the second referendum

•  Rightly or wrongly, the upcoming UK election looks like turning into the long-threatened second referendum. With Labour imploding, the Lib Dems are the obvious second choice and have effectively become the official anti-Brexit party. There is little doubt they would — if they could — deliver non-Brexit, and without being plagued by ambivalence. The Conservatives are in the role of pro-Brexit party but their level of wholeheartedness seems less clear-cut, though there is no doubting the determination of their leader.
   Three years is a long time. Are voters still clear enough on what the Brexit issues are? I know what my own position is, but that is based largely on the illiberality of the EU state, a topic that may not be of much interest to the majority. As far as economics goes, the net effect of EU membership is too difficult to quantify even to say whether it’s positive or negative. There is a lot more to EU policy than free trade, much of it market-distorting.
   Do the people who voted for Brexit in 2016 still care enough to vote for it again? Not much has happened to make the choice any easier. True, it has emerged that the pessimistic warnings of Project Fear were probably wrong. But we have also had plenty of anti-Brexit and anti-Brexiteer propaganda since the referendum. The Brexit movie painted Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings as a hero, but portrayed Leave voters as being of questionable intelligence (see Focus Group scene).
   Undemocratic it may be, to make people choose again, but that's to some extent what we are being presented with. The Conservatives may need to remind voters about the arguments for leaving, if they do not want to see major losses to the Lib Dems. That is, assuming they can sound convincing. If not, it's probably best to stay silent.

•  Journalists regularly remind us that the UK is suffering from a housing crisis, but the interpretations offered tend to reveal confused thinking. If the population rises by half a million every year, the urbanisation process continues, and people increasingly live alone, a chronic housing shortfall is to be expected. Add foreign investment in properties left empty, and the problem becomes extreme. But this phenomenon gets muddled up with the separate issue of wealth inequality and the fact that property ownership has become more concentrated so that more people are having to rent. Attacking the wealth disparity isn't going to solve the housing shortage, but that doesn't stop commentators wanting to blame property owners — baby boomers, the bourgeoisie, etc.
   If the housing stock is too low and most people can only afford to rent, it follows that most new private properties will (at least initially, until the pressure has abated) need to be purchased by the well-off and rented out, in order to alleviate the problem. So perhaps it's the well-off who need to be induced to buy to let, if market demand for new property is to rise sufficiently to make builders want to build. This argument, however, conflicts with egalitarian morality.
   Rather than using carrots to encourage more letting, most commentators prefer the idea of sticks for beating second-home owners: e.g. threatening a higher rate of council tax, or strengthening tenants' rights. The Times's Libby Purves endorses the stick approach, justifying it by referring to

the morally reprehensible idea that in a time of shortage it is OK to treat dwellings as mere investments.

Ms Purves believes (among other things) that we need "better security for all tenants", an approach which seems as likely to exacerbate the shortage problem as to help. The perspective of property owners is airily waved off:

If that scares off amateur landlords, who cares? Let councils buy their assets, cheap.

•  The Sun's Dan Wootton condemns Prince Andrew for seeming "aloof", contrasting HRH's BBC interview unfavourably with Princess Diana's:

[...] Princess Diana's Panorama interview proved without any doubt that she was one of us [...]

The 1995 Panorama programme, featuring Princess Diana's revelations about royal life, seems to have been stage-managed better than Prince Andrew's "car crash" interview. A woman with a sob story is of course an easier sell than a man denying a sex crime. It seems doubtful, however, that Princess Diana thought of herself as "one of us" (unless "us" means people who dislike the Royal Family), just as it seems doubtful that the average left-wing technocrat thinks of the people he supposedly wishes to help as being like himself.
   The belief that they don't think they are special, they realise they are just like us, and only want to help us — a fantasy rarely questioned by even the most cynical journalists — is surely one of the key reasons we have been ruled by leftist governments for the last thirty years. (More about the ideology of the pseudo-egalitarian elite can be found in George Walden's The New Elites, and in my own book The Ideology of the Elites.)
   Prince Andrew seems to have unwisely associated with a number of unsavoury characters over the years. Rather than being too aloof, he may not have been aloof enough.

•  This blog will be back in 2020.

Grenfell Tower

•  According to the Phase 1 Report from the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire, residents of the Tower were initially advised by the Fire Brigade not to evacuate the building. A few residents chose to ignore this advice. With hindsight, it seems it would have been better if they had all ignored it.
   It appears the initial advice of the Fire Brigade would have been appropriate if the building had conformed to required building standards. However, the building did not conform to required standards, rendering it more flammable than expected.
   It has been suggested that ignoring the Fire Brigade’s initial instructions might have had something to do with common sense. It is not clear that there are any conclusions of this kind to be drawn. Anyone, however risk-averse, might well have decided to follow official advice in a situation of this kind. If there are psychological implications, they seem more likely to be about a culture of faith in experts than about common sense.
   We are constantly pressured to consult professionals, with regard to a wide range of everyday matters. To solve our relationship problems, we require relationship counsellors. To solve our psychological problems, we need to to consult the psychiatrically trained. Problems with children require parenting or child counsellors. We are pressured to get tested for possible diseases, and to receive professional advice about the results.
   On the packaging of practically every over-the-counter remedy, there are exhortations to consult your doctor, either before use or in the event of an adverse reaction. Considered in aggregate, these exhortations are grossly unrealistic. Much of the time, the average GP would probably have little to contribute to such cases. If all the warnings given on packaging were rigorously followed, doctors would be even more overwhelmed than they already are.
   The demand that we should believe in the power of expertise, and follow authorised opinion, has the effect of infantilising and disempowering us. We feel we must bow to the superior knowledge of the trained official. We cannot be allowed to think for ourselves, because there is always someone who knows better.
   The cult of the expert is founded on various ideals that do not stand up to scrutiny. E.g. the theory that training necessarily turns someone into a person with superior powers of judgment. In relation to state services, it depends on the thesis that different parts of the bureaucratic machinery can each be relied on to do things in the agreed way, so that one part can safely assume that another part has behaved according to published standards.
   In fact, the various parts of the state apparatus are subject to intense cost pressures, as well as human error. This is before we even consider the lack of economic incentive to operate to standards that go beyond the immediately obvious.
   It is not just the public who are liable to become overconfident about the validity of assertions made by professionals. Professionals themselves are liable to place too much confidence in the assertions of other professionals. Particularly in crisis situations, they may be required to place excessive reliance on mechanical instructions provided by manuals and training courses, rather than on their own judgment.

•  Electable government officials compete for power by offering voters benefits. For example, more social housing. At the same time, voters are reluctant to have their taxes increased to pay for these additional benefits. The result is pressure to achieve readily countable targets (e.g. number of new houses or apartments built) at minimum cost and hence with minimum attention to background safety and durability aspects. Deficits in background aspects will not necessarily be discovered until much later, if at all.
   In the absence of obvious incentives not to cut corners, it falls to government officials to develop an internal culture in which safety is given more priority than is likely to be appreciated by voters in the short term. In this, they need to be supported by the media.
   For example, in relation to the current election campaigns, parties might avoid offering to expand public services unless at the same time they give weight in their campaigns to (a) the effects of any such expansion on taxes and (b) the hidden costs of ensuring that services are provided to an adequate standard. The media might insist that these aspects of social welfare offerings be given adequate attention.
   In particular, the question should be asked whether any expansion in UK social housing should be offered to voters, unless accompanied by a commitment to first investigating all existing social housing, with regard to fire and other risks — and rectifying any problems that are identified.

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wicked individualism #1 — swimming pools

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I discover a review* of two books on swimming pools.
   The following extract, referring to infinity pools, reminds me of the popular claim that we live in the "age of the selfie", allegedly a time of heightened "individualism" or "solipsism", usually meant pejoratively. The implication is that we used to live in a time of greater communitarian values — a nostalgia myth that has been around since at least the eighteenth century.

We now live in the age of the infinity pool. The bright curves, sugary tints and gay social melee of the 20th century have given way to darker, squarer tubs where the edge of the pool is designed (at least in theory) to vanish into the horizon.

The jolly bourgeois riot of collective public bathing has yielded to an immersive solipsism at once outward and inward: the infinity pool bather often looks away from others to snap a selfie showcasing the view behind them.

Kelly is one of the few humans to appear in Splash, photographed standing at the edge of a Balinese infinity pool, gazing out to sea, her back to the camera. Hers is a voyeuristic album of an invisible elite's sparkling private paradises, utopias whose very form disavows social context.

"Disavowing social context"? Sounds faintly immoral.
   Technology changes, as do the goods and experiences that are available; human nature, not so much. Commentators on individualism like to focus on the areas where people seem to be doing things more by themselves than they used to, and tend to ignore other areas that have become more crowdified.

* James Delbourgo, 'From Here to Infinity', reviewing:
Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool by Annie Kelly, and
The Swimming Pool in Photography by Francis Hodgson.