Firebellys is back

Backbeat the word was on the street that the fire in your [belly] was out.

Apologies for mangling the lyrics of one of Oasis’s finest, but after my recent report of its tragic demise it appears that Firebellys has been resurrected phoenix from the flames style, and has reopened on the other side of Purley High Street. Okay, the puns will stop here.

The in-laws ordered a takeaway from the new Firebellys last week and caught up with the proprietor, apparently the old landlord wanted £23k a year rent for the unit and all negotiations failed, the new place on the other side of the street is just £10k a year and is arguably a little bigger. Obviously they’ve had the hassle of closing down for a few months and moving all their stuff, but now they’re back in business, at least for takeaways, the eat-in part is still being finished.

Great news for me, proper wood fired pizza is back on the menu. Not so great for Firebellys old landlord though, his unit was still empty last time I went by, and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of them down Purely High Street at the moment, maybe he can find a charity shop to take it over, that’s what seems to be happening round the corner on the Brighton Road.

Things you see in Croydon

There’s a grotty looking pub called the Swan & Sugarloaf on South End in Croydon, my bus goes by it those days I work from the Croydon office. I’ve walked by on a few occasions and almost been tempted to go in, but something held me back, possibly my wife’s distaste for some of Croydon's less salubrious hostelries (she grew up in South Croydon), or perhaps it’s my fairly recently acquired bourgouise sensibilities (there was a time I drank in any number of drinking holes where “holes” is a fitting noun)? But I digress, the point is that when the Swan & Sugarloaf changed hands some time back (last year I think?) a banner appeared outside proclaiming “All Pints £2”, with a chalk board above one entrance boasting “£2 Pints” with “Always & For Good” scrawled underneath, yet fairly recently the banner has disappeared, and the message on the chalk board became “All Pints £2.20” with the 20 squeezed in smaller print next to the original, but “Always & For Good” is still there, I wonder if anybody else has noticed?

For a slightly grimmer picture consider this morning when I got off the bus close to West Croydon bus station (grim and West Croydon bus or train station seem inevitably linked somehow), I rested my bag on the wall of the car park at the back of St Michael’s whilst I retrieved my security pass, there on the other side of the iron railings was a bloodied tampon. Makes me wonder about some people!

Stimulus, public spending and faux-Keynesian bollocks

Somebody recently pointed out to me these arguments from Johan Hari and David Blanchflower respectively arguing against cutting public spending in the name of stimulus, but both in their different ways seem a little bit off kilter to me.

I’ll begin with Hari, now he’s not an economist, most of the time he sticks to writing very elegant, very earnest sounding polemics with a callow, hand-wringing, soft-leftist theme, so he can be forgiven for being a bit flaky in what he might pass off as economic analysis, and his contention that were somehow following Keynesian insights in economic policy is very flaky. It’s become trendy to raise in economic matters Keynes recently but there’s nothing particularly Keynesian in economic policy which deficit spends in the good times, the bad times, and the in-between the good and the bad times! The Labour government’s past, present, and future deficit spending isn’t the Keynesianism of Keynes, but rather the faux-Keynesian bollocks of perpetual deficit spending.

Crude comparisons with what other countries debt levels look like is a red herring, UK taxpayers aren’t responsible for the debts of the other countries (although I’m sure there are some Eurocrats working on that), besides this faux-Keynesian bollocks seem to be unclear on the differentiation between structural and cyclical debt, something which probably needs to addressed in the context of the deficit spending that was already going on before the recession.

It also seems au fait at the moment to make claims about financial stimulus without actually being required to show any real evidence of its impact, never mind real evidence that any particular approach to stimulus is the most effective. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that stimulus arguments have a whiff of unfalsifiablility about them; if we come out of recession it’s due to stimulus (regardless of hard evidence), if we don’t then the stimulus wasn’t big enough (again regardless of hard evidence). It’s also often claimed that every recession is different, different contexts, different triggers, and this one is patently different to the Great Depression in its context; yet we should accept as a matter of faith that some insights theorised with hindsight from the Great Depression hold true now regardless of context! I’m sure there some mathematical economic model which says it so, just a shame reality and models have a habit of diverging from one another.

If a true Keynesian policy is about managing aggregate demand in both good and bad times, then it doesn’t necessarily translate into an argument whereby government should be taking increasing amounts of the public’s money (and it is the public’s who pays – now and in the future) and spending it for them via the inefficient state bureaucracy. Yet this is what many public spending stimulus arguments implicitly acknowledge. Admittedly part of the stimulus has been the cutting of taxes e.g. reduced VAT, and the use of subsidies to encourage consumption e.g. car scrappage allowance, so stimulus arguments and propping up state bureaucracies cannot be mutually dependent no matter what some might imply.

But this is really where the political framing of stimulus comes in, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the role of the state is to create to create bureaucracy because bureaucracy gives people things to do. This is where public spending and public services become disingenuously conflated, a conflation which Blanchflower perpetuates with his comments about big versus small government. If you ask the average tax payer do they want their bins emptied, their hospitals cleaned, their children taught by properly trained teachers, their streets patrolled by bobbies on the beat they’ll probably say yes. But if you ask them do they want inefficient bureaucracy simply because it gives people something to do, do they want quangos that act as talking shops for what front-line services actually deliver, or do they want a variety of euphemistically titled non-jobs filled at public expense, then I’m guessing they’ll say no.

So it isn’t surprising that not everyone sees it as in their politically interests to make the distinction between real public service and vested interests being funded by the taxpayer. This is why it’s perfectly acceptable for the people who pay for public spending to question just how much value from it they get, and to ask for hard evidence of the effectiveness of such stimulus, and to laugh at faux-Keynesian bollocks.

As for Blanchflower’s plans to inflate our problems away it’s not too horrific on a personal level, a decline in the real value of my savings would be more than compensated by inflation eating away the real value of my mortgage. I’m also thirty years away from retirement, so no immediate danger there. But I’m not so sure how low interest rates and higher inflation works for my retired grandparents, not so good I’d imagine. And what about those government bonds we need to shift to keep up the deficit spending? How do they fit into higher inflation and low interest rates?

Cameron, policies, and public expectations

On the eve of the Conservative Party Conference it may be worth raising a well worn circular argument often repeated by some on the left that David Cameron has no policies, it’s a circular argument because any policy Cameron reveals is not classed as a “true” policy, and therefore the circular argument is closed by the “no true Scotsman” type logical fallacy. Now I don’t personally think this circular argument is particularly noteworthy as a piece of political analysis in itself, in fact I don’t think it’s any kind of political analysis as far as Cameron’s policy stance is concerned, nor is it likely to be a particularly influential political slur because the only people likely to accept it on faith alone are either committed leftists and those who are a more than a little bit dim (not excluding those who straddle both camps), the former are not going to be voting for Cameron anyway, and my hunch is the latter probably aren’t going to be a decisive factor in the key swing constituencies.

A variant of this argument is that Cameron’s policies are “hollow” in some way, although what this means is seldom evidenced by people making the claim, because like any policy from any opposition politician there’s little in the way of empirical evidence to judge a policy, at best there may be some counterfactual speculative opinions about what policies might have produced, but that’s it really. Maybe they can point to lazy political journalists with even lazier sub-editors, who needing to fill a column, but lacking effort or even capability to complete something genuinely thought provoking reach into the bucket of Cameron clichés, after all those who love this shtick will roll over to have their tummy’s tickled, and those who don’t will at most leave a trail of online comments pointing out how facile it is, driving those all important ad impressions.

But so what? Well, the only thing that’s really interesting about this is the focus on policy, or more specifically the comfort blanket importance sections of the public place on the idea of parties having a “policy” of some sort on almost everything. This is a very real legacy of the New Labour on the political landscape.

To shift away from Old Labour the New Labour project wanted to step away from the idea that Labour was all about the historic core values or ideology of the labour movement, instead it was focused on “what works”, so it deliberately set about creating a bank of “policies” on just about everything, because having an official policy says you’re prepared, you’re pragmatic and you’re definitely not dogmatic because you’ve thought about this. New Labour was the “third way”; it was “what works” it was free from archaic ideological values.

But there are problems with this narrative, having lots of policies in itself means nothing if what you put forward as “policy” is unlikely to ever be implemented, or even more cynically is never intended to be implemented. As long as a specific policy sounds at least superficially plausible then that’s how the public consider it, even if they’re ultra-cynical and think all politicians are liars they still look at the superficial plausibility, and most of the time they leave it at that, the specifics are a matter for the moment, in six month’s time attention will be elsewhere.

But the success of Tony Blair and the New Labour project in selling “policy” to the public means that the public now demand “policy”, or at least what they think a “policy” should be, some coherent sounding statement of intent. Where once policy was something that added definition to core values, political philosophy and ideology, now policy is elevated above all else. It may indeed seem to be a hollow way of doing politics, but this is what the public has been conditioned into accepting, if the want the faux-pragmatism of “policy” without underlying values and this is the landscape that Cameron or any other would be Prime Minister must now operate in.

On celebrity paedophilia

Anyone else find it a bit disturbing that so many high profile figures are expressing outrage at celebrity paedophile Roman Polanski being arrested? My favourite is Robert Harris claiming the arrest of the paedophile is “disgusting treatment”, perhaps all these people should club together and take out a page in The Wall Street Journal explaining why drugging and anally raping a 13 year old girl should not be considered “disgusting treatment”?