"Dutch voters… halt the wave of populist successes that delivered Brexit and President Trump"

Emailed in by MBK, from The Times.

“It is an evening when the Netherlands after Brexit, after the American elections, said ‘Stop’ to the wrong kind of populism,” a beaming Mr Rutte told supporters last night in the Hague.

Richard Ambler, in the comments:

Really? Are we looking at the same figures?

Mr Wilders, was on course to win 19 seats, an increase of over 25%
Mark Rutte, the centre-right prime minister lost over 25% of his seats
Labour, lost 28 of 38 MPs or lost nearly 75% of their seats

This equally could qualify was a massive swing away from the centre left towards the far right… This blatantly biased piece of reporting tries to hide this swing and refer to Mr. Wilders as a populist, extremist who must be stopped at all costs and then tries to present this result as his humiliation.

Are Our Maps Upside Down?

I was watching a generic History of Britain - Viking Era documentary recently and one of the throw away lines was that the Norman Invasion changed Britain's orientation from North towards Scandinavia to South towards France.

For various strategic reasons the orientation has stayed that way for a very long time. But Britain, and more so in the best parts (i.e. the stabby northern parts from whence I hail), is not really like France and Spain towards which it is pointed on most maps. Britain is a lot more like the Netherlands (the last successful invader I guess) Germany (the last successful dynastic transplant) and Scandinavia.  

And if you turn the map upside down, the fit seems much more natural, with France and pensioner depository Spain much further away than as are consciously considered. 

I am not suggesting that a guerrilla army be formed to storm every school and turn around maps (hmmm, or am I?). But it is an interesting thought as to how something mundane and arbitrary can shape our perception of the world.

Home-Owner-Ism compared

While looking through some articles on the web, I came across this little paper; a conference submission from 2007 on: "HOUSING CONSUMPTION AND RISK SOCIETIES: HOMEOWNERSHIP AS A MEDIATOR OF RISK IN BRITAIN, JAPAN AND THE NETHERLANDS".

Not really that juicy, but the extract of some of the responses from the different countries speaks for itself:

6.2 GOOD INVESTMENT OR SECURE ASSET

I: Do you think this house has been a good investment?

M: I don’t think so at all. We knew at the time we bought this place that the prices were going down.

I don’t really expect them to recover too much either, but it is quite important to maximize the performance of this house. You might feel that it is better to own a house than renting even though the value has gone down
(Japan, home-owner, male, 37).

It all happened by chance, not that we thought beforehand that we could make a killing by selling. In fact, you weren’t at all sure whether buying the house on Parklaan was a good idea, or if the price we paid wasn’t too high. Looking back, it turned out to be a good decision, but that...

Not speculating at all. No, it all happened to pass off very well, not as we expected. We couldn’t have anticipated it. I didn’t realise that the market would...Well, it just exploded. We sold at the right time.
(The Netherlands, home-owner, male, 59)

I think it is the only possible way of making decent money in the long-term, there are no get-rich schemes, you can’t do that, the stock market is not worth investing in, pension schemes aren’t worth you putting your money...

And also you can buy properties with other people’s money, whereas if you invest in stocks or shares or in a pension scheme every single penny has to be your own money, but if you are buying an asset like property you can borrow up to 85% of the cost and in ten years time when it has doubled in value, that’s all yours, so your money is worth 11 times what it was worth 10 years ago...And in the meantime someone else services the debt.
(UK, home-owner, male, 33)

"Yet the really interesting thing about the tulip boom is that it did not end in universal disaster..

From Andrew Marr's A History Of The World (not the best book ever but well worth £4 if you can plough through it quickly enough so as not to get confused by the fine detail):

... or even in the widespread bankruptcy of Dutch speculators. The Estates General which ran the republic refused to take special measures, and passed the problem back to the civic authorities.

Many towns, in their turn, refused to process or hear any court actions involving the tulip trade, carrying on as if none of it had really happened and allowing the paper losses and the paper gains to wipe each other out.

If the dreams of sudden enrichment were snatched away, so were the nightmares of destitution.

This concept is of much wider application of course and I have alluded to it often enough.

[Thoroughly Tasteless] Reader's Letter Of The Day

I'm surprised that The Metro printed this one:

Housemates who slam doors in the late hours. Should I moan or just give them a copy of Anne Frank's diary as a helpful guide to being quiet?

Jo, Bristol.

Population Density Fun

From The Daily Mail:

England is now the most overcrowded country (1) in Europe... Officials said that by next year England will have 402.1 people for every square kilometre, overtaking the figure of 398.5 in Holland and 355.2 in Belgium... (2)

Recent EU figures have shown that Britain accounted for nearly a third of the total increase in population across the whole of Europe last year (3), with 412,000 extra people in this country in 2009.

Whitehall has also acknowledged that 100,000 new homes will be required each year for the next 25 years to cope with the growth of population as a direct result of immigration. (4)

The figures have underlined concerns over the effects of rising population on transport and housing (5), and on both cities and countryside, as numbers rise towards the officially predicted level of 70 million by 2029.

James Clappison, Tory MP for Hertsmere, said: 'Population density of such a level is an issue which politicians must address. Immigration is the major driver of population increase.' (6)

Two can play at that game:

1) 'The most overcrowded' is a tautology at best.

2) As I've said before: "From Wiki, UK population 61 million, surface area 94,526 sq miles = 645/sq mile (249/sq km). Not spectularly high, so they strip out S, NI and W and look at England only. From Wiki, population 51 million, surface area 50,346 sq miles = 1,000/sq mile (391/sq km).

But why don't we go one further and strip out Greater London? English population (excl. GL) 43.5 million, surface area 49,727 sq miles = 874/sq mile (342/sq km). That gets us down to well below The Netherlands and only a quarter of Malta's density."

Conversely, Greater London has a population density of 10,596/sq mile. If a high population density were such a terrible thing, then nobody would want to live there, would they?

3) Which underlines the point that it's net immigration from outside the EU that's behind this, which is entirely self-inflicted.

4) I cheerfully agree that Labour were letting in far too many of the wrong sort of people, but, being The Daily Mail, they merrily ignore another factor that is just as important: increases in life expectancy.

The UK population pyramid at the ONS shows the number of people aged 60 or under going up from 46 million to 52 million between 1971 and 2029, which is a compound annual increase of 0.2% [=(52/46)^(1/58). The number of people aged over 60 goes up from 10 million to 19 million over the same period, a compound annual increase of 1.1% [=(19/10)^(1/58)].

And how much housing would we need to build to accommodate an extra 9 million people in 58 years? Call it 1.5 old folk per home = 6 million homes, which is just over 100,000 per year.

5) What 'pressure on transport'? Seeing how many bus or train drivers are fairly recent immigrants, we'd be in a bigger mess if they all left.

As to 'pressure on housing', see (4). Is building 100,000 new homes, i.e. expanding our housing stock by 0.3% every year (=100,000/27,000,000) really that terrible, seeing as it'll be recent immigrants doing a lot of the actual work?

Even if we leave the floodgates open (which I do not recommend) and have to build 200,000 homes a year (for the immigrants and to accommodate for the additional old folk), that's an increase of 0.6% a year, against compound annual increase in overall population of 0.4% per year between 1971 and 2029 [=(71/56)^(1/58)], big deal.

6) No it's not. See (4).

UPDATE: Adam Collyer dissects a similarly hysterical article in The Torygraph, illustrated with some bonus Top A-Level Totty.

Pantomime time: Oh yes it is!

From today's Times*:

Residents say that vast sheds for South American alpacas and free-range chickens now fill fields once occupied by sheep and cows. A new track wider than the lane it runs alongside has been built without planning permission and excavators are digging “stock ponds” and land drains in a boggy meadow once filled with wild flowers.... They have put a mobile home on the site for two agricultural workers and converted a neighbouring barn into offices....

The Cotswolds stone farmhouse of Deborah Jones, an illustrator, was damaged when the mobile home was taken along the narrow lane on the back of a lorry. She said: “We are not just worried about what their ultimate intentions are for this land, it is not suitable for the sort of intense agricultural use they claim to want to put it.”

Dude, WTF?

I'd strongly suspect that these people have bought the land precisely because it was suitable for more 'intense agricultural use' than the rather more picturesque sheep and cows. If they can make more money from alpacas and free-range chickens that sheep and cows, then why should they be prevented from doing so?

NIMBYs can of course never admit that what they do is out of naked self-interest, and one of their favourite excuses is that they want to protect 'Britain's food security'. They cheerfully ignore that barely one-tenth of the UK is developed and that eight or ninety per cent is agricultural land; or that with all the improvements in agricultural methods we have made, the UK could easily be self-sufficient in food (assuming a slightly more monotonous diet); or that if we used more land for industrial purposes, the value of the additional industrial output would enable us to buy ten times as much food from abroad as we would lose in domestic food production capacity etc etc.

But these new owners are doing their bit for 'food security' and what thanks do they get?

Another of the NIMBYs' mantras is that 'Britain is a crowded island'. I wish they could lift their gaze to across the North Sea to to The Netherlands, which is rather more densely populated; is a net food exporter and where people have larger and cheaper houses. Sure, their countryside is covered in poly-tunnels and greenhouses, so what? What's better - greenhouses and poly-tunnels and 'food security' or a stifled economy and 'food miles'?

Finally, I do not dispute for a second that amenity value is important. Of course we should have parks and playgrounds in urban areas rather than selling them off for housing or factories, but reserving ten per cent of urban land for parks and playgrounds is rather a different matter to small groups of rural Home-Owner-Ists, who might only own a few acres between them, dictating the uses to which the thousands of acres which surround them may be put.

So why not let him who pays the piper call the tune? If they don't want the land to be used for alpacas and free-range chickens, then they should club together and buy up the land and accept the lower rental income from a farmer who is restricted to sheep and cows only.

(Of course, Land Value Tax would sort this out much more efficiently, but that is another topic.)

* See also Tim W.
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UPDATE: Joseph Takagi in the comments links to this fine article of four years ago:

Bill Wiggin, MP for Leominster, Herefordshire, and the party's agriculture spokesman, said it was "unfair" that his constituents had no say over where polytunnels for growing strawberries and other fruit and vegetables were put up... He refuses to eat strawberries grown in polytunnels because he says that every strawberry bought adds to the amount produced under seas of plastic that have become a problem for his constituents, some of whom have lost 25 to 30 per cent from the value of their homes.

Some 'agriculture spokesman'. eh?

Another one bites the dust

Via EU Referendum, it appears that the fairly nationalist/authoritarian Polish president has died in an air crash.

Is it just me, or do these things tend to happen to right-wingers, e.j. Jörg Haider, Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, or going further back, Wolfgang Schäuble who was shot in the back and has since been in a wheelchair and Airey Neave? And of course the IRA had a pop at the whole Tory Cabinet back in 1984.

The only leftie I can think of who was assassinated/murdered in recent times is Anna Lindh.

UPDATE: Dearieme adds Olof Palme to the list, also in Sweden. Maybe the rules are inverted in that country?

Iceland & democracy

This whole "Iceland reneging on its promise to refund UK and Dutch governments for the money it refunded its own savers" story seems to have split opinions somewhat:

John B sums up the facts neatly (as ever, you can seldom fault him for factual inaccuracy) and concludes: "If that’s democracy, screw it."

Witterings links to this via this and concludes: "Isn't that how democracy is supposed to work? Politicians say yes, people say no - people win. Simples."

To be fair, the missing bit is that UK taxpayers didn't have a say in the UK government's decision to bail out these frankly reckless 'savers' in the first place, but hey. To my mind the fight is between these savers and Icelandic banks; there was no overriding need for governments or taxpayers to get involved in the first place. The people in charge of local councils' investment policies who risked taxpayers' money in this way ought to be sued for negligence or misuse of public funds or something.

"Australia coastal living at risk"

More complete and utter bollocks from the BBC:

Australians may have to leave coastal areas as rising sea levels threaten homes, according to a new report.

The parliamentary committee report says urgent action is needed, as seas are expected to rise by 80cm (31 inches). (1)

About 80% of Australians live in coastal areas, and the report recommends new laws banning further development in coastal regions. (2)

Correspondents say the authorities are divided over whether to retreat from rising seas or defend the coastline. (3)

The report, entitled Managing Our Coastal Zone in a Changing Climate, urges the authorities to consider "the possibility of a government instrument that prohibits continued occupation of the land or future building development on the property due to sea hazard". (4)

It estimates that Aus$150bn ($137bn) worth of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms in future years." (5)

(1) OK, let's assume sea levels actually rose by 31". How many properties are built less than 31" above sea level? Relatively few, I'd guess.

(2) They live where it's nicest to live, i.e. near the beach and near a large town, rather than in the Outback.

(3) That's a straightforward economic decision. Costs and benefits. It's up to property owners in any particular area to decide which they prefer (and pay for it via an earmarked Land Value Tax, if a majority are in favour, to match costs and benefits). See also Netherlands.

(4) Dude, WTF? If people believe that sea levels will rise, they will prefer to build or buy on higher ground, the markets will sort it out. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong - it's like insurance.

(5) This is the crowning glory of nonsense, of course. Property prices in Australia are (apparently) even higher than in the UK, so the rebuild cost of all that property might be a quarter of the figure mentioned. The rest of it is location value.

Did nobody watch Superman? Lex Luthor's cunning plan was to start an earthquake that would see most of California fall into the ocean. As a result of this, the land he'd bought further inland would then become coastline and rocket in value. So with Australia, the total location value would not (necessarily) be destroyed, it would just move somewhere else, wherever all the people and businesses move.

Geert Wilders

Fun Online Poll Results & that Dutch lass who wants to go sailing

Hmm.

In last week's Fun Online Poll, a surprising 44% of respondents said they were angered and repulsed by the reception given to al-Megrahi on his return to Libya, with 56% saying they weren't (there wasn't a middle option or a "don't know/don't care" option). I personally don't see what there is to be particularly upset about, but hey, that's why I ran the poll.
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Rantin' Rab got a decent debate going on the topic of whether it was right for the Dutch authorities to prevent Laura Dekker* from trying to sail round the world single handed at the age of 13 or 14. Those who commented (including me) seemed to agree that she should be allowed, on the basis of "What's the worst that can happen?"

So that's the topic of this week's Fun Online Poll, "Would you allow Laura Dekker to try and sail round the world single-handed?".

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

* Whose father and mother are no doubt known as 'Desmond' and 'Blackand'.

"Ireland risks splitting EU, says adviser to Sarkozy"

I said back in March that an Irish "No" might be The Beginning Of The End. Going by the tone of this article*, perhaps history will prove me right.**

I like this paragraph best:

He said it was a mistake for the Government to hold a referendum on Lisbon and described such plebiscites as "tools for dictators" as evidenced by European history. "If you hold 10 or 12 referendums and in every state there is 80 per cent support for an idea there is still only a less than 1 per cent probability that the measure will pass everywhere," he said.

Wot?

"Dictatorships"? Like Switzerland, Norway, Ireland ...?

The maths is out. What he means is "if there is an 80 per cent probability of each referendum resulting in a 'yes'", in which case, the probability of all 12 referenda resulting in a 'yes' is just under 7% (+0.8^12).

And where does this "80 per cent" come from? IIRC we've had three referenda so far*** (France, Netherlands, Ireland) and all three have resulted in a 'no'.

* Via Denis Cooper.

**^TMSigue Sigue Sputnik

*** Update, oops, I forgot about referenda in Luxembourg and Spain, who both voted 'Yes'