asset like property. If you can't pay the interest or repay the loan the lender can repossess the thing you bought.

The problem occurs when the number of people defaulting grows to a large enough number to push the price of property downward. This discourages people from borrowing, discourages banks from lending, reduces the amount of useful work to be done, reduces the value of the properties people live in, discourages people from borrowing...

At this point the banks all thought they were fine. They had seen this coming and instead of having to repossess their customers' houses they could sell the debt, albeit at a loss, to someone that was willing to take on the increased risk that the borrower would default. In a rapidly self-reinforcing cycle the value of mortage debt fell to under thirty cents in the dollar. The "credit crunch" happened when it became clear that no one wanted to sell their customers debts at the price that anyone else was willing to pay for them. The wholesale lending market ceased to operate.

From here things get tricky. If there is to be rising unemployment the sensible thing for each of us to pay down debt and rack up savings. If we are to avoid a self reinforcing cycle of increased unemployment the sensible thing is for all of us to at least spend as much of our earnings as we did last year.

The personal is the political.

All this has been true for about a year now. There is a palliative. The government prints money to buy some of the excess debt that has been issued by the banks. The inflationary damage of adding this free money is that a lender who would not have been repaid is, but the risk that the lender then repeats the mistake of lending to an indigent borrower is pretty slim just now. Once this 'fake' money appears in the economy we can mop it up with higher interest rates to repay those savers who are earning no interest just now to keep the rest of us afloat.

House prices must be allowed to fall to just below their long term trend value (about four times annual salary in the UK) as quickly as possible, so that there is some, limited, point in buying a house. People who have been working every hour God sends buying houses, changing the decor and selling them on must find something more socially useful to do or at least be remunerated in line with a house painter. Banks must reduce the number of intermediaries involved in joining a borrower to a lender and those intermediaries must also find something more useful to do.

This is the easy stuff. The hard stuff is that recessions are always an expression of the pain of change. The mid seventies recession was about finding out that energy supply was the key to ever increasing standards of living. The early eighties recession was Britain finding out that it was service economy not a manufacturing one. The nineties one was about finding out that the internet wasn't the cure to all ills. This one is about finding out that nothing is "ever increasing" economic growth doesn't last forever and there are times when our efforts need to be devoted to maintaining the world we have rather than building a brave new one.

Aqua Sea Foam Shame

A select committee had a group of senior bankers for lunch yesterday. The main dish being served was Humble Pie. The bankers said they were terribly, terribly sorry for the banking crisis. They were each asked if they took personal responsibility for excessive lending and an untenable business model (lend people money for twenty-five years with money borrowed for a couple of weeks at a time) and they each explained that “no, they didn’t feel, that they, personally, had done anything, actually, wrong” but they were terribly, terribly sorry for all the hardship their decisions had caused.

Simon Jenkins of The Times has a wonderful analysis which goes along the lines: the only people that Labour politicians know who know about economics are bankers, when anything goes wrong the ruling party call for some expert advice. The bankers say that the government must give lots of money to the banks and policy progresses accordingly.

Amongst the endlessly gloomy economic data there may be a case for investing heavily in lampposts and rope as we are clearly going to need something to hang our former Masters Of The Universe from and with.

If the bosses of HBOS, RBS and other historic acronyms weren’t to blame who was? It could be their inquisitors, our legislators, for driving us into a world of capitalist running pigs incentivised only by greed for not coupling the market to the general “good” or it could be the poor “victim” public who wanted nothing more than a roof over their heads and unearned capital gains beyond anything we were likely to earn at a desk with a keyboard.

For better or for worse we no longer live in a hierarchy, wake up one morning as Prime Minister or Chief Executive of Global Corp or Rupert Murdoch or General Sir Michael de Snootyboots KCB, CBE, DSO, QGM and you will find every decision that you think of taking is suffocatingly constrained by various “considerations”.
We now live in a networked society.

This means that a set of manga trading cards is as likely to capture the hopes and fears of our children as a Prince’s Trust initiative for rebuilding self-esteem amongst the inner city dispossessed. Conspiracy theorists are social luddites longing for a bygone era of deference when the surf was beholden to the squire who was beholden to the knight who was beholden to the king who represented God who was responsible for everything. When the world went against you, it was obvious who to blame.

In the new world we have to blame ourselves. The only questions are “How did I contribute to this recession, how can I devise a sustainable life to follow, who can I help and how can I help.”

Fortunately for my wafer thin self esteem, there is no time to write my answers to these questions today, however it is a question that cannot be ignored indefinitely.

Killer Journalism

Greater Manchester Police chief Michael Todd, 50, was found dead near the summit of Snowdon last year.

He was an experienced walker and had headed to the mountain with no other purpose than to slip into the sleepy narcosis of hypothermia and die.

Sir Paul Scott-Lee headed an inquiry which was ordered to look into whether Mr Todd's personal life had adversely affected his duties as chief constable of Greater Manchester Police.

When Dr David Kelly shot himself in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, serious questions were asked of the culpability of a Prime Minister whose government had put intolerable strain on this man.

No such questions are being asked of the journalist who called Michael Todd saying "We are going to publish a story that will ruin your career, your marriage and quite possibly your relationship with your children. Do you have any comment to make?"

Michael Todd had committed no crime, but had a private life that could not bear public scrutiny. The 12-page report concluded there was "no evidence that these relationships adversely affected the inquiry was ordered to look into whether Mr Todd's personal life had adversely affected his duties as chief constable of Greater Manchester Police day to day discharge of his duties as chief constable".

Contradictorily, the report did mention that the "poor judgement" that Mr Todd was showing in his "private" life might compromise his security vetting and hence lead to his demotion within the police force.

I haven't run the Greater Manchester Police force, or any other. However, I imagine that talented, hard working, loyal and astute officers are hard to find. I imagine that the Michael Todd was promoted to Chief Constable because he was the best man for the job. Presumably, Manchester, now has to make do with the second best man for the job.

A journalist, an editor and a newspaper proprietor conspired to ruin a man's life and reduce the quality of policing in Manchester. They did so in the name of "the public interest". They are not named in any of the reports that I have read this morning.

Satirists and Facists

I awoke this morning to find Southern Britain carpeted in slush. Tuesday's playful dump of snow is departing, leaving behind hideous globs of melting, blackened snow. Real life returns with cold toes, looming unemployment and headline interest rates desperate for us to return to the spending binge of the last few years, yet unreflected in any overdraft of mine.

The BBC rather sweetly pointed out that we haven’t had any notable satire to illuminate systemic collapse of the banking system. Two unnoted satirists were invited to explain why. Will Self claimed to have predicted economic meltdown for some time but the public had to give comedians a good few years to find funny things to write about our shared misery. Why doesn't clever Mr Self get a job steering monetary policy at the Bank of England. I suppose he’d see it as a dead end job with poor prospects and it will be a couple more years before we can get Alistair Darling to sit alongside an inebriated northern comic making fart jokes on the panel of Shooting Stars.

This morning’s funny guys suggested that the role satire was to act as a beacon of hope, reassuring its audience that at least one other person understands the gap between common sense and the way things are. Common sense is a phrase that has everyone nodding knowingly in agreement. But, I suspect, that my common sense is not yours and is certainly not Will Self’s, or Alastair Darling’s.

The lovely, intelligent and completely misguided Cosmo Duff-Gordon, who writes for the South African Sunday Times, is always telling me about “the man in the street” who doesn’t see why British schools and hospitals should be made available to every Johnny Foreigner who decides to take advantage of our fine climate and haut cuisine by moving to our sceptred isle. He calls this common sense and I’m sure the German’s felt similarly about Jews and Romanys in the 1930s (or the Israelis about the Palestinians right now).

No, common sense, is a short hand for those who would summon an imaginary army to support their argument regardless of its merits or implications. We shall have no common sense in this blog.