Curated from Paradise Circus, written by Jon Bounds

It comes into it’s own in a crisis, you know. It’s how people know that roads are slippery or schools closed because it snowed, other than that the ground is covered in snow. And despite attempts by both ‘market forces’ and ‘stupid government pandering BBC Director Generals obsessed with nothing more than their jobs and the bottom line’ it’s still going.

It’s the place for the gentle discussion, followed by great tunes from M People. Or on commercial local radio: an advert for a local loan shark, followed by M People and the Lighthouse Family, broadcast from an industrial estate in Greater London. But what would we do without it, eh? Especially in minicabs.

And, of course, what would we do without Birmingham? “Witton calling” were the first words on Radio 5IT, a station based on Electric Avenue Witton in 1922 and it was the first BBC radio broadcast outside London. A commitment that the national broadcaster hasn’t really kept up. Local radio—another export we’ve given to prop up Manchester.

Curated from Birmingham Post – Business Blog, written by David Bailey

In his recent budget, Chancellor George Osborne unveiled yet another effort to boost infrastructure spending with a planned £3bn extra investment, but only from 2015-16, and with little detail on where that investment would actually go.

The extra money for infrastructure investment would come out of additional current spending cuts. The extra spending was welcome but fell far short of what was needed, and indeed what the Business, Innovation and Skills Secretary Vince Cable had called for before the budget.

There was no extra borrowing at historically low interest rates (as Vince Cable called for) to pay for extra capital spending to kick-start recovery. Cable, remember, had written that the question was whether “should borrow more, at current very low interest rates, in order to finance more capital spending: building of schools and colleges; small road and rail projects; more prudential borrowing by councils for house building. This last is crucial to reviving an area which led economic recovery in the 1930s but is now severely depressed”.

He went on to state that “such a programme would inject demand into the weakest sector of our economy – construction – and, at one remove, the manufacturing supply chain [cement, steel]. It would target two significant bottlenecks to growth: infrastructure and housing.”

In fact, Osborne’s move falls well short of what is needed (note that some experts estimate that the UK needs some £400bn of infrastructure investment over the next 10 years) and anyway previous Osborne budgets had promised much on infrastructure and had failed to deliver, so a large dose of scepticism is needed this time round as to whether the Chancellor will actually deliver.

Overall it was a disappointing budget in this sense. Far better would have been a willingness to borrow at historically low interest rates to kick start infrastructure spending and house building immediately. That could have been supported via a modestly funded national investment bank, with wider powers to leverage funding from the private sector to boost investment in infrastructure and housing.

We won’t know where the money will go until the summer at the earliest when we hear more in the Comprehensive Spending Review. But where should the money be spent?

From an economic point of view, the focus should be on “shovel-ready” projects which had previously been seen as delivering a return but which were axed in the first few years of the government. Dust them off, and get them moving.

The money is likely to go on big transport projects such as rail and road. And let’s not forget housing. Stimulating a housing price bubble via lending guarantees doesn’t make sense. Far better would be to actually spend money on building social housing via local authorities and housing associations.

Things anyway need to be speeded up urgently. A recent update on 40 projects under the so-called ‘National Infrastructure Programme’ showed that just two of the schemes were due for completion in 2013, with a number well behind schedule.

As a result Osborne has said that the government would create a central team of commercial specialists to oversee large scale projects. It’s a sign of how the government has so far failed to get projects moving.

What’s clear is that HS2 isn’t going to help much in getting the economy moving soon as it is years off. ‘Shovel ready’ projects are what we need, and given the scale of capital spending cuts by the government in the first few years, there should be plenty available of viable projects to choose from.

And apparently the government is looking at a second motorway toll road. I’m wondering why they are bothering. Why come up with a no-doubt hugely complicated scheme to sell assets or rights to build roads and charge tolls to sovereign wealth funds and infrastructure multinationals when it would be far cheaper for the government to just borrow the money by issuing government bonds (gilts) at historically rock-bottom rates?

Osborne doesn’t want to do this because like with PFI, he wants to keep this off the government’s balance sheet, so as to keep reported borrowing and debt figures down. But also like early PFI schemes in particular, this often ends up costing a lot more than simple bond financing in the long run, and just like any other debt will have to be repaid ‘on the never-never’ over decades.

Furthermore, the limited experience with road charging in the UK isn’t exactly encouraging. As I’ve noted before (see here), the financial problems with the M6 Toll don’t bode well for private sector investment in roads, which is something the government is trying to encourage.

Professor David Bailey works at Coventry University Business School

Curated from Spectator Blogs » Spectator Blogs, written by Fraser Nelson

A few months ago, a Norwegian students’ group made a spoof video sending up Live Aid, and the clichéd Western view of Africa and the stereotypes perpetuated by the aid industry. It has now been viewed two million times, making it one of Europe’s most successful political videos. It starts with an African equivalent of Bob Geldof.

“A lot of people aren’t aware of what’s going on there right now. It’s kinda just as bad as poverty if you ask me… people don’t ignore starving people, so why should we ignore cold people? Frostbite kills too. Africa: we need to make a difference.”

The joke organisation is called Radi-Aid, where Africans share heat with Norway. Here’s the video:-

The Norwegians can joke about this because there, people don’t really die of the cold. In Britain, we do.”Every winter in the UK, 25,000-30,000 deaths are linked to the cold weather,” chirps the NHS website, as if this were as grimly inevitable as the winter itself. That’s about one death every seven minutes. The long, harsh winter of 2012/13 looks set to push the death toll over 30,000 – way more than the casualty rate for, say, breast cancer or road (and all other) accidents. Jack Frost is one of Britain’s biggest killers.

I’ve never worked out why there isn’t more outrage over this, and look at this in my Telegraph column. There’s so much concern about the effects of global warming, and carbon taxes introduced to make bills more expensive. This will have no measurable impact on global warming, but can be sure to lead to colder homes and – quite possibly – shorter lives. Right now, there are pensioners over Britain who worry about putting the heating up because bills (having doubled over the last seven years) are so expensive. And Ed Davey’s figures show his carbon taxes would make these bills higher still.

While we worry about global warming, the cold is the real killer. Ed Davey has five main climate change policies that push up our bills: the Emissions Trading Scheme, Carbon Price Floor, Renewables Obligation, Energy Market rigging and feed-in-tarrifs. These five policies add an average £62 to fuel bills today, and are expected to add £199 in 2020 and £271 in 2030. Without those five policies, fuel bills would fall by 10pc by 2020, rather than rising by 6pc. And in 2030, they’d be 4pc lower than today, instead of 18pc higher

Davey does have plans that lower bills. Better insulation and more efficient boilers are welcomed by everyone. But bringing bills down should be his entire policy: he should be going for cheaper energy, not greener energy.

The UK rates for ‘excess winter mortality’ ought to be seen as a national scandal: they are almost twice that of far-colder Norway. Spain is actually worse than Britain: the cold hits countries whose houses don’t keep in the heat as well. The Norwegians are not born with cold-resistant genes: they have just, as a society, worked out how to prepare for winter. We’re still struggling.

Insulate: the way to save lives. The remedy that the Norwegian students joke about, sending radiators to cold folk, is not far off the mark. The most effective way to help is to help with boiler upgrades, loft insulation and other measures to make British homes more energy-efficient and, ergo, cheaper to heat. The research into this is pretty clear:-

Higher mortality rates are generally found in less severe, milder winter climates… Countries with comparatively warm all year climates tend to have poor domestic thermal efficiency. Because of this, these countries find it hardest to keep their homes warm when winter arrives. (Healy et al, 2002)

Various government schemes have been trying to remedy this. Yet the insulation budget is being cut – and is anyway a fraction of the cost of the Winter Fuel Payments, a scheme where the word ‘fuel’ is redundant. It gives a cash bung to all pensioners even if they’re millionaires or expats living in the Costa del Sol. Just 12pc (pdf) of the payment goes to people in actual fuel poverty. It symbolises the failure of successive governments to take the problem seriously.

Yesterday, I was blogging about Radio Four’s Thought for Today and how I miss the insights of Rabbi Lionel Blue. One of his phrases was ‘moral long-sightedness’: the ability to see (and get worked up about) problems thousands of miles away while being blind to problems on our own doorstep. Yes, overseas aid is important. But people are dying in Britain, too, under our noses. Even the Iranian press is looking at this aghast.

No one would wear a wristband for British pensioners, at least 150 of whom are likely to die from cold-related illnesses today. Perhaps the cause of death is too mundane and the solutions too familiar to generate much excitement. Saving their lives has somehow become the least fashionable cause in politics.

If we were to scrap Winter Fuel Payments and properly insulate homes, we may – like Norway – be able to make jokes about harsh winters. As things stand, dying of the cold is a very British disease.

The post Dying of the cold: a very British disease appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Curated from Spectator Blogs » Spectator Blogs, written by Nick Cohen

Since the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of words have been produced about the Web. Enthusiasts have told us that it is the greatest communications revolution since Guttenberg invented movable type, and they are probably right. Utopian fantasists have imagined that cyberspace would be beyond the reach of governments – those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, as one particularly giddy theorist put it – and they were certainly wrong.

Their libertarian dreams, as we can see tonight, were an illusion. Those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’ are tougher than they look. They are more than capable of using the new technologies to their own advantage, while censoring what their citizens write online. In the past, I would have directed you to China, Iran or Belarus to see web censorship. But now we can get all that at home.

Politicians and broadcasters are talking tonight as if those hundreds of millions of words had never been written, and we are still living in the pre-Berners-Lee age. They keep saying that the party leaders proposed “press regulation” today, when that was barely the start of it. The establishment – and when all three parties and the extra-parliamentary great and good come together, I think I can describe them as such – has emotional reasons for misleading themselves and the public. They see the excesses and alleged crimes of the tabloids and want to say that the legislation before Parliament will stop them. But there is also a strong element of propaganda. By focusing on the brutishness of the tabloids, they make public forget about attacks on fundamental principles and perhaps allow themselves to forget as well. For when people behave dreadfully they normally have to delude themselves before they can delude others.

I can see the propaganda’s appeal. Although I believe in freedom of the press in theory, I find the sanctimony, pornography and bullying of much of the press revolting. I don’t think the state has the right to control them, but if the tabloids closed tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear.

“Press regulation” as the BBC News was saying at Six and Channel 4 News is saying as I type, does not sound so bad, not even to me, if all it means is stopping the tabloids. The briefest study of the Royal Charter and the Crime and Courts Bill which carried Leveson proposals, however, shows that the first attempt at press licensing since 1695 does not confine itself to the press. In public, the establishment talks about “press regulation”, in the small print, its demands are much broader and very modern: it wants Web regulation.

The regulator will cover ‘relevant publishers’. If they do not pay for its services and submit to its fines and rulings, they could face exemplary damages in the courts. It is not just the old (and dying) newspapers, which the state defines as ‘relevant publishers’ but ‘website containing news-related material’.

As Index on Censorship says, ‘Bloggers could find themselves subject to exemplary damages in court, due to the fact that they were not part of a regulator that was not intended for them in the first place. This mess of legislation has been thrown together with alarming haste: there’s little doubt we’ll repent for a while to come.’

What ‘news-related’ material can get you into trouble? It turns out to be the essential debates of a free society. Dangerous topics to write about include ‘news or information about current affairs’ and ‘opinion about matters relating to the news or current affairs’. Any free country should would want the widest possible discussion of news and allow the largest possible range of opinions about current affairs. As of tonight, Britain does not.

Oh and how could I have forgotten, in homage to the toned and gilded originators of the new authoritarianism, the three main parties are also warning us to be careful about ‘gossip about celebrities, other public figures or other persons in the news’.

Is there an upper limit on readership? Is a website that has a few dozen hits a day exempt? Or does this mean every website that comments on news and current affairs or gossips about Hugh and Jemima must pay to join the quango, accept its punishments, or face exemplary damages in the courts? The government does not know.

What about Twitter feeds? My editor at the Observer, John Mulholland pulled me up short last year when he pointed out that an approving review Richard Dawkins had written on his website on my last book –on censorship, aptly – had been tweeted hundreds of times. ‘That’s done you more good and been read by more people than anything in the mainstream press,’ he said. He was right. Dawkins has 645,000 followers. That’s more followers than the Independent has readers. Should his Twitter feed be regulated? Should he face exemplary damages if he tells the state to piss off, as I hope he would? Or should there be some kind of Twitter limit? If you tweet about the news and celebrities and only have 100 followers will you be free to speak your mind within the laws of the land? But if you get 500, 1,000, 10,000 followers should the new rules apply?

Paul Waugh of Politics Home asked Downing Street whether the new quango would cover Twitter. It didn’t know. Crime and Courts Bill says that people who publish about their hobby, trade, business or industry and the authors of online academic journals will be exempt. The government is, of course, exempting itself and all other ‘public bodies’ as well, for it would never do for the state to abide by the rules the citizen must follow. Everyone else must submit, as far as we can tell.

The anarchist in me is looking forward to sheer bloody mess this half-baked, illiberal, ill-conceived censorship will bring. It will be a perverse delight to see the regulator overwhelmed and the politicians, who applauded themselves so loudly today, mocked tomorrow. But this isn’t funny. I am already getting bloggers contacting me, and asking if they need to tone down what they write or sign up to the quango. If politicians from all parties – and let us not forget that just as in Murder in the Orient Express they are all guilty – do not instead tone down this sweeping legislation a great chill will descend on the free republic of online writing, which until now has been a liberating and democratic force in modern British life.

The chilling effect is the most sinister and pervasive form of censorship, and something no robust, plain-speaking democracy should tolerate.
As I say in You Can’t Read This Book , which Dawkins was so kind about.

‘You can be a famous poisoner or a successful poisoner,’ runs
the old joke, ‘but you can’t be both.’ The same applies to censors.
Ninety-nine per cent of successful censorship is hidden from
view. Even when brave men and women speak out, the chilling
effect of the punishments their opponents inflict on them
silences others. Those who might have added weight to their
arguments and built a campaign for change look at the political
or religious violence, or at the threat of dismissal from work, or
at the penalties overbearing judges impose, and walk away.

Update 10.20 pm Downing Street has now told the Guardian that “personal blogs” like the Guido Fawkes political website would not be covered, but news-related websites like Huffington Post UK would.” Still no word on Twitter, I see, but personal political blogs like Guido Fawkes and many another right wing and left wing blog, are hard hitting. They are news blogs, and in the case of Guido Fawkes and some of his left-wing competitors they are large-scale news providers. The distinction makes no sense. More to the point, where is it written into legislation? It’s not in the amended Crime and Courts Bill , while the Charter just says the Leveson “Inquiry recommended that for an effective system of self regulation to be established, all those parts of the press which are significant news publishers should become members of an independent regulatory body”. It does not say what the government defines as a significant news publisher.

This is all going to end up in the courts. The judges will have to clean up Parliament’s mess. I should warn liberal readers that the English judiciary’s record on freedom of speech is pretty poor.

The post It’s not a press regulator, it’s a web regulator. appeared first on Spectator Blogs.

Curated from Labour Uncut, written by Editor

by Kevin Meagher

David Cameron famously described UKIP members as a collection of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”. But are they fascist too? This is the question being posed by campaign group Hope Not Hate.

It is asking its supporters whether their successful efforts at taking on the far right in the shape of the BNP and English Defence League since 2004 should now extend to UKIP ahead of next year’s European elections.

“Should we begin to oppose them or should we stick to extremist groups like the BNP?’ they ask on their website:

‘The case for opposing UKIP:

‘UKIP is increasingly taking an anti-immigrant tone and as anti-racists we cannot ignore that. They are whipping up fears over new immigration and as we approach next year’s European Elections this will even get worse.

“The growing support for UKIP is scaring the mainstream parties and it will push them to adopt more hard line policies on immigration and multiculturalism. We need to prevent this and offer a positive alternative to the politics of hate and division.

‘The case against opposing UKIP:

‘We might not like some of UKIP’s policies but they are not a fascist or far right party. They are embedded to the democratic system and have more in common with the right wing of the Conservative Party than the fascists of the BNP. And, despite their current anti-immigrant rhetoric, they are still basically a single issue party.”

For an avowed anti-racist organisation like Hope Not Hate to begin campaigning against a mainstream political party is a dangerous extension of its terms of reference. It crosses an important Rubicon in our democracy. It encroaches, clumsily, on the delicate ground around free speech and effectively invalidates criticism of immigration as a policy. It dilutes their focus which has nobly been all about ostracising the far right.

To lump UKIP into the category marked ‘far right’ is silly gesture politics and will simply make ‘extremism’ a meaningless catch-all. Are the two thirds of voters who express a worry about large scale immigration to be dismissed as extremists too? Is Ed Miliband after raising the issue last week?

The strength of Hope Not Hate is that it is not exclusively the prerogative of people on the left. All those of good will who think racial inferiority and violence towards minorities are repellent ideas and who feel basic respect for other human beings is characteristic of British fair play can join in.

Also, it simply will not wash to bracket Nigel Farage with Nick Griffin. UKIP’s greatest strength is the simplicity of its message. ‘We want freedom from Europe and all its works’. People are at liberty to disagree with it or to critique its naïve simplicity, but it is hardly in the same league as the BNP’s poison. It’s a safe bet that Nigel Farage will not be troubled for his record in denying the Holocaust.

So ‘fruitcakes’ they may be, but the rise of the Fourth Reich UKIP most definitely is not. Hope Not Hate should stick to its valuable work fighting the real thing.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut