Ever since Obama won the election I’ve had an uneasy feeling that Sarah Palin is being underestimated by the US media and political establishments. Frank Rich has come to the same conclusion. “Logic”, he writes,

doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off…

Thoughtful piece in the Economist. It starts from the revelation by a new Pew Research poll which finds that 53% of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, 70% say there is no evidence. Pew goes on to point out that “Disbelief in global warming in the GOP is a recent occurrence. Just a few years ago, in 2007, a 62%-majority of Republicans said there is solid evidence of global warming, while less than a third (31%) said there is no solid evidence. Currently, just 38% of Republicans say there is solid evidence the earth is warming, and only 16% say that warming is caused by human activity.” The article goes on:

It’s one thing to hold the position that rising global temperatures are due to natural variation, not human activity. I consider that position wrong and dangerous, but it’s a dispute over the analysis. But it is simply a fact that the planet is getting warmer. That many people who previously knew this have come to un-know it indicates that people are busy at work promoting ignorance.

Reminds me of Daniel Moynihan’s wonderful principle: everyone is entitled to his own views, but not to his own facts.

One of the most depressing aspects of big news stories is the herd-like way in which mainstream media construct a narrative and then select only the facts that fit that narrative. Part of the narrative of the Irish economic collapse is the factoid that there are 300,000 unfinished or unoccupied houses in the Irish Republic at present. So it’s refreshing to find this careful piece by Bill Nowlan which tries to take a more dispassionate view.

LAST April I wrote a paper on so-called “ghost estates” for the Irish Planning Institute’s annual conference. At that time, the topic was red hot but all the debate was based on media reports, academic number-crunching and hard luck stories – there were no hard facts.

In my paper I called for a detailed survey and analysis so that Government, financiers, academics and planners could separate facts from fiction and develop action policies.

That survey has now been completed by the Department of the Environment It has been a big job with Government inspectors visiting each of just 2,900 estates – but the output is good. It turns out that there was, and is a lot of misinformation about so-called ghost estates. The survey shows that whilst problems do exist with empty and incomplete developments, they are far fewer than media and other reports would have us believe.

The survey identified more than 2,800 housing developments where construction had started but had not been completed.

This translates into just 180,000 housing units for which planning permission exists. Construction had begun on more than 120,000 of these dwellings with 77,000 dwellings completed and occupied.

A further 23,000 homes are completed and vacant. Another 10,000 are part-completed, requiring final fit-out and connection to services. The remaining 10,000 dwellings are at earlier stages of construction, from preliminary site clearance up to wall plate level. The balance are the units which have planning permission but have not been started.

These figures have already been reported – so why am I revisiting the issue? Well I suppose facts make far less interesting reading than much of the speculation to which we were treated for the past 12 months with sensational TV programs and acres of newsprint about disastrous estates with more than 100,000 vacant houses – the implication being that they were so-called ghost estates.

In fact there are only 23,000 new houses built and unoccupied in what I will call new estate developments. This is just 2 per cent of the overall national stock of homes in the country. The number of part-built houses at 10,000 is insignificant, equating to about three months work in a normal property and construction environment.

The survey shows that much of the vacancy in such estates is in western counties and numbers for the greater Dublin area are so low it could be argued that there is a potential shortage of new houses in the area when the economy recovers.

The detail of the survey does not support the idea that there are large numbers of tumbleweed estates. A few do exist but these are mainly outside the areas of normal demand…

If you’re an academic, a parent, a prospective university student in England or even — Godammit — a former Lib Dem voter, then Stefan Collini’s London Review of Books piece on Lord Browne’s attempt to re-engineer an entire higher education system is a must-read. He starts from an observation that many of us had already made — which was the curious way in which the entire subject of the report was portrayed in the media as being just about fees. Collini points out that, in a way, the fees issue is peripheral. What’s important is that the Report proposes

a far, far more fundamental change to the way universities are financed than is suggested by this concentration on income thresholds and repayment rates. Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities). The single most radical recommendation in the report, by quite a long way, is the almost complete withdrawal of the present annual block grant that government makes to universities to underwrite their teaching, currently around £3.9 billion. This is more than simply a ‘cut’, even a draconian one: it signals a redefinition of higher education and the retreat of the state from financial responsibility for it.

What Browne wants is

a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator. His premise is that ‘students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.’ His frequently repeated mantra is ‘student choice will drive up quality,’ and the measure of quality is ‘student satisfaction’. At the moment, he laments, ‘students do not have the opportunity to choose between institutions on the basis of price and value for money.’ Under his scheme, such value will be primarily judged by students in terms of ‘the employment returns from their courses’. Courses that lead to higher earnings will be able to charge higher fees.

Collini is a Professor of English, so it’s hardly surprising that he casts a beady eye on Browne’s use of the language. Consider the sentence in the report which asserts that “Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.” “Looked at more closely”, writes Collini,

this statement reveals itself to be a vacuous tautology because of its reliance on the phrase “want to get”. By definition, individuals are privileged reporters on what they think they want. The sentence could only do the work the report requires of it if it said something more like: ‘Students are best placed to make the judgment about what they should get from participating in higher education.’ But this proposition is obviously false. Children may be best placed to judge what they want to get from the sweetshop, but they are not best placed to judge what they should get from their schooling. University students are, of course, no longer children, but nor are they simply rational consumers in a perfect market.

And then there is Brown’s touching faith in the market. “It is fascinating, and very revealing”, says Collini,

to see how Browne’s unreal confidence in the rationality of subjective consumer choice is matched by his lack of belief in reasoned argument and judgment. The sentence that immediately follows the vacuous one about students’ “wants” reads: “We have looked carefully at the scope to distribute funding by some objective metric of quality; but there is no robust way to do this and we doubt whether the choices of a central funding body should be put before those of students.” It is, first of all, striking that the only alternative envisaged to the random play of subjective consumer choice is an “objective metric of quality”, i.e. some purely quantitative indicator. And second, it is no less striking that instead of allowing that an informed judgment might be based on reasons, arguments and evidence, there are simply the ‘choices’ made by two groups, treated as though they are just two equivalent expressions of subjective preference. We can have the money for a national system of higher education distributed either in accordance with the tastes of 18-year-olds or in accordance with the tastes of a group of older people in London: there’s no other way to do it.

As Collini shows, the Browne report is an astonishingly vacuous document. What struck me most about it — speaking as an engineer — is the engineering mindset that it embodies. Browne owes his ascent in the university world to the patronage of Alec (now Lord) Broers, an engineer who presided over some strange developments in Cambridge university when he was its Vice-Chancellor and who often appeared to be completely mesmerised by Browne. Broers is a successful engineer but in most other respects always seemed to me to resemble Mr Magoo. His 2005 Reith Lectures (tellingly entitled “The Triumph of Technology”) were embarrassingly feeble. Most worryingly, he seemed completely blind to the significance of the humanities. And now, right on cue, comes his protege’s recommendation to cut all of the teaching grant for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in English universities. If the report is implemented, then only those who are rich, cultured or curious enough to shoulder the costs will study these subjects. And British society will be poorer as a result.

And, of course, everyone has been too polite to mention the fact that it was Engineer Browne who, as BP’s CEO, laid the foundations for the company’s disastrous foray into the US, and who then dug the pit for his own downfall by attempting to conceal the origins of a gay relationship. Why, one wonders, was such a booby entrusted with the fate of the British university system? For once, we cannot blame the Con-Dem coalition. The man who gave this particular clock to this particular monkey was Gordon Brown.

This comes from an Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole. He’s writing about a recent interview given by Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister]. But he could have been writing about any member of the UK Con-Dem coalition government.

For two years now, official speech has been a one-way process. The Government decided that it would do things of immense consequence, knowing there was very little public support for those actions. Never in the history of the State has a government adopted policies of such significance in the absence of any kind of public consensus in their favour.

Once you go down that road, real communication ceases. The Government can talk, but it cannot listen. Anything it would be likely to hear – public opinion, objective evidence, expert analysis – would tend to undermine its chosen certainties. So the talk has to be one-way. It has to be aimed, not at engaging in debate, but at getting across the idea that there is nothing to be debated. There are no choices, no alternatives, no legitimate differences. The purpose of all official speech is not to communicate, but to kill communication.

This is why the question hovering over all the fuss around Brian Cowen’s infamous interview is not “was he hung-over” It is Dorothy Parker’s response to the news that president Calvin Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”

If you read the transcript without listening to the voice, Cowen’s interview on Morning Ireland is almost indistinguishable from the one he gave a few days earlier to RTÉ radio’s This Week programme. And that in turn is the same as almost every interview he has given in the last two years.

This is not because Cowen can’t communicate. In private, or on semi-formal occasions, he is articulate and engaging. It is because, as Taoiseach, he must speak a language as dead as Manx or Crimean Gothic. When words are used, not to stimulate discussion, but to deny the possibility of discussion, they die. They wither into verbiage. They become spin that has stopped spinning, propaganda that no one expects to fool anyone. And the first official language of the State is no longer Irish or English, it is this system of empty sounds, spoken into a void.

Whenever politicians invoke TINA (there is no alternative) you know they’re lying. Or kidding themselves. There’s a lot of lying and self-delusion going on at the moment.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

Nick Cohen has a terrific column in today’s Observer about the ludicrous persecution of Paul Chambers for a silly Tweet.

The 27-year-old worked for a car parts company in Yorkshire. He and a woman from Northern Ireland started to follow each other on Twitter. He liked her tweets and she liked his and boy met girl in a London pub. They got on as well in person as they did in cyberspace. To the delight of their followers, Paul announced he would be flying from Robin Hood airport in Doncaster to Northern Ireland to meet her for a date.

In January, he saw a newsflash that snow had closed the airport. “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed,” he tweeted to his friends. “You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

People joke like this all the time. When they say in a bar: “I’ll strangle my boyfriend if he hasn’t done the washing up” or post on Facebook: “I’ll murder my boss if he makes me work late”, it does not mean that the bodies of boyfriends and bosses will soon be filling morgues.

You know the difference between making a joke and announcing a murder, I’m sure. Apparently the forces of law and order do not.

A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers’s work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception.

“Do you have any weapons in your car?” they asked.

“I said I had some golf clubs in the boot,” Chambers told me.”But they didn’t think it was funny. I kept wondering, ‘When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?’ Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.”

The Crown Prosecution Service wanted to charge him under the law’s provisions against bomb hoaxers, a serious measure aimed at a serious public nuisance. But there had been no hoax. Paul Chambers had not caused a panic at the airport or intended to cause a panic. No one in authority knew about the tweet until some busybody decided to report Chambers.

Instead of displaying a little common sense and letting the matter rest, the CPS dug up an obscure section of the 2003 Communications Act, which makes it an offence to send a “menacing message” over a public telecommunications network.

It goes on — and gets worse, to the point where one really is reminded of Kafka. Chambers pleaded ‘not guilty’, but the CPS persuaded the judge that in the context of terrorist violence his tweet should be taken as a genuine threat, whether he was joking or not and whether the airport knew about the “threat” or not.

Chambers was given a criminal record and ordered to pay £1,000 in costs and fines. His employer then fired him. He decided to appeal against his conviction, moved to Northern Ireland to be near his girlfriend, and got another job. His Appeal is due to be heard next Friday, so he warned his new employer that his name would be in the papers and explained why. He was then duly sacked again.

The crazed authoritarianism that lies behind this case is one of the enduring legacies of New Labour, and it is one of the reasons that some of us were glad to see them lose the election. As Nick Cohen says:

The hounding of Paul Chambers stinks of Labour authoritarianism. The prosecuting authorities showed no respect for free speech. They could not take a joke. They carried on prosecuting Chambers even when they knew he was harmless. They turned a trifle into a crime because a conviction helped them hit performance targets. Inside their bureaucratic hierarchies, it was dangerous to speak out against a superior’s stupidity. Better to let an injustice take place than risk a black mark against your name.

If the court condemns the CPS, I can guarantee that Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, will not fire or discipline the prosecutors involved. I doubt if he will even tell them they have undermined support for the anti-terrorist cause.

I don’t care what the polls say or how unpopular the coalition becomes – Labour must change the settled view of the majority of Britons that it is the party of politically correct jobsworths or it will never win another election.

Yep.

Sobering NYT column by Paul Krugman.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out…

Yep. And there’s no indication that Osborne & Co understand this.