Friedrich Hayek: a great political thinker rather than a great economist

Despite being awarded a Nobel in economics in 1974, Friedrich Hayek was a great thinker rather than a great economist. He called himself a ‘muddler’. His own attempt to build an economic theory floundered. His major contribution was to emphasise the limitations  of economic knowledge, and thus the inevitable frustration of efforts to build economic utopias. His theorising was abstract, but his purpose was practical: to make the case for a liberal economic order which would be proof against the political and economic wickedness and madness through which he lived: the two world wars, the Great Depression and the rise and fall of fascism and communism.

Hayek’s was a slow-burning flame. He hit the intellectual jackpot with his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, a dire warning that western democracies were on a slippery slope to despotism, a book which influenced Margaret Thatcher. He was also an adroit academic politician and fundraiser, and left an enduring institutional legacy in the Mont Pelerin Society, a sanctuary for free-market thinkers.

This is not the first biography of Hayek. Alan Ebenstein and Bruce Caldwell himself have written intellectual ones. But Caldwell and his German-speaking co-author Hansjoerg Klausinger wanted to write the last one, at least ‘for this generation’. The result of ten years’ toil is a first volume of 800 pages, which takes Hayek’s life up to the age of 50, with a second one – presumably of similar weight – to cover his remaining 44 years. No one is likely to repeat this feat: all the materials are assembled under one roof. It is only interpretations which will shift. This is the definitive Hayek for our times.

Inevitably, it raises a question about the purpose of biography. In reviewing the first volume of my own life of Keynes, the economist Maurice Peston wrote: ‘What help is knowledge of the lives of Newton and Einstein in predicting the movement of the planets?’ To which the answer is that economics is not a natural science like physics. One needs to know the economist, and his location in the flow of events, not to test his theories but to judge their value for our own time.  

The context of Hayek’s thinking here revealed is usually illuminating, but occasionally details of the ‘times’ overwhelm the ‘life’. One rather despairs when one reads sentences such as:‘Fritz entered the university to study law, but to trace his subsequent path we must first delve into the complexities of the law curriculum at the University of Vienna.’ With an effort (and some prior knowledge) the reader can trace a clear personal and intellectual thread from birth onwards, but one could have wished for a more skilful integration of background and foreground.  

Friedrich von Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 into a conservative, Christian, German, professional, mildly anti-Semitic family of lower nobility (hence the ‘von’, rather like the British ‘Sir’). Pre-war Vienna was both the cultural capital of Europe – mainly because of its brilliant, recently emancipated Jewish intelligentsia – and the home of destructive racial, religious and social conflicts. This background offers a key to understanding Hayek’s intellectual journey, which was a lifelong quest for a theory of economic order invulnerable to the destructive tendencies of democratic politics. This gave ‘Austrian economics’ its rigid, Platonic character, at odds with the ‘pragmatic’ approach of the politically more secure Anglo-Americans.

However, the theoretical case for entrusting to the free market exclusive direction of the flow of society’s goods and services depended heavily on demonstrating its god-like capacity for rapid adjustment to changing conditions, and it is here that the Austrian School fell short. Hayek inherited from Eugen Böhm-Bawerk a theory of ‘inter-temporal equilibrium’. Adjustment between the consumer and capital goods sectors is secured by movements in real interest rates, reflecting changing consumers’ ‘time-preferences’. But Hayek also inherited from Ludwig von Mises a theory of money and credit, in which money was the ‘loose joint’ in this system of automatic adjustment. This is because banks could finance investment from credit rather than from the voluntary saving of the public. This produced the ‘wrong’ discount rate between present and future goods. Hence the importance of keeping the devil of money creation under the strict control of the gold standard.

In Hayek’s view, slumps were caused by excessive credit creation, leading to a distorted structure of production, which was bound to collapse when the economy ran out of the savings to complete the investments. To inject more credit into a diseased system would only make the disease worse. The malinvestments had to be liquidated for healthy growth to resume. Slumps had to be allowed to run their course.

This left the Austrians without a sensible policy in the face of the Great Depression of 1929-32. They were like Protestants preaching rigid virtue in a situation which called for a large dose of Catholic forgiveness. Lionel Robbins had brought Hayek from Vienna to the LSE in 1931, to counter the dominance of the ‘Cambridge school’ of economists. The battle between Hayek and Keynes over the causes of, and cures for, the Great Depression is well told, but is also well known. Both were political liberals, but whereas Keynes believed that the preservation of political liberty required substantial modification of economic liberty, Hayek thought that the two had to be tightly tethered together to prevent the slide into totalitarianism.

Hayek’s first sortie to Cambridge to explain the slump left his audience baffled. Eventually, Keynes’s assistant Richard Kahn asked: ‘Is it your view that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ Hayek replied, pointing to a blackboard full of triangles, ‘but it would take a very long mathematical argument to explain why.’ Mystification was increased by the fact that students could never tell whether Hayek was speaking English with a strong German accent or German with an English accent.

Over the 1930s most of Hayek’s students at the LSE, notably Nicky Kaldor, defected to the Keynesian camp. The reason is obvious: in the face of the greatest economic catastrophe of modern times, he had no policy to offer except general belt-tightening. The softly spoken, reasonable sounding professor from Vienna with the ambiguous smile turned out to be a sadistic deflationist. Even his patron Lionel Robbins deserted him, writing in his memoirs that Hayek’s attitude ‘was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulus to a drunk who had fallen into any icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating’. Yet Hayek never changed his tune. In the early 1980s he told Thatcher that the only way to kill inflation was to have 20 per cent unemployment for six months.

He more or less gave up technical economics after his battles with Keynes and the Keynesians, and switched to the intellectual course which would eventually bring about his apotheosis. His target this time was the planning movement, then very much in vogue among left-leaning intellectuals. ‘Socialist planning’, boosted by its ‘success’ in the Soviet Union, was their answer to capitalism’s distempers. Against this, Hayek claimed that ‘economic calculation’ required prices; prices reflected individual choices; those choices could not be known in advance by the planners; they were ‘discovered’ by market transactions, which co-ordinated them.

Hayek’s shift was a retreat from economics to political economy. Rather than trying to ‘prove’ the theoretical perfection of the market system, he started to argue that, imperfect though the market system was, in the long run central planning systems were bound to be worse: worse for efficiency and much worse for liberty. It was the ‘fatal conceit’ of the planner to believe he could somehow hoover up all the dispersed knowledge (including the subjective preferences) of millions of people into a central planning ministry and apply it to solve economic problems.   Rather, it was the price system itself which ‘discovered’ this knowledge and coordinated individual plans. He called his own ‘discovery’ that social knowledge is subjective and dispersed the ‘most exciting moment’ of his life. Caldwell agrees: Hayek’s discovery of the ‘knowledge problem’ was his ‘most enduring legacy in economics’. 

However, while powerful, the contrast he offered between individualism and collectivism was too restrictive. It omitted the fact that a great deal of dispersed (or ‘tacit’) knowledge was to be found in local communities, which are not market actors. Both conservative and socialist communitarian critiques of central planning escaped Hayek’s gaze.

While the Keynesian revolution seized control of Cambridge economics, the LSE became the site of the battle between the planners and market liberals. ‘Imagine the lucky student,’ the authors enthuse, ‘who in the summer term of 1936-7 could watch Hayek lecture on why a collectivist economic system could not work from 5-6 on Thursday evenings, and then hear [Evan] Durbin explain how to run a collectivist economy from 6-7!’

Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom was the outcome of the ‘socialist calculation’ debate. His polemical point was that while the democratic powers believed they were battling for freedom against tyranny, their commitment to ‘democratic’ planning would inevitably lead to the same result, since it would progressively impair the market system. Churchill claimed in his losing general election campaign of 1945 that a Labour party victory would lead to a ‘kind of Gestapo’; but Hayek’s main popular appeal was to the anti-Roosevelt right in the USA. He never considered that Roosevelt’s New Deal might have been an antidote to serfdom rather than a prelude to it. As an American reviewer pointed out acidly: ‘The preparation for an electrocution and an electrocardiogram is the same, up to a point.’

The last five years covered by this volume saw Hayek build an institutional basis for free market economics. Influenced by the experience of intellectual life in pre-first world war Vienna, he had always been a man of circles and groups on the edge of standard university courses. Thus in the second world war he proposed an ‘English Speaking College of Social Studies for Central Europe’, located in Vienna, to educate ‘an elite with a certain common tradition of ideas, values and forms of discourse’: that is, a post-war Europe instructed by philosopher kings. More immediately successful and enduring was the Mont Pelerin Society, which he started in 1947 as an academy for liberal thought. This institution-building took place against the background of Hayek’s relocation from the LSE to Chicago University, where an American businessman guaranteed his salary, his messy divorce from Helena Fritsch, his marriage to his first love ‘Lenerl’ Bitterlich and his break with his English patron Lionel Robbins.

Hayek once said that for your ideas to succeed you had to outlive those who hate them. He died in 1992, aged 92, at the height of his fame. The second volume of this biography promises to be a vindication of his dictum.

A dismaying exercise in nostalgia: Simon Schama’s History of Now reviewed

For those who consider themselves traditional liberals (full disclosure: such as me) Sunday’s first episode of Simon Schama’s History of Now may have felt like a somewhat dismaying exercise in nostalgia. As Schama ran through a familiar anthology of 20th-century liberalism’s greatest hits, we were taken back to a happier, more recognisable world of clearly demarcated goodies and baddies where democracy would inevitably mean the triumph of our own beliefs and there was little that couldn’t be fixed by art ‘speaking truth to power’.

The programme’s starting point, as you might imagine, was the Spanish Civil War, described by Schama as a ‘great battle between democracy and autocracy’ – rather than, say, two autocracies. In this case, the truth-speaking art was Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, which Schama movingly analysed without mentioning the awkward fact that the power it spoke truth to took no notice. Instead, the painting now became the archetype for other art that shaped the post-war liberal commitment to the individual, from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

Discussing Orwell, Schama juxtaposed Oceania’s Two Minute Hate sessions with rallies of Trump supporters chanting ‘Lock her up!’, because both demonstrate ‘the glee of hatred’. Most of the time, though, he concentrated on Eastern Europe, with particular reference to Czechoslovakia where, as a visiting student in 1965, he sensed the ‘angry fatigue’ with communism that inspired the Prague Spring three years later.

His stirring account of what followed – the Russian invasion, Havel’s heroics, the 1989 Velvet Revolution – saw the programme at its best. But this was perhaps not surprising, given how neatly these events fitted Schama’s desired paradigm. Here, unmistakably, was a ‘regime of lies’ losing out to ‘people who just wanted to get their own lives back’. And to prove it, we met a wizened survivor from the dissident rock band the Plastic People of the Universe – once imprisoned under the communists ‘for playing the saxophone’ and now seen in a bar with a packet of fags, explaining the importance of ‘a morning beer’.

Where the programme seemed on less solid ground was in its more abstract declarations. We heard, for example, that ‘freedom of expression is the foundation of humanity’. But what if that expression takes a form that Schama doesn’t like – as in Hungary whose democratically elected leader Viktor Orban got his usual liberal kicking? Or even in that clip of the Trump rally where we were obviously being invited to indulge in a spot of gleeful hatred ourselves?

The answer, when it finally came, will have been unexpectedly familiar to Catholic viewers. Nothing, said Schama in conclusion, ‘is more important for the fate of humanity than the free exercise of the informed imagination’ (verbal italics, Schama’s own). According to Catholic doctrine, when it comes to moral choices, we should rely on our conscience, even over Church teaching. There is, however, a cunning qualification: our conscience must be ‘informed’ – which is to say informed by Church teaching. In other words, you’re free to think for yourself, but only if you do so in the correct and approved manner. The annoyingly intractable paradox of liberalism, of course, is that it takes much the same line: something that Schama didn’t appear to notice on Sunday but that he ended up fully embodying.

Avenue 5 – back for a second series on Wednesday – is a comedy drama created by Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, Veep) and starring Hugh Laurie. So why hasn’t it made more of a splash? After all, the premise is pretty good too: a cruise spaceship taking a group of passengers for a luxury trip around Saturn is thrown off course, delaying the scheduled return to Earth from eight weeks to eight years. (Feel free to insert your own Avanti West Coast gag here.) Not only that, but the captain (Laurie) has no idea how to pilot the ship, having been hired merely as a reassuring figurehead while the real pilot Joe does all the work. Or at least he did until he died at the start of series one. So what happens now?

The trouble with Avenue 5 is that this always seems a question directed as much at the show as at the crew and passengers. As ever in Iannucci’s work, the dialogue is crammed with great one-liners. Yet, unlike in The Thick of It, these feel as if they, too, exist in a space-like vacuum, untethered to the characters speaking them.

The same sense of randomness also applies to the plot – or, more accurately, to the many subplots that come and go as if being tried out and (understandably) discarded. Odder still for a series in which people are facing imminent death, there never seems to be anything really at stake. The result is a comedy where drifting aimlessly is both the subject and the modus operandi.

Parents need to do more to stop their kids watching porn

Nothing scares politicians more than telling parents how to do their job, which is a shame because a bit more finger wagging might be just what we need. The Online Safety Bill returns to parliament this week to be debated by MPs once again – with the legislation aiming to stop kids looking at porn online. 

MPs have already spent around 40 hours debating this Bill, in previous forms. In this time only eight MPs have suggested that parents might just have some responsibility in stopping their children accessing porn online. Fifty MPs have so far opined on the merits of switching off the internet for teens but barely one in six mentioned in parliament that parents might have a role to play. We can only hope for better as the Bill returns for a third time to be debated by MPs. Maybe their lordships, more likely to be grandparents than parents, will bring some much needed common sense to these discussions.

One of the largest pornography websites in the world, PornHub, has more clicks than the BBC, with few if any controls on who is viewing. Whatever you think about proposals to get tough on internet porn, with restrictions on access and age identification, overlooking the role of parents is a strange way to proceed. Our children and young people are consuming pornography more than ever before but Westminster famously has a blind spot when it comes to families – particularly when it comes to telling parents to take responsibility. Talking family is almost taboo in fashionable Westminster circles.

If we really are going to stop kids getting hold of grizzly online content we need to be brave enough to look to parents. It shouldn’t be either or: we should be clear about the role of parents alongside tighter online controls. Regrettably this wasn’t the view taken by Nadine Dorries, when she was in charge of pushing through the Bill in a previous form. 

She told MPs from the despatch box that ‘the role of the state was to fulfil the responsibility of the parent in order to protect a child where a parent could not’, citing John Stuart Mill no less in her statist claim. She should get out more – philosophy is fine but common sense will tell you that it’s parents buying smart phones and putting tablets in front of their children that is at least part of the problem. Bizarrely parents are even setting up social media accounts for their underage children. 

Researchers have found that there is a significant ‘pornography gap’ in Britain – the gap between the amount of pornography consumed by children and how much their parents think they have seen. A quarter of parents thought their child had seen pornography online, but in reality, more than half of children admitted to viewing porn. Parents also seem to assume that girls don’t view porn but boys do. Dads, wink wink, are more likely than mums to think their children were viewing smut online. In reality today’s porn is nothing like the smut of a previous age. It is more likely to be violent and far less erotic. It is more often than not abuse peddling as titillation.

Parents might claim to be talking to their children about this issue – 60 per cent say they have had conversations about porn – but very few children can recall ever having such a conversation.

We are in the middle of a huge social experiment where we have allowed our children to access the most violent pornography on an industrial scale like never before. We are only beginning to understand the huge harm this is doing to young people, both girls and boys, as they reach adulthood.

Maybe more MPs will mention parents in future debates but it’s not very likely. Getting tough on Big Tech is easier than asking more of parents. Our political class is cocooned in a bubble trying to pull levers that might not even work. We need to find our voice on parenting and family life. It will start with MPs from all parties getting to grips with what is happening behind closed doors.

An unexpected heartbreaker: Elf the Musical, at the Dominion Theatre, reviewed

Elf opens with an unbelievable premise. Buddy was abandoned as a baby and adopted by Santa’s elves and he spent a happy childhood making Christmas gifts in their factory at the North Pole.

The action begins when Buddy decides to track down his real father in New York, but when he arrives he finds a community sunk in greed and cynicism. He’s horrified to learn that everyone exploits Christmas for financial gain. His dad, Walter Hobbs, turns out to be a bullied publishing executive who has no time to spend with his wife and his lonely younger son. Buddy’s mission is to restore love to this broken family and to repair the fractured society of New York. Along the way, he starts a corny romance with a sexy blonde elf, Jovie, who works in Santa’s grotto at a department store.

The power of the story lies in its goofy simplicity and in the ingenious brilliance of analysing capitalism through the eyes of a trusting and incorruptible innocent who believes in the original message of Christmas.

The challenges faced by Buddy seem insurmountable. Can he heal the suffering Hobbs family? Will he save Walter from his nasty, rapacious bosses? Is it possible for him to find love with a part-time elf? Well, it’s Christmas, so everything is possible.

Simon Lipkin dazzles as Buddy, and he easily matches the loose-limbed charm of Will Ferrell in the 2003 movie. Tom Chambers shines as the pinched and angry Walter who chooses love over greed and rebels against his heartless bosses. Dermot Canavan is a little powerhouse of comic invention as the Manager who believes that Buddy is an undercover agent sent by his superiors to spy on Santa’s grotto.

In the closing scenes, all is resolved. Buddy purges the city of evil and finds happiness with Jovie. The final moments are as moving as anything in Dickens. This is an unexpected heartbreaker. Just wonderful.

Baghdaddy by Jasmine Naziha Jones has a similar opening to Elf. An innocent teenager, named Dad, arrives in Britain from Iraq in 1980. But unlike Buddy, Dad has no mission to fulfil and no powers to wield. He’s idle and purposeless and he mopes around the place complaining about things. The food is too bland, his bedroom is too cramped, his Cockney landlady is a screeching moron who claims to be bilingual because she knows the origins of the term ‘cul-de-sac’. Racist youths call him a ‘camel jockey’, and one of them tries to murder him. The Iran-Iraq war begins but Dad is too scared to go home so he continues his pointless life in Britain. What’s he doing? We aren’t told. So we don’t care.

Scroll forward ten years and Dad has married a local girl (but she’s omitted from the story, presumably because she’s British and therefore not oppressed). Dad has turned into a violent loser who bullies his daughter, Darlee, by twisting her ear and yanking her around the house. She sprawls on her mattress wailing: ‘I hate you!’ In his better moods Dad takes her to McDonald’s and bores her with reminiscences of Baghdad which mean nothing to her because she hasn’t bothered to learn Arabic.

The meandering scenes of gormless bickering between father and daughter are supplemented with impenetrable dream sequences peopled by unnamed sprites dressed as children’s entertainers. These shimmering goblins scream humiliating insults at Darlee or they argue among themselves. Their tone of hectoring superiority rises by a few decibels when the Iraq invasion begins in 2003. The goblins, along with Darlee, denounce every party involved. They berate the UN for imposing sanctions, they lambast Tony Blair for warmongering, they denounce Saddam for despoiling his own people. All we learn here is that political comment delivered by ghosts in silly costumes lacks impact.

However the press-night performance was distinguished by wild and constant applause. The stalls were dotted with little fan clubs of the cast, none of whom will have paid for a ticket, and there were regular eruptions of laughter from each group as they cheered a piece of business performed by their favourite. It was like a Nativity play. If you knew the actors, you were charmed. If you didn’t, you were bored.

In the script’s closing moments, the writer attacks the Arts Council for funding her petulant rant. ‘Gatekeepers hold the door for me. Yeah. Aren’t I lucky? I’m the Jerry Maguire of trauma. Show me the money.’ It’s curious that Naziha Jones feels angry and frustrated that her teenage jottings are being produced on the London stage. There must be some inner torment eating away at her. Perhaps she knows deep down that without the subsidised sector her voice would be ignored because there’s no demand in the commercial theatre for these pipsqueak diatribes.

The Arts Council claims to promote merit when it merely identifies talentlessness.

Are the Tories in the throes of an existential crisis?

The UK government has had a fractious couple of weeks. First it was the Swiss EU deal rumours, then housing, then a panicked response to high immigration figures. The latest problem to crop up is a rebellion over onshore wind, which has effectively been banned in the UK since 2012. What each of these disparate issues have in common is that they fall within the scope of what is increasingly the most important political debate in the UK. This is the extent to which the government should prioritise economic growth, and, implicitly, who the country is run for. 

Onshore wind and immigration are perhaps the clearest examples of this. The restrictions on wind turbine development, which currently make new developments effectively impossible, defy logic. If you’re in the middle of an energy crisis and you also have a formal commitment to net zero, not to mention a small-c conservative preference for not interfering in peoples’ lives, banning turbines because you think they look ugly makes little sense. This is why a move from Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister, joined by both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, to reverse the ban has gained so much momentum. It now looks like the government will have to give in to the rebels and do something about onshore wind. 

On immigration, the problem the government faced was that net migration, which they committed to reducing, had in fact increased, to more than 500,000 per year. This was mostly because the British government issued more student visas, as well as popular one-off settlement schemes for Ukrainians and Hong Kongers. A rational response would have been to treat the figures for what they were, a likely one-off, and to point out that most non-UK students leave the country after completing their degrees. Instead, they panicked, and came up with a plan to reduce the number of student visas for so-called low-quality degrees. This plan fell apart quickly thanks to internal opposition, which sprung up because of the key role foreign students, who pay exorbitant fees to study in the UK, play in funding the higher education sector. 

In both cases, government policy aimed at placating core voters ran into opposition because of the impact it would have on economic growth. In previous years, with a stronger prime minister than Rishi Sunak, these policies would have probably either gone through or stayed intact. But instead, they have been forced to back down. This is also the result of what will perhaps be the longest-lasting effect of Liz Truss’s premiership. Truss’s own failed push for a pro-growth agenda violently threw the Conservatives out of their policy consensus towards a debate over whether they are in fact the so-called anti-growth coalition themselves, and at risk of turning into a party for pensioners. The last point was one Clarke himself addressed when he expressed his opposition to a push from some other Conservative MPs to scrap house-building targets. 

This is a debate that will get more intense next year, because it will become more focused on Brexit. Sunak’s government still plans to sunset most EU-derived legislation in the UK by the end of 2023 under the retained EU law bill, which he inherited from Johnson. The bill itself is emblematic of the Conservatives’ approach to Brexit so far: diverging from the EU as much as possible without really knowing what they want to achieve by doing it. 

That lack of a Brexit strategy is having a corrosive effect on Brexit’s popularity. YouGov polling data now show 56 per cent saying it was wrong to leave the EU compared to 32 per cent saying it was the right thing to do. One in five leave voters surveyed have changed their minds. Against this backdrop, trying to pass what is essentially a Brexit poison pill, without having a clear and detailed alternative regulatory framework in place, will not go down well. There’s a risk that the bill will leave large gaps in the UK’s legal framework, which we expect to alarm both some backbenchers and the House of Lords. 

The debate will not go away under a Labour government. Rather than presenting a concrete strategy of their own, Labour have played an opportunistic game, criticising the Conservatives when they come up with an obviously unpopular policy but not deviating on the fundamentals. Sir Keir Starmer has committed to staying out of the EU’s single market and customs union, and to reducing net migration. There is, as far as we can tell, no big Labour plan for housing. While in opposition, Labour can keep putting pressure on the Conservatives while still largely supporting the same policies. But, should they end up in government, that will no longer work.

A version of this article first appeared in the Eurointelligence morning news briefing. Sign up here

The sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte: ENO’s It’s a Wonderful Life reviewed

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either on spectacle or on sentiment.

And quite right too: this is a Christmas opera, and there aren’t too many of those about. English National Opera doubtless wishes that there was a bankable operatic equivalent to The Nutcracker, guaranteed to fill that vast auditorium every December. It’s entirely logical to try to create one, and Heggie’s 2016 movie adaptation is a good fit for the UK’s most pop-savvy opera company. This is not the time for experiments (though it’s barely three years since ENO did Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus). Posterity will sort the wheat from the chaff; meanwhile a new and successful English-language opera by a composer with Heggie’s reputation for accessibility is exactly the sort of thing that a subsidised national company ought to be putting in front of us. The audience, for what it’s worth, looked big, youthful and diverse: all those things that (we now know) the Arts Council of England only pretends to give a stuff about.

Anyhow, Collins has crafted a good-looking show. That opening fantasy sequence is dazzling beyond anything available to Frank Capra back in 1946, and throughout the long flashback of the plot, Giles Cadle’s designs evoke a playful, pastel-coloured American dream where life and fate play out beneath a star-spangled heaven and the pantomime-baddie capitalist Potter conducts his business behind a gigantic dollar bill. The plot follows the contours of the film fairly closely, occasionally opening a scene out to make the most of its operatic potential. A love duet for George Bailey (Frederick Ballentine) and his future wife Mary (Jennifer France) brings Act One to a close and sends you floating out into the interval in a warm, Bohème-like haze of sweetness.

Heggie shoots for the big emotional targets, and generally hits them. The music is frosted with glittering bells and chimes: lush, tonal and frankly romantic, it’s the sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte. Again, no complaints here: ’tis the season, after all. I could have done without the self-conscious little spasms of syncopation – classical music’s equivalent of dad-dancing. There’s a larger problem, though, in the character of Clara the angel (de Niese). (She was Clarence in the film, but it makes musical sense to introduce another high voice into a male-dominated cast.) De Niese is on stage, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, almost throughout, and her closing scene is kitsch beyond description. We were asked not to reveal the ending: let’s just say that it’s as camp as Christmas.

More problematically, it dilutes the impact of the opera’s last big emotional surge. George Bailey has seen the abyss but what, really, is at stake for an angel? That’s no criticism of de Niese, a diva who was born to sparkle on top of a Christmas tree. But the humanity of the piece, such as it is, lies elsewhere. Ballentine’s George was a plain-speaking everyman, clear, direct and almost painfully sincere throughout a long and taxing role, and lighting up in his scenes with France – whose voice, glowing from within, made a nice contrast with de Niese’s brilliance. Donovan Singletary, as little brother Harry, exuded oaky warmth and Michael Mayes (Potter) slithered menacingly over some of the more sharply characterised vocal writing. The orchestra, under Nicole Paiement, sounded like a million dollars, and ENO could certainly use some of that right now.

There’s often an early seasonal treat to be had from the various music colleges’ end-of-term operas. Louise Bakker’s RCM production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld delivered multicoloured silliness with an energetic, fresh-sounding cast from whom Lylis O’Hara (Diana) stood out as a bright and agile coloratura soprano to watch, and the bass Jamie Woollard, as Jupiter, conveyed regal charisma and poise even while dressed in shaggy breeches as a sort of disco bluebottle. Michael Rosewell conducted fizzily, while Anna Yates’s designs presented Hell as a celebrity bachelor pad where the only thing to read is Top Gear magazine. Cerberus (Henry Wright) was a three-headed pug, and when he howled tunelessly along with John Styx (Redmond Sanders) I reckon that Offenbach – who once wrote a whole opera about a singing dog – would have laughed as hard as everyone else.

Why ASMR is evil

In 1954, the psychologist James Olds made a few ordinary rats the happiest rodents that had ever lived. He had directly wired an electrode into the rats’ brains, plugging into the septal area, which he believed might have something to do with the experience of pleasure. When he passed a small electric current through the electrode, the rats seemed to enjoy the experience. If he buzzed the rats only when they were in a particular place, they’d keep returning there, as if they were asking politely for him to do it again. So he tried handing over control of the experiment to the rats themselves. Olds gave them a lever: when pushed, it would turn on the electrode. The rats quickly learned how it worked, and they had a fantastic time with it. Some of the rats would giddily push the lever 2,000 times per hour for 24 hours straight. They also lost all interest in food, or sleep, or sex, or any other more mundane ratty pleasures. And not long afterwards, they died, starving and sleep-deprived and in absolute transcendent bliss. Olds was happy with his experiment. The results, he wrote, could ‘very likely be generalised eventually to human beings – with modifications, of course’.

Of course, human beings are not like rats. We demand slightly more out of life. But Olds got his wish: we tried the same thing on ourselves. Later in the 20th century, direct brain stimulation was explored as a way of treating pain without the need for any messy, dangerous drugs. So in 1986, a woman who had been living with chronic pain for more than a decade was fitted with a brain electrode. An article in the magnificently named scientific journal Pain describes what happened next. ‘The patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial… Compulsive use has become associated with frequent attacks of anxiety, depersonalisation, periods of psychogenic polydipsia and virtually complete inactivity.’

Today, this is called ‘wireheading’, and for obvious reasons it’s attracted the attention of science-fiction writers. You can quite easily imagine a future world in which every single human being lives alone in a windowless cell, hooked up to an electrode, maybe along with a food tube or a nutrient drip, experiencing pure unmediated pleasure every second of their lives. With some kind of benevolent AI in charge of everything, the wireheads would be freed from the indignities of work and the disappointments of love; they wouldn’t start any wars or commit any crimes; there probably wouldn’t even be much point teaching them to speak. If the point of life is to be happy, to have as many positive experiences as possible while avoiding all unnecessary suffering, then mass wireheading is the obvious, practical route. We would have finally created a perfect world. 

I think I would, on balance, rather die than live in that world. In fact, I think I would rather be tortured to death; I would spend the next 50 years being very slowly cut into wafer-thin slices from the toes up before I let you hook me up to one of those electrodes. This should not happen to anyone. You could even imagine a nice liberal post-carceral society in which wireheading is reserved only for the most dangerous criminals: people who simply aren’t safe to be around get a copper wire shoved delicately into their brains, so they can live out their days in a state of total rapture, too giddy with happiness ever to pose a threat to anyone else. We could start doing this tomorrow; the technology already exists. But if we did, I would probably feel the need to self-immolate in front of a courthouse. 

The planet of the wireheads will probably not become a reality any time soon. But there are other things out there that aren’t too different, and I felt a touch of that same deep, instinctive horror when I visited Weird Sensation Feels Good, the Design Museum’s exhibition on ASMR.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The Design Museum describes it as ‘a physical sensation of  euphoria or deep calm, sometimes a tingling in the body’. Some people get it and some people don’t: if you get it, certain sensory triggers will kick off a very pleasant fuzzy sensation, usually starting in the scalp and moving down the body in one big comfortable wave. Like small soft fireworks. Like bubbles sparkling down your spine. 

The specific sensory triggers vary from person to person, but it’s often some kind of soft, gentle noise: whispering, quiet voices, tapping or clicking, the sound of someone slowly chopping vegetables or softly stroking your face. The presence of another person seems important – someone tapping their nails or clicking their tongue might trigger ASMR, but you’re much less likely to get the sensation from rain or a ticking clock. It doesn’t work so well without the emotional element. It’s about feeling safe, and warm, and loved.

 Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf described something that sounds a lot like ASMR in Mrs Dalloway. ‘“K . . . R . . .” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.’ People have been feeling this sensation since long before we had a word for it; we’ve always found ways to delight in the world and the people within it. Pleasant loving tingles when someone scratches your neck or whispers in your ear. The strange calm of a BBC announcer describing faraway storms on the shipping forecast. In fact, ASMR could be older than humanity: some theorists suggest it might have emerged along with social grooming in our ape ancestors. But in the past decade or so, the whole thing has became very depressing very fast.

 Around 2010, people in Facebook groups and forums started swapping videos that gave them nice tingly feelings. Bob Ross painting a mountain; Bjork taking apart her TV. It didn’t take long before they started trying to induce the effect themselves. Today, dedicated ASMR content occupies a large and growing slice of the internet. These videos are big business; the most popular producers – they call themselves ASMRtists – can pull in seven figures per month. 

 According to the Design Museum, this stuff ‘injects the internet with softness, kindness, and empathy’, and the videos I’ve seen are indeed very soft, kind and empathic. Recording from her bed, a woman in her underwear taps her plastic nails against each other while whispering breathily into a 3D microphone. (A lot of these microphones come with a pair of eerie silicone ears on either side.) ‘I love you,’ she says, and smiles. She nuzzles her lips against one of the plastic ears. ‘You’re so important to me. I love taking care of you.’ She exhales deep into the mic. ‘Does that feel nice?’ In another, the ASMRtist is a man, coming home late at night to find his girlfriend – that’s you, the viewer – already asleep in bed. ‘I know, baby,’ he whispers. ‘I know. You’re a sleepy girl. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, it’s OK.’ He kisses your invisible shoulder. Kind wet mouth noises. ‘You’re safe,’ he mumbles. ‘You don’t have to wake up. Everything’s OK.’ 

Obviously, I’ve picked the creepiest examples. Many of the videos are not like this. Instead of saying she loves you, the girl in the video just whispers that she’s going to make some nice relaxing noises, holds up various household objects to the camera, and then taps her fingers against them. Tap tap tap. Fizz fizz fizz.

This is how you know that things are not going well. There are untold millions of people who spend a good chunk of their free time every day sitting by themselves in a dark room in front of a screen, blissing out to a series of clicking sounds. You listen to someone who does not know your name, and who would not notice if you died tomorrow, pretending to nurture you. This could only exist in a deeply lonely, deeply broken world. It’s miserable to imagine millions of people subsisting on this cheap digital ersatz of intimacy. It’s even more miserable to consider that this cheap digital ersatz of intimacy might be more efficient than the real thing. Human relationships can be ugly and dangerous and they don’t always work, but it turns out that what we’re really looking for in them is a soft continuous clicking sound. Books and films might be enjoyable, but they might also disappoint you: better to strip out all the unnecessary plot and dialogue and attempts to speak to the human experience, and just spend your leisure hours getting yummy tinglies from a kind-faced woman making repetitive mouth noises.

Even outside of ASMR communities, something like this ethos is taking over culture. Grown adults read books for children or watch the same episodes of the same sitcom over and over again – not because these things are particularly good, but because of the way they make you feel. That soft, cosy nostalgic feeling, that sense of comfort in a world that’s so often cruel. Apple TV’s Ted Lasso was described by one critic – who meant this as a compliment – as a ‘warm hug of nice’. Isn’t it mean to criticise the things that bring people pleasure? Shouldn’t we just let people enjoy things?

But ‘let people enjoy things’ is probably what the rats would say if you tried to take away the lever that’s killing them. The woman with the electrode in her brain reported frequent anxiety attacks, which increased the more she self-stimulated. Earlier this year, a study from Northumbria University found that people who self-report as experiencing ASMR are more likely to score highly for trait anxiety and trait neuroticism. The authors suggest that ASMR could be an effective treatment for anxiety attacks. Or maybe it’s the other way round; maybe constantly inducing an entirely artificial sense of wellbeing is not actually particularly good for you. 

The Design Museum’s exhibition doesn’t really address any of this. It starts with the assumption that ASMR is nice, and it’s nice to feel nice senstions. In fact, it’s not really about ASMR at all; instead, Weird Sensation Feels Good is mostly an attempt to get you to experience it. At the centre of the exhibition is a big soft padded cocoon littered with screens and headphones: you wander around, plug yourself in, get cosy, and watch a softly spoken Scandinavian man gently fingering some bed linens. And it was a very nice warm place to be on a rainy London afternoon, but I didn’t feel anything tingling down my spine. No fuzzy bubbles. No deep sense of comfort and calm. Maybe I’d have a different opinion on this stuff if I could experience ASMR myself. But I imagine if you turned me into a wirehead, I’d probably start coming up with reasons why that isn’t so bad either.

Off the main exhibition hall, there’s a smaller room that invites you to have a go at making ASMR-inducing sounds yourself. One of the toys is a microphone under a layer of thick leather; you’re meant to run your fingers softly over the material and listen to the rustling sounds it makes. When I put on the headphones, the stand was suddenly commandeered by two small children. As their mother tried desperately to make them behave, they started furiously banging their tiny fists against the mic while screaming into it at the top of their lungs. There might still be some hope. 

The strange chair appointment of Oxford’s Vice Chancellor

To enormous fanfare last week, the Dame Louise Richardson Chair of Global Security was established at the Blavatnik Business School in honour of the soon-departing Vice Chancellor. It was a remarkable event in a couple of respects – first, global security is frankly a dud subject for a chair at Oxford. More to the point, the Dame was appointed to this vanity project when she was still in office, which was an extraordinary departure from usual custom and protocol. Normally an honour of this sort would be proposed after the departure of the scholar it’s named after – normally an individual of exceptional distinction in an established field – and left to their successors to promote. In this case, she obtained it while she was actually in office.

The Chancellor, Lord Patten, who was instrumental in getting her appointed, did his best to justify the chair at its launch: ‘Before [Dame Louise] was a distinguished Vice Chancellor, she was a great teacher and a great scholar; through her work and her scholarship around terrorism and global security, she provided an extraordinary contribution to public policy.’ 

Except, she wasn’t and she didn’t. Her chief contribution to the literature on this subject was a book called What Terrorists Want, which has vanishingly slim claims to scholarship; supplemented by a chapter in a book she edited on the roots of terrorism published in 2006 plus a publication co-edited by Robert Art for the US Institute of Peace, a federal institute with no academic standing. Plus a book on Anglo-American relations during the Suez crisis. This, to be frank, doesn’t amount to great scholarship. The chair is based at the Blavatnik School of Government, itself something of a vanity project, semi-detached from the main objectives of the university itself. The Dame declared that she was ‘deeply touched that a number of generous donors came forward to create this chair in recognition of my time as Vice Chancellor.’ 

Given the diminishing autonomy of the individual colleges at Oxford during her tenure, and the increasing influence and funding of the central university administration – plus, it should be said, the apparent attempts to suppress the Oxford Magazine on her watch, the only publication in the university capable of expressing independent views on these things (an attempt which sits oddly with Dame L’s parting observations about being in favour of free speech) – that money could have been better spent. She also seems to have done her bit to try to kill off the independence of the university’s parliament (or sovereign assembly) called Congregation. She tried to exclude it from preliminary investigative discussion of the new Reuben (formerly Parks) College on the site of the former Radcliffe Science Library, effectively seeking to reduce it to rubber stamp status, then suggested that Congregation was ‘fossilised’. 

Dame Louise is off to become president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the biggest grant foundations in the US, proof again that once you establish yourself on the merry-go-round of public and academic directorates, there’s no limit to your upward trajectory.   

A daily shower is money down the drain

When did it become an inalienable human right to have a shower every day? I ask the question because pretty clearly it wasn’t always so. Yes, the Romans had showers – of course they did (they probably had the internet, too, but archaeologists can’t see it). A potter about online will tell you that we got the first mechanical shower here (hand pumped) thanks to the ingenuity of a plumber from Ludgate Hill named William Feetham. That was in 1767, which means that by the time Jane Austen was getting ink on her fingers a shower was an option for some.

So the answer to my question is somewhere between 1767, when I expect a monthly bath was de rigueur for most of us, and around 1990, by which point it become common for Britons to take a daily shower and regard it as essential. We can probably pinpoint the shower’s emergence as a daily fact of life between the tearing of the shower curtain in Psycho in 1960 and Michael Douglas’s impressive displays of shower-related stamina with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct in 1992. Indeed, according to a poll by YouGov from 2018, 62 per cent of Britons take at least one shower each day – indicating, perhaps, that there are those who routinely take more than one. These showers last, on average, seven to eight minutes.

And that, whichever way you cut it, must be using an eyewatering amount of water. How much? Well, a few years back the Energy Saving Trust released some figures stating that Britain used 2.2 billion litres of water a day showering – which is about as much water as pours over the Niagara Falls in ten minutes (at around 750,000 US gallons per second, if you’re interested). That’s a lot of water. 

As well as being cleaned and treated at great expense by your local French-owned water company, this water probably has had to be heated by you, too. All of which means that there’s a massive carbon and environmental impact from your daily shower – not to mention a major financial cumulative cost, especially when you consider that something like a fifth of all energy used at home is to heat water. And if you like longer showers, well good luck to you. A power shower is bringing the cost-of-living crisis your way quicker than you can say Imperial Leather.

So here’s a thought. Why don’t we simply shower every other day? Firstly, it gives you eight valuable minutes back – and that’s not to be sniffed at. Over a year eight minutes every other day stacks up to 1,460 minutes, which tots up to a full 24 hours — so you could get a whole day of your life back. Wowsers. 

Secondly, think of the cut in carbon emissions – all without splurging tens of thousands and committing an egregious act of virtue-signalling by buying a Tesla or some grotesque hybrid 4×4 that weighs more than a bank vault because it’s lugging around two mutually inefficient propulsions systems.

I admit that going shower-commando sounds a bit old school, but don’t forget that not so long ago men and women might bathe just once a week (and some quite probably less frequently than that) – back in the 1950s and 1960s, that is. Things moved on for adults once we all started getting proper plumbing but it was still common for children to bathe once a week in the 1970s and 1980s. Angela Rayner says she used to have weekly bath at her grandparents’ house (because her parents were so poor, she has said) and it’s not held her back – her politics might stink, but she doesn’t, or at least not to my knowledge.

And is all this showering even necessary? Almost certainly not, particularly when you consider how sedentary we are now. Most of us hardly break a sweat on a daily basis in the first place: the only muscles that increasingly lardy Britons stress are jaw muscles, or perhaps an arm used to raise a takeaway pizza to the lips. (And frankly if you break a sweat chewing, you need a cardiologist, not a shower.) Of course, one can’t deny the effects of anxiety – watching England progress through the World Cup is apt to make even the most honed among us perspire. But how stressed do you have to get to need a shower?

As well as saving gas or electricity (so helping the planet, and all those poor island countries that will otherwise sink into the Pacific) and avoiding otherwise spiralling costs, you’ll also have the pleasure of being part of a movement that is saving enough water over the course of a year to fill a reservoir – and I don’t know if you’ve seen a reservoir recently but they could do with all the water they can get. Halving our annual shower ration will help keep reservoirs topped up without having to kiss goodbye to the Wimbledon fortnight or the cricket season. 

All we have to do is drop our relatively recently adopted daily fixation with a shower and reacquaint ourselves with a thing called a flannel. I know, how positively Tudor, but it’s even reusable. (So it’s doubly green, and not just after a few months’ use.) In extreme cases you could consider using strong cologne if you need to. But for most of us that wouldn’t be necessary because we are essentially no-sweat persons. We make coral look athletic. The fact is that for the majority there’s simply no earthly reason we should wantonly drench our perfectly clean bodies in gallons of water simply because people in Dallas did 40 years ago and Britons caught the notion.

So come on folks, it’s time to follow Bobby Ewing and step out of the shower. We need to break this pointless and wasteful aqueous obsession. Get a flannel and a bar of soap. Get Victorian. Think of the money. That, my friends, is what the sweet smell of success is all about.

How to eat frites the Belgian way

Many things about Belgium are impenetrably mysterious to the incoming foreigner: the commune system, which language to use, how to politely eat moules. But few are as cryptic as the menu of sauces that accompany Belgian frites. Ketchup, tartare, barbecue and mayonnaise seem fine. But what is Samourai? Andalouse? Mega? 

Unlike many great Belgian things that have successfully been exported (Trappist beer, chocolate, Tintin, speculoos biscuits, Audrey Hepburn), frites can only be experienced on home turf. And my, aren’t they so Belgian.

First, the friteries or fritkots in Dutch – chip shop kiosks found wedged on to street corners and in city squares – are totally egalitarian and the service is totally grumpy. Lightly greying ladies in need of a post-shopping snack, tired government officials, mothers feeding hungry kids, lads on the way out for beers all gather in the friterie queue to be greeted by nonchalant servers. It’s not for no reason they were considered an essential service and allowed to stay open during Covid. 

Second, few chips in the world can be as good as the Belgian frite. Almost universally made from fluffy Dutch Bintje potatoes cut about a centimetre thick and twice cooked in beef tallow, they are always startlingly hot with a craquelure surface unapologetically doused in salt. You can find vegetarian frites at a place in the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels but, I hate to say, they’re just not the same.

Now, the sauces. Most are mayonnaise based. Some are spicy. Many taste more or less identical. The majority of friteries run a menu that stretches to 20 or more. La William, a 50-plus-year-old Belgian company that specialises in sauces, is responsible for most. 

Andalouse, a tomato and pepper-based mayo sauce, is a good bet. House tartare too. American packs a little piquancy. Brazil tastes like a cold pineapple pizza. Bicky is a much-loved Belgian institution that comes in yellow (original), red (tomato) and brown (hot) varieties. As far as I can tell, it’s essentially a mustardy type of mayonnaise that is partly made from cabbage.

Mastering the sauce menu could be a life’s work as you manoeuvre your way around the frying havens of Brussels. Every local has an opinion on the best friterie and debates can be more heated than the fryers inside. If you’re really stuck you can consult the Fritmap.

My favourite (and local to where I live so I’m biased) is Frit’Flagey, a classic chip shack to one side of Place Flagey in the south of Brussels with an eternally long queue. It, and a similar set-up on the Barriere Saint-Gilles which is squeezed on to the side of a road, still serve les frites in the traditional chip shop paper. No messing around and enormous portions.

In the centre, Friterie Tabora near the Grand Place is a solid if touristy bet. You can spot it from the yellow bike in the window and the even wilder than usual variety of sauces. Big Saus or Maffia, anyone?

Frites can come fancy if you want, boxed and laden with more imaginative pairings such as basil and parmesan or kimchi, truffle and cheese at Frites Atelier, the brainchild of Michelin star-winning chef Sergio Herman, in Sainte Catherine.

Harman may have spent 18 months testing every frite in the book and now has five outlets, but it must be noted for the purists that the man is Dutch. Plus I’m never sure this is really how frites should be eaten – at bistro tables with bentwood chairs – but then not everyone is for the street corner, greasy cone experience.

The grandmere of the scene, the option that will earn you bragging rights, is Maison Antoine, a short walk from the European Commission building. Maison Antoine has been churning out the chips since 1948 and has sustained the world’s policymakers through hours of negotiations.

So hungry was the then-German chancellor Angela Merkel during one particularly hairy Brexit debate in 2016, she marched down to Maison Antoine and bought 45 cones of chips for her team. The owners reported that she also ordered 40 toppings, mostly mayonnaise and a few sauce Andalouse. Why she didn’t opt for the Samourai sauce, we shall never know…

The SNP doesn’t have a serious plan for independence

The next UK general election will be a referendum on independence for Scotland. This is according to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, after the ‘disappointing’ Supreme Court ruling last week found that her administration did not in fact have the power to unilaterally rewrite the UK’s constitution.

Will the people of Scotland really accept that the ballot box outcome in 2024 will represent a ‘de facto’ referendum that could lead to them being removed from the UK? With no legal or historic precedent for such an undertaking, the arbitrariness of the proposition would be comical if it were not so serious.

But perhaps equally comical is the idea that Sturgeon’s team is developing a serious plan for implementing economic independence. Principally, how it will manage a sudden move outside the sterling currency zone without creating an economic crisis for the new state. The plan is to unofficially use sterling in a similar way to how Panama uses the dollar, or Montenegro the euro, but then move to a new Scottish currency. Does that sound credible?

Many will have their doubts, especially as a newly-released freedom of information response has established that the Scottish government has done zero – I repeat, zero – modelling of the potential transaction costs that a new currency will inflict on businesses and consumers. The response to Sam Taylor, who heads up These Islands, reads: ‘The Scottish government does not have the information you have asked for because no modelling of increased currency transaction costs due to an independent Scotland having a different currency was commissioned or was underway between 6 May 2021 and 31 October 2022.’ It adds: ‘There was also no record of internal Scottish government discussion on this subject found in staff inboxes or saved documents over the time period specified.’

This is curious. In the run up to the 2014 independence referendum, the Scottish government did manage to model the transaction costs businesses in the rest of the UK would face under a new currency scenario when importing and exporting to Scotland. The analysis showed that businesses in the remainder of the UK would have to absorb costs of approximately £500 million as a result of foreign exchange transactions linked to Scottish trade.

The SNP at the time was arguing against a new currency. Instead, they were in favour of a formal sterling monetary union with the remaining UK – which might explain why the Salmond administration was happy to conduct and publish the analysis. 

But now the Scottish government has changed tack, instead arguing for a new Scottish currency after a period of ‘sterlingisation’. This might explain why the Sturgeon administration is reluctant to delve into the reality of what currency transition would actually mean for businesses. Salmond’s team did not outline the costs to Scottish businesses of operating with a new Scottish currency. Considering analysis has shown that one in four jobs in Scotland are supported by demand for Scottish goods and services from the rest of the UK, and that the vast majority of Scotland’s imports and exports are with the rest of the UK, it seems to follow that those costs would be considerable.

But it’s not just businesses who need to fret: on the consumer side, the impact of a new currency could also have major downsides. There are over 700,000 households in Scotland with sterling mortgages. If Scotland launched its own pound, then a great many of those householders would suddenly find their wages denominated in that new currency while their mortgages and other debts would likely remain in sterling. It’s hardly the most straightforward solution.

Recent history shows us how damaging currency risk can be for regular households. As an example, take the case of east European borrowers who took on Swiss franc-linked mortgages a decade or so ago. Attracted by lower interest rates, mortgage holders subsequently saw their payment liabilities skyrocket due to currency moves. Struggling homeowners ended up taking banks to court. The SNP plan threatens to introduce similar risks to Scottish households.

The lack of discussion on currency transaction costs and other currency risks is on a par with Nicola Sturgeon’s recent constitutional gamesmanship: the Scottish government’s latest paper making the economic case for leaving the UK failed to provide any fiscal modelling for the new state. It seems the Sturgeon administration really is intent on whitewashing the economic risks of leaving the UK. Perhaps they already know it will be a disaster for Scottish businesses and households – but are swivel-eyed enough to push the case regardless. Perhaps the latest manoeuvres (from the court case to the white papers) are intended to keep the populist bandwagon rolling with no real secession intent. 

Regardless of the motivation, this further highlights to the Scottish people that they are being led by a party, a movement and a first minister that is tired, out of ideas and drained of credibility. That’s one upside, at least.

A house-hunter’s guide to Somerset

It’s famed for cider, cheese and Glastonbury, but there’s much more to love about Somerset.  Alongside a popular private members’ club (Babington House) and a global gallery outfit (Hauser & Wirth), its most in-vogue country house hotel (The Newt) has helped to attract a steady stream of creative emigres.

Among those embracing the county’s way of life are internationally known designers such as Alice Temperley and Bill Amberg and landscape gardeners such as Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt, whose rewilding garden won best in show at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show (which happened to be sponsored by The Newt).

But from Frome via Bruton and Ilminster west to Chard there are plenty of entrepreneurs ‘slow living’ in and around Somerset’s quintessential market towns, where local craftsmanship runs deep.

Freelance seamstress and mother of four Leni Donaldson lives near Ilminster (where Alice Temperley has her atelier) and makes traditional childrenswear at Maggie Rose Clothing. ‘There’s a great small business support network – I meet local artists at craft fairs through the Somerset Collective,’ she says. ‘Life is not lived at high speed down here and I like the independent spirit.’

She’s not a Down from Londoner (DfL) and living in Somerset is not all about the ease of the commute to the capital. It’s a good two-hour train journey from London, so it’s more often a place where people want to be for its own sake (rather than just donning their Barbours and Hunters for a weekend of five-star comforts).

Buying agent Jo Henry, of Jess Simpson Property Search, says: ‘People looking to move to Somerset will find their tribe there. It’s open-minded, eclectic and less materialistic than other areas.’

That said, while it’s a lower-profile beneficiary of the post-pandemic ‘race for space’ than the Cotswolds, the average Somerset house price has been creeping up. It’s now £322,420, according to Hamptons using Land Registry data – up 24 per cent since 2019. You don’t have to have a banker’s salary to move here, but it might help in some of the honeypot market towns: the number of £1 million-plus property sales last year was three times the number in 2019.

Unsurprisingly, in fashionable Bruton the average price is higher: £398,970, up 35 per cent in two years. It’s got a cluster of great businesses, including the Michelin-starred restaurant Osip, bespoke rug-maker Studio Knot and Rag of Colts, who make wonderful things from repurposed saddle leather – but for such a little town it gets a lot of hype, according to Cathy Morris-Adams of agent Lodestone.

‘Its reputation drives in media, film and music people, and we’ve got buyers who have been renting for two or three years, waiting for the right property. Between £900,000 to £1.5 million the market has been incredibly busy,’ she says.

But she suggests house-hunters will find better value if they widen their search. While the nearby village of Batcombe is as pricy as Bruton, she recommends Evercreech as ‘much more affordable’ and then, 30 minutes away, Langport (with the River Parrett running through it). There’s also Somerton, with its pretty square and octagonal stone Buttercross, built in 1673 to protect the butter and cheese on sunny market days.

In Martock – where the Temperley family run the Burrow Hill Cider farm – there’s a Grade II-listed detached four-bedroom house for sale at £750,000 through Palmer Snell with stone outbuildings perfect for a studio.

Also within easy reach of Bruton is Charlton Musgrove (with a good pub in The Smithy) and Wincanton, where the former PR guru Lynne Franks’s Seed Store sells wellbeing products made by local women entrepreneurs.

South of the A303 near the village of Templecombe (which offers direct trains to Waterloo), a five-bedroom country house with its own paddock is for sale at £950,000 through Savills.

Jo Henry picks Babcary as a ‘good village’ with an award-winning pub, The Red Lion, close to the A37. She says that villages west of Castle Cary (direct trains into Paddington) are more popular than they were in pre-Covid times.

According to Alistair Heather of Savills Bath, the typical DfL buyer spends £1-2 million on a detached house on a couple of acres. The area’s schools are a draw, including All Hallows, Millfield, Sherborne, Sexey’s and King’s Bruton. ‘Villages ten to 15 minutes’ drive to Castle Cary station like Baltonsborough, West Bradley and Pilton are popular,’ he says.

In Pilton, there’s a beautifully renovated three-bedroom house complete with outdoor bar and kitchen marketed by Lodestone for £695,000, while the six-bedroom Old Rectory in Limington, towards Yeovil, is for sale at £1.65 million with Knight Frank.

Heather says the A36 corridor – for the Frome-Waterloo line – attracts buyers to Beckington, Rode and Norton St Philip. Contracts have just been exchanged on the Old Vicarage, an eight-bedroom property in Frome – with a guide price of £2.25 million. ‘Unique properties are still going to sealed bids,’ he adds.

Andrew Bailey’s fighting talk

Andrew Bailey this afternoon showed that those who start fights don’t necessarily finish them. Speaking as the only witness at the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee today, the Governor of the Bank of England landed some rather extraordinary accusations against Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, suggesting that he was not informed of the details in September’s mini-Budget and that he ‘does not think it was settled’ even the day before it was announced.

According to Bailey, both the Monetary Policy Committee and the Treasury officials who were briefing the Bank were forced to speculate about what was coming: ‘There was speculation that this was going to be quite a substantial package,’ he told the Lords committee, ‘but we did not know how big it was going to be and how substantial.’

Bailey’s comments make an already-fried relationship between himself and Truss worse. Right from the outset of the Tory leadership campaign, Truss was pointing the finger at the Bank of England, suggesting it was held responsibility for the inflation spiral that Britain is experiencing. While Truss always stopped short of insisting that the independent Bank raise interest rates, the economists advising her campaign were much more open that a core part of Truss’s economic strategy was to create space for the Bank to tighten monetary policy.

The Governor was also asked whether the Office for Budget Responsibility being sidelined in that mini-Budget process: in response Bailey suggested that the Bank was too. It’s a narrative that Truss and Kwarteng won’t like, not least because it adds to reports that even some of Truss’s closest allies and staff were not aware of the additional tax cuts to be announced, including those who would have played an active role in selling the policies to stakeholders.

But while the politics between the Treasury and the Bank are likely to make the headlines, the far more interesting debate during today’s committee meeting was around monetary policy, between Bailey and the Bank’s former governor Mervyn King, who sat on the panel.

There was no explosion between the two, only polite back and forth. But King has not shied away to point out, on many occasions now, the ways in which he thinks the Bank has got it wrong since the pandemic hit. Just last week King told the Wincott Foundation that ‘central banks really lost touch’ when they broke ‘that intellectual link between inflation and what was actually going on’ within the British economy: ‘It’s true in the Bank of England and the [European Central Bank] that the models they use have the property, that whatever you do to monetary policy, inflation always comes back to the target because it has to. [It’s] the assumption that closes the model.’

‘I certainly wouldn’t want to use [a] model as a basis for making the decisions about monetary policy,’ King followed up. ‘We’ve obviously lost some credibility in what’s happened. There’s no point using models that as soon as you’ve got perfect credibility, that doesn’t make any sense.’

This may read like a technical point, but in the world of monetary policy, there are fighting words. In short, King is hyper-critical of Bailey and the MPC for assuming for well over a year that inflation was ‘transitory’, on the basis of models.

In today’s meeting, nothing so feisty was said, but the undertones were there, with King pressing Bailey on the possibility that a recession was now ‘part and parcel of the process needed to get inflation back… to two per cent on a sustainable basis’. King also suggested that the current base rate of 3 per cent ‘doesn’t seem likely’ to get inflation back down to target,’ which is expected to start falling rather rapidly, according to the Bank’s latest inflation forecast. 

Bailey insisted that there was awareness inside the Bank of these points; that its forecast, while showing inflation coming down rapidly in the latter half of 2023, also included ‘the largest upside risk to inflation, in year two certainly’. And in reference to interest rates, Bailey went as far as he could without pre-empting the next MPC vote, saying that ‘the expectation is that there will be more to do.’

This is a particularly interesting response, given the Bank’s last vote to raise interest rates by 0.75 basis points – the first rise of that size in over 30 years – also came with it a strong suggestion in the minutes that it wanted to slow down the pace. 

We can’t know if it was King’s questions or a new assessment of the state of the economy over this past month that has led Bailey to pivot away from hinting at a dovish approach. It will be interesting to see over the next few days how market expectations react to Bailey’s latest comments, which suggest a (slightly) more hawkish approach. In the words of the current Governor this afternoon, ‘watch carefully’.

It’s nonsense to say we are no longer a ‘Christian country’

According to the census, British Christianity is having a disastrous century. In the 2001 census, a clear majority of people in England and Wales – 72 per cent – described themselves as ‘Christian’. In 2011, this figure fell to 59 per cent. And now, it’s another drop: a 13 percentage point drop to 46 per cent. 

These figures suggest that a Christian country has imploded within the space of two decades. Will the figure continue to fall at this rate? Will Christianity disappear from this land within 40 years? 

Probably not. What the census shows is that ‘cultural Christianity’ has dramatically fallen. For of course this is all that the census can tell us about. It does not delve any further than asking about people’s religious allegiance. It does not inquire into people’s beliefs or church attendance or any other form of practice. Back in 2001, other surveys suggested that far fewer than 72 per cent were Christian in any real sense – and of course actual church attendance was already very low, about 7 per cent. 

So what the last few census results tell us is that people are becoming less inclined to claim Christian identity when they are not actively religious. They prefer to tick the ‘no religion’ box. Did these people who used to tick the ‘Christianity’ box have a vague belief in God, which Richard Dawkins has eroded? Or did they have a vague cultural allegiance to Christianity, which has diminished? 

Last year a survey organised by Humanists UK tried to find out. As well as asking people’s religious allegiance, it asked those people who ticked ‘Christian’ why they ticked it. It found that about a third believed in Christian teaching. The rest said that they had been raised Christian, and that Britain was a Christian country. Humanists UK urged such people not to tick Christian, warning that cultural Christianity could blur with bigotry. 

This perspective has gained ground – that it is dubious to claim Christian allegiance if one is not actively Christian. I sense the influence of identity politics. Seeing how passionately minority identities are held, people feel that it is dubious to claim an identity that is only vaguely held, that is not authentic. The average British agnostic probably still feels culturally Christian, but is wary of saying so. They feel positively about her country’s religious tradition, and are glad the C of E is still around, and like going to church twice a year, and reluctantly admit that humanist morality has Christian roots. Yet they feel uneasy about ticking the Christianity box. For they shouldn’t claim to be what they are not. Also, they slightly fear that populist politicians might exploit cultural Christianity.

There can be no ‘true’ survey of Christian allegiance, because it is too vague a thing. But in 2018 the British Social Attitudes survey asked a slightly more helpful question: ‘Do you regard yourself as belonging to a religious group?’ It prompted people to wonder if they have an active rather than inherited allegiance. 38 per cent identified as Christian. That is surprisingly few, if you want to think of Britain as a Christian-majorty country. But it’s surprisingly many, seeing how few attend church.

It’s nonsense to say that Britain is no longer a Christian country because this mark of Christian allegiance has fallen below the half-way point for the first time. In reality, people are becoming more wary of hypocrisy and inauthenticity, which you could say (if you want to annoy the atheists) shows the influence of Christian moral teaching.

The good, the bad and the ugly of the new Online Safety Bill

The new version of the Online Safety Bill seems, on the face of it, to be an improvement on the previous one. We’ll know more when it’s published – all we have to go on for now is a DCMS press release and some amendments moved by Michelle Donelan, the Digital Secretary and architect of the new Bill. The devil will be in the detail.

Let’s start with something that hasn’t got much coverage today, but which I think is important. Plans to introduce a new harmful communications offence in England and Wales, making it a crime punishable by up to two years in jail to send or post a message with the intention of causing ‘psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress’, have been scrapped.

That’s good news because, as Kemi Badenoch said in July, ‘We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.’

The bad news is, the new communications offence was intended to replace some of the more egregious offences in the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. The communication offences in the Malicious Communications Act are still going to be repealed, but not S127 of the Communications Act.

But this change does solve a problem I’d previously flagged up about the previous version of the Bill. It obliged the large social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc) to remove content in every part of the UK if it’s illegal in any part of the UK (‘offence means any offence under the law or any part of the United Kingdom’). So if it’s illegal to say something in Scotland, in-scope providers would have to remove it in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

That created a problem because the new harmful communications offence would only have replaced some other communications offences in England and Wales, not in Scotland and Northern Ireland. So when it came to what you could and couldn’t say online, the new communications offence would not have replaced one set of rules prohibiting speech with another; it would have just added a new set.

That problem won’t arise now, and nor will social media platforms have to enforce the new speech restrictions in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act across the whole of the UK because the government amended the previous version of the Bill so providers won’t be obliged to remove speech that’s prohibited by laws made by a devolved authority.

Fears that Nicola Sturgeon might become the content moderator for the whole of the UK can be laid to rest – at least for the time being. It’s worth bearing in mind that a future Labour government could change that with a single, one-line amendment.

But the new version of the Online Safety Bill won’t criminalise saying something, whether online or offline, that causes ‘hurty feelings’, and we should be grateful for that.

Okay, now on to the main event.

Clause 13 of the Bill (‘Safety duties protecting adults’), which would have forced in-scope providers to set out in their terms of service how they intended to ‘address’ content that is legal but harmful to adults, has been scrapped.

How big a win is that?

Some of today’s papers are reporting this as removing any reference to ‘legal but harmful’ content from the Bill, but the phrase ‘legal but harmful’ has never appeared in any versions of this Bill. And, thanks to an amendment I and others lobbied for in July, the previous version of the Bill would have made it clear that one of the ways providers could ‘address’ this content would have been to do nothing.

The Times today says ‘the government has dropped plans to force social media and search sites to take down material that is considered harmful but not illegal’. But that’s not correct since it never planned to force sites to do that.

The objection to clause 13 was more nuanced. It was that if the government published a list of legal content it considered harmful to adults and imposed an obligation on in-scope providers to say how they intended to ‘address’ it, that would nudge them to remove it.

Even though the option to do nothing was available to providers in the previous version of the Bill, it would have been a brave social media company that said it would do nothing to ‘address’ this content, given that the government had designated it as harmful to adults.

Another objection to the previous version was that, according to its provisions, the list of legal content that was harmful to adults was going to be included in a statutory instrument and not in the Bill itself. Indeed, Nadine Dorries, then the Digital Secretary, published an ‘indicative list’ of what was going to be included and, among other horrors, it included ‘health and vaccine misinformation and disinformation’.

One concern free speech groups had is that after this list had been drawn up it could easily be added to by another statutory instrument, whether by this government or the next, creating an anti-free speech ratchet effect. That would have been a hostage to fortune.

In the new version of the Bill, the list of legal content that’s harmful to adults won’t be included in a supplementary piece of legislation, but on the face of the Bill, which will make it more difficult for future governments to enlarge. It’s not described as content that’s ‘legal but harmful’ to adults, but that’s essentially what it is. So you can ignore reports that the government has ditched this concept altogether. Rather, it has decided not to include the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in a statutory instrument but in the Bill itself.

In the DCMS press release, this lawful but awful content is defined as follows: ‘legal content relating to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, or content that is abusive, or that incites hatred, on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sex, gender reassignment or sexual orientation’. We can expect similar wording to appear in the new version of the Bill when it returns to parliament next week.

That’s almost identical to the ‘indicative list’ of legal but harmful adult content set out by Nadine Dorries, so reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. Although, credit where credit’s due, there’s no reference to ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ in the new Prohibitorum.

Another key difference is that instead of saying how they intend to ‘address’ this content in their terms of service, providers will have to say what tools they’re going to make available to their users who don’t want to be exposed to it. This is what Michelle Donelan means when she says in today’s Telegraph (with a fair amount of top spin), ‘I have removed “legal but harmful” in favour of a new system based on choice and freedom’.

The new system is definitely an improvement. Not because the previous version of the Bill would have forced social media companies to ban content that was legal but harmful to adults outright – that’s based on a misunderstanding – but because it applied pressure on them to do that.

The new version of the Bill is signalling to providers that if they want to make this content available to adult users in an unrestricted form they can, provided they supply their most sensitive users with tools to protect themselves from it – the social media equivalent of a ‘safe browsing’ mode. That’s better than the previous version. The new system empowers adult users to choose what content they’d like to see, with the state no longer nudging social media platforms into restricting legal but harmful content for everyone, regardless of their appetite for this material.

But I have some concerns about the ‘user empowerment’ system.

There’s a significant risk that most providers will make the ‘safe browsing’ mode their default setting. So if adult users want to see lawful but awful content they will have to opt in.

That may mean politically contentious content – saying transwomen aren’t women, for instance – will not be visible to users of the big social media platforms unless they’ve opted to dial down their safety settings. Why? Because the new Bill is telling providers they have to provide their most sensitive users with tools to protect themselves from, among other things, content that abuses or incites hatred towards people based on their protected characteristics (‘race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sex, gender reassignment or sexual orientation’). Woke activists will argue that a whole range of contentious views fall into that category and all users should be protected from them unless they switch their settings to ‘unsafe’, i.e. protected by default.

Defenders of the new system will argue that users will still have the option of adjusting their settings so they can see legal but harmful content – and that’s better than banning it outright, which the previous version of the Bill nudged providers to do. But some users won’t be aware they can adjust their settings in this way, or they will but won’t know how, or they won’t want to in case a woke colleague sees something ‘hateful’ over their shoulder and reports them to HR.

And what about politically contentious websites like The Conservative Woman (TCW) and Novara Media – perhaps even The Spectator? Will their content be judged ‘unsafe’ by providers and only made available to users who ‘opt in’? That sounds far-fetched, but TCW was blocked by default by the Three mobile network earlier this year.

When the Free Speech Union looked into it, we discovered it was because the British Board of Film Classification, to which Three had outsourced the job of deciding which websites were ‘safe’, had given TCW an 18 rating. So Three restricted access to the site for its users because its default settings excluded any websites the BBFC classed as only suitable for adults.

In light of this, it’s not unrealistic to think that under the new system politically contentious websites will be judged unsafe by the big social media platforms and banned by default (although not outright). And that will have a negative impact on their commercial viability. Not only will it limit their reach, it will make it harder for them to get advertising because most companies are concerned about ‘brand safety’ and won’t want to advertise on websites that are deemed unsafe by companies like Facebook. To a certain extent that happens already, but it could get significantly worse after this Bill becomes law.

In the previous version there were clauses making it more difficult for social media platforms to restrict ‘content of democratic importance’ and ‘journalistic content’, which were designed to mitigate the chilling effect of clause 13. It’s not clear how these will work in the context of the new ‘user empowerment’ model and I fear that providers will now be able to comply with these free speech duties by protecting this content for people who’ve dialled down their safety settings but not for those who’ve dialled them up. If that’s the case, it’s something that needs to be fixed as the Bill goes through parliament.

In one respect at least, free speech will be better protected in the new version. The previous one said providers would have ‘a duty to have regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law’. That was pretty toothless since ‘have regard’ is the least onerous of the legal duties. In the new version, I’m told, that has been beefed up to ‘have particular regard’ which is better. (That’s something the Free Speech Union has been lobbying for.)

There are other free speech issues with the new Bill that Big Brother Watch has flagged up. But I think that, taken as a whole, it’s an improvement on the previous version. Michelle Donelan has had to steer a difficult path between those of us lobbying for more free speech protections and a vast array of groups petitioning her to make the Bill more restrictive, including factions within her own party. I don’t think she had the political room to do any more than she’s done and I don’t blame her for trying to spin the changes to the ‘legal but harmful’ provisions as more radical than they are.

Nevertheless, I still have concerns about the Bill and will be scrutinising it carefully when the new version is published. If, as I suspect, the duties to protect content of democratic importance and journalistic content have lost some of their force, I hope to work with parliamentarians in the Commons and the Lords to reinvigorate them.

Has the Indyref ruling complicated Catalonian separatism?

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on Scottish independence will offer scant encouragement to separatists in Catalonia. The crux of the judgment – that Holyrood’s devolved powers do not stretch as far as being able to hold an independence referendum without consent from Westminster – also highlights the problem for Catalan secessionists, who have yet to secure Madrid’s approval for a vote on divorcing Spain.

Nicola Sturgeon has said she will respect the judgment. Similar prohibitions, though, haven’t stopped Catalonia’s separatists, who are in many ways more rebellious than their Scottish counterparts. In 2017, Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled that an independence referendum planned by Catalonia’s then-president, Carles Puigdemont, would be illegal. Puigdemont blazed ahead anyway and in the resulting vote, held on 1 October, 92 per cent chose independence. The referendum’s orchestrators spent three and a half years in prison for disobeying the court’s ruling (a fate that Puigdemont avoided by fleeing to Belgium), before being pardoned and released by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez last summer.

By contrast, Catalonia’s methodical President, Pere Aragonès, is comparable with Sturgeon in his approach to secession Eschewing dramatic, unilateral tactics, Aragonès instead hopes to gain Madrid’s permission to hold a legal independence referendum. But Sánchez has said that he’s bound by the Spanish constitution, a document from 1978 which arguably makes it harder for him to grant such a vote than it would be – or has been – for any British prime minister.

Perhaps recognising the frailty of a case based on UK legislation, the SNP’s lawyers tried to justify another Scottish independence referendum under international law. They cited Quebec, the former French and British colony in which two votes on seceding from Canada – held in 1980 and 1995 – both returned a ‘No’ (by 59.5 per cent and 50.5 per cent, respectively).

The Supreme Court’s judgment on this aspect of the SNP’s argument, though, also applies to Catalonia. Lord Reed ruled that there are two situations in which a territory might claim the right to secede under international law – if it’s a ‘former colony’ or if it’s under ‘foreign military occupation’. But Catalonia, like Scotland, is neither a ‘former colony’ (unless, as some of the more hardcore separatists maintain, Madrid is the coloniser), nor is it under ‘foreign military occupation’. The latter claim would have been easier to make between 1936 and 1975, when Catalan culture was ruthlessly oppressed by fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Nevertheless, Catalonia has had some support from the international community. In August, the UN Human Rights Committee found that Spain had violated the political rights of the secessionists who organised the 2017 referendum by suspending them from public office prior to their trial and conviction more than a year later. Although this ruling seemed to bolster the separatists’ claim that they’re up against a repressive state, it hardly constituted recognition that they have a right to independence under international law. The EU has also refused to become involved with the battle between Madrid and Barcelona, seeing it as a purely domestic affair.  

More craftily, the SNP’s lawyers argued that any future referendum on Scottish independence would be purely ‘advisory’. Lord Reed rightly saw through this strategy, ruling that an authorised referendum would have important consequences for a ‘constitution and political culture founded upon democracy’. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either Sturgeon or Aragonès, armed with a ‘Yes’ generated by a legal vote, taking no further action – perhaps rightly so. A pre-approved referendum labelled as merely ‘advisory’ would carry much more force than a large-scale opinion poll.

Spain’s government and judiciary took the same view in November 2014, when Catalonia’s then-president Artur Mas staged what he dubbed a ‘process of citizen participation’ – i.e. a referendum in all but name. For defying the Constitutional Court and holding the vote, in which 80 per cent opted for independence, Mas was banned from public office for two years and fined €36,000 (about £31,000). The point is that in Spain and the UK, any independence referendum granted by the central government, precisely for that reason, would be more than just ‘advisory’.

That same year, of course, Scots didvote on independence with Westminster’s approval: a ‘once in a generation’ act which temporarily gave Holyrood the power to hold a referendum. Sturgeon seems to have forgotten the result of that vote when she talks of securing a way for Scots to democratically express their will. She’s also forgetting the polls, which indicate that, even post-Brexit, most of Scotland favours remaining in the UK, albeit by a slim margin. The same is true in Catalonia, where support for secession has dropped to 38.8 per cent, down from 48.7 per cent just after the 2017 vote (although most Catalans do support another, legal referendum). In other words, it’s far from clear whether either Scottish or Catalan separatists would get the result they want, even if a referendum was allowed.

The Supreme Court ruling highlights not only the Catalan equivalents of Holyrood’s constitutional limitations, but also suggests that international law wouldn’t provide an effective recourse for either camp of secessionists. In Scotland and Catalonia, the path taken by separatists just became much tougher to navigate.

Suella Braverman’s unlikely reading material

Since her (first) appointment to the Home Office, Suella Braverman has been at pains to point out that she is no fan of the left. The Fareham MP spent her final day in office under Liz Truss railing against the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ in parliament, shortly before departing and returning less than a week later under Rishi Sunak.

For their part, the Guardian have returned the love, running a string of critical stories of the Home Secretary since her return. But is there now a thawing in relations between the newspaper and the minister? For just weeks after decrying the Graun in the House, Braverman’s department signed a £30,000, one-year contract for the press and private office’s hard copy newspaper requirements, which of course included daily delivery of… the Guardian. Keeping tabs on the enemy, perhaps?

Still, at least Suella can get some sounder thinking from one source on her list: The Spectator is among the aforementioned publications too.

The Tories should defend free speech, not neglect it

The government’s Online Safety Bill is coming to look more and more like some ghastly juridical juggernaut: a vessel grimly unstoppable, even if no-one quite knows where it is heading or where they want it to go.

The latest changes to the Bill, announced this week, look very much like an attempt to make the best of a bad job. They leave untouched the provisions of the legislation aimed at safeguarding the young, but slightly relax it as regards others. The aim is the awkward one of placating three disparate constituencies: child protection activists, those desperate to be seen to be doing their bit to bridle Big Tech, and those who value free speech online. And they are a mixed bag.

The good news first. Anyone who likes free speech must rejoice at the government’s decision to finally drop ‘legal but harmful’. The provision encapsulated the idea that there should be some kinds of material not in itself illegal that the largest internet platforms – Twitter, YouTube and the like – should nevertheless be barred from sharing with adults. This scheme had nothing going for it. It was patronising. It was politically dangerous, since future governments of all complexions would have gained a pretty open-ended power to place material they disliked off-limits by ministerial fiat (think, for example, lockdown or vaccine scepticism, both of which could have been seen to be disinformation). And it would have led to super-cautious regulation by the tech giants themselves, who would undoubtedly have played safe and taken steps to remove anything that might spell trouble.

Its abandonment also put the opposition nicely on the spot. Labour spokeswoman Lucy Powell’s immediate but incautious reaction, that ‘replacing the prevention of harm with an emphasis on free speech undermines the very purpose of this Bill, and will embolden abusers, Covid deniers, hoaxers, who will feel encouraged to thrive online’ was a gift to the government. It neatly exposes Labour as a party which at bottom is deeply troubled by the idea of freedom of speech and much prefers technocrats to be able to filter what we are allowed to see.

Having dropped its ‘legal but harmful’ proposals, the government also proposes a quid pro quo: while adults should be allowed to see harmful material, they should nevertheless be given the ability to block it if they want. Here we should be a bit more cautious. True, we remain free to choose. On the other hand the whole thing seems rather unnecessary, since if we don’t like what we see on a platform we can always move on to another page. Nevertheless, if this concession helps ease through the proposal to remove the ‘legal but harmful’ bar, it is something those with liberal views on free speech can probably live with.

So too with the government’s second idea: the creation of a new offence of deliberately encouraging of assisting self-harm. This is clearly an acknowledgment of the original inspiration of the Bill, which was the need to prevent a repetition of the suicide of a teenager who saw such material online. Frankly, it is difficult to see many cases in which people promoting it deserve much sympathy, or much of an argument against criminalisation (which already exists in the parallel case of suicide).

Now for the bad news. At present a big threat to free speech online is not Big Tech at all, but the prohibition in the Communications Act 2003 on placing any material on the internet that is ‘grossly offensive’. It’s a disconcerting piece of law that can cover almost anything. Its victims have included YouTuber Count Dankula, fined heavily by a humourless Scottish sheriff for a video of a dog doing a Nazi salute. More recently, Joseph Kelly from Glasgow, given 150 hours of community service for a silly Twitter post welcoming the death of Sir Tom Moore. 

The ill-effects of this catch-all provision go much further too, since it allows over-zealous police to threaten almost anyone with prosecution, arrest and seizure of computer equipment if they post anything that annoys someone else. Witness Caroline Farrow, a journalist seriously threatened with a criminal record for misgendering a trans activist, and Kate Scottow, arrested and actually prosecuted, though ultimately acquitted, for much the same thing.

Even the Law Commission, not a body well-known for its support for free speech, has called for this awful provision to be repealed and supplanted by a much narrower prohibition limited to material intended to cause psychological or physical harm. As drafted, the Online Safety Bill would have done just that.

Unfortunately, the government has now apparently quietly backtracked, and said it wishes to leave the old law intact. Why? The reason is not clear. Supposedly the aim is to protect victims of abuse. Nevertheless, the actual effect of the law is, if anything, to promote abuse by encouraging anyone offended by what they see online to run to the police and ask them to make life awkward for the person posting it. There may also have been more or less informal representations from prosecutors and others who found it a convenient way to silence those who stepped out of line – but this is speculation.

In any case, this is a change that needs to be widely publicised and resolutely opposed, both in Parliament and outside it. If the Labour party have shown themselves unhappy with free speech, we can at least now call on the government to do what is right, stand firm against the opposition and show its clear support for our right to say and read what we like.

The New York Times does it again

Let me tell you a story, dear reader. It is about a land – a quasi-dictatorial kingdom no less – where locals huddle round bin fires on the streets of the great metropolis, gnawing on legs of mutton and cavorting in swamps. Once there was good government, but a plebiscite some years ago brought with it autocracy, plague and a nation ‘falling apart at the seams.’

Which land could this be? Why it can only be our dear old United Kingdom, as seen through the eyes of the average New York Times subscriber. For years now Mr S has been chronicling the Brit-bashing excesses of America’s least reliable news source. Whether it’s peddling dubious clickbait about our vaccine regime or comparing everything to Brexit, there are few articles that the NYT won’t run to please its audience of superior Yanks and self-flagellating Brits.

And now the NYT has done it again, running two extremely questionable articles in the space of two weeks. The first concerned a young man called Ademola Adedeji. According to the NYT, Adedeji was ‘swept up’ in a ‘murder-conspiracy case with no murder’. The young black man, the paper gasped, ‘never attacked anyone or owned a weapon’. British policing, the NYT implied, was to blame, given how its ‘war on gangs disproportionately targets young Black men.’ Unfortunately, conspiracy to murder is still bad – even if the person involved doesn’t manage to commit a murder. That’s probably why it is a crime on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just as night follows day, so too did a second article follow that first. Another article questioning the motives of the entire British legal system appeared last Sunday, this time about the Modern Slavery Act. Enacted in 2015, it was designed to prevent human trafficking. ‘But’ intoned the NYT gravely, the Act is now ‘being wielded against low-level drug dealers more than cross-border human traffickers, and disproportionately affecting Black men under 21.’

Who, pray, were the young gentlemen being unjustly imprisoned for such crimes? The case study that the NYT chose to offer up as proof of its theory was a chap called Glodi Wabelua. The term ‘low-level drug dealer’ suggests a certain teenage amateur type, selling a few grams of weed on a Saturday night out. Wabelua, whatever else, doesn’t exactly sound like that. The NYT notes with shock, how, in the government’s eyes ‘Mr. Wabelua was not just a drug dealer. He was a slave master.’

Yet the reports of Wabelua’s original conviction in 2019 suggests that term is very much appropriate. The Guardian no less reported that Wabelua ‘ran a lucrative drugs supply into Portsmouth from London using teenagers as young as 14 as their mules… the victims, all from south London, were recruited and groomed before being sent to Portsmouth… Wabelua [and his associates]… had total control over their teenage victims’ freedom of movement.’

Sounds an awful lot like a slave master, eh? Drug dealers enlisting children seem to be, er, precisely the sort of people this law was designed to target. For a news organisation that fulminates so much about ‘false information, sketchy digital ads and other deliberate efforts to mislead’, perhaps the New York Times could start tackling this problem by addressing its own issues close at home?

The Online Safety Bill is still a censor’s charter

One of Rishi Sunak’s pledges was to remove the ‘legal, but harmful’ censorship clause that Boris Johnson was poised to bring in via the Online Safety Bill. A few weeks ago it was said that he had done so and I wrote a piece congratulating him. I may have spoken too soon. The Bill as published would actually introduce (rather than abolish) censorship of the written word – ending a centuries-old British tradition of liberty. The censorship mechanism is intended for under-18s – an improvement on the original, draconian plan. But it still raises problems that I doubt have been properly discussed in Whitehall given the bias amongst officials desperate to get this Bill through.

Films and magazines have long been subject to age censorship. The intentions of this Bill are fine: to protect children from indefensible content. But the greatest mistake in politics is to judge a scheme by its intentions, rather than its effects. The moment that a censorship mechanism is introduced for the written word, you risk opening a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences. If the government is pretending to have abolished legal-but-harmful, it might not really think about or scrutinise the potential effects of a censorship-by-proxy regime whose very existence it is reluctant to admit. Worse, it’s pretending reliable tech exists to censor content for kids only. It doesn’t. So as things stand, Sunak’s Bill is based on a false premise.

As the world’s oldest weekly, The Spectator has campaigned for free speech several times over its lifetime. Each time our premise has been simple: speech should be legal or illegal but there should be nothing in between. The moment you create a third category – of censorable speech – then you create a tool where the consequences are hard to envisage or control. In the digital world, where censorship bots and algorithms are making tens of thousands of decisions a day, the potential for unintended consequences rises exponentially. And far beyond the understanding of Whitehall officials, especially if the political pressure they face is pro-censorship and anti-Big Tech.

In the case of the revised Online Harms Bill, we need to ask:

1. How are tech companies supposed to distinguish between adults and kids? 
2. If they are expected to verify, does this mean the end of anonymous accounts?
3. If they are expected to guess, how likely are they to guess right? And distinguish between an 18-year-old and an 19-year-old?
4. What risk is there of adults being subjected to a censorship regime intended for kids? If the government’s case rests on the power of age-guessing algorithms, where is the evidence of their accuracy? 
5. Will the state turn a blind eye to the resulting censorship? If online firms have to list all the content they target, we can all see it’s being done right. But if there is no such obligation, we will never know what censorship regime is in operation.
6. What speech is being censored? The government promises a list, but has not published one. Will MPs be asked to vote for censorship, but only told later what’s being censored?
7. Michelle Donelan, the Culture Secretary, has just been on the radio saying fines will be crushing (‘we’re talking tens of billions of pounds’) for Big Tech firms who violate the censorship clause. Given that such firms make virtually no money from current affairs and political discussion (they’d drop it all if they could as it represents a massive regulatory risk and negligible cash), won’t they just let the censorship bots rip on all content – rather than risk ‘billions’ on the accuracy of age-targeting algorithms?
8. If online firms can’t know user ages for sure, and are on the hook for billions if they mess up, surely they will err on the side of content removal?

It’s true that some of the worst parts of the original Bill have gone. In the old Bill, the regulator or Secretary of State could change what was being censored. As things stand, there will be a list that only parliament can add to – which will make it harder to put Jimmy Carr jokes on the list of verboten content (as Nadine Dorries had suggested). The odds are – although we don’t know – that the banned list will include things like suicide encouragement (which is already illegal) so there is less chance of collateral damage. But there is still a substantial risk of this. As an editor, I see this every day: the way online firms apply their own invisible and new forms of censorship, usually targeting minority ideas which bots identify as suspect. 

The problem with censorship is always – always – the unintended and unimagined consequences. Blair introduced hate-speech laws to outline racism, but ended up being himself investigated for allegedly being rude about the Welsh. As he was being interviewed by North Wales Police, he perhaps thought ‘hmm: this is an unforeseen, unintended consequence of my hate-speech bill’. This encapsulates the problem with censorship: things get out of control very quickly. Generations of politicians have concluded that, in which case, it’s best not to censor the written word at all: not for kids, not for adults, not for anyone.

If Rishi Sunak is now going to change this and introduce censorship, he’d take us into dangerous waters. And this Bill contains nothing, absolutely nothing, to monitor the censorship that it would introduce. The Bill rightly outlaws more of the material involved in the tragic death of Molly Russell: that’s how to do it. Make speech legal, or illegal. But the traditions of this country in having no censorship for the written word can, even now, be defended by removing ‘legal but harmful’ in its entirety.