Raise a glass to the right experts

The temperance movement hasn't had a boost like this since prohibition.

A major new international study on the health risks of alcohol, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, in Seattle, was published last week in The Lancet. "The safest level of drinking is none," the authors concluded. "Our results point to a need to revisit alcohol control policies and health programmes, and to consider recommendations for abstention."

But if nonsense was graded like alcohol, this would be 100 proof. The authors are making statements and policy recommendations their own findings do not support.

The study's results show the risk of developing an alcohol associated health illness such as heart disease or diabetes over the course of a year for non drinkers, is 0.914 per cent. For those who consume a single drink daily, the risk increases to 0.918 per cent. Two drinks per day raises the risk to...0.977 per cent.

So, among 100,000 people consuming two drinks per day, 63 more would be expected to develop health problems, relative to a group of 100,000 teetotallers.

The implication of the results is not that we should embrace teetotalism, but that the health risks of moderate daily alcohol consumption are, in fact, extremely small. One of the report's authors, Professor Sonia Saxena of Imperial College London, reflected none of this in her comments to the media.

"Most of us in the UK drink well in excess of safe limits and as this study shows, there is no safe limit. The recommendations need to come down further, and the government needs to rethink its policy," she said.

Let's skip over the Lewis Carroll style paradox of being able to drink more than a nonexistent safe limit, and consider what UK government health recommendations on alcohol actually are.

In 2016, the government cut the levels of recommended alcohol for men and women to no more than 14 units per week, that's six pints of average strength beer or seven glasses of wine. So roughly around one drink a day, which is what the study suggests is barely more risky than not drinking at all. That means government policy is, in fact, appropriate. One could argue it's excessive, given the small relative risk increase associated with two drinks per day.

What lessons can we learn from this debacle? The lesson for researchers is, obviously, to be extremely careful not to make claims that are not clearly supported by their work.

The likelihood is these authors, focusing on the unquestionably severe health harms associated with high alcohol consumption, believed they had a moral responsibility to overegg their findings.

Perhaps they were worried by mixed messages coming out of other recent research suggesting moderate alcohol intake was beneficial. Perhaps they feared a slippery slope to mass binge drinking.

Whatever their motivation, the decision to call for total abstention was a mistake. And there seems to be a particular problem with this kind of overreaching in public health research - where the "x causes cancer" story has become ubiquitous, often based on rather tenuous or ambiguous results.

The line separating science from advocacy is inevitably blurry and we shouldn't be overly strict about policing it. Yet these authors pretty clearly went too far and, sadly, have probably inflicted damage on the credibility of the wider scientific research community as a result.

What about the lesson for the public? There will be, doubtless, those who say this shows one shouldn't trust scientists, because they have a hidden social or political agenda. So ignore the overwhelming consensus on climate change. Don't listen to economists on Brexit. Follow your guts instead, or whichever non expert politician speaks most convincingly to your prejudices.

That would be folly. The right conclusion is not to disregard expert advice, but to make greater efforts to heed relevant experts, specifically those who can put raw results in an appropriate context.

The Lancet authors might be experts on the epidemiology of alcohol harm but they are not experts on risk and its evaluation. The fact their paper does not even state the absolute risks of alcohol consumption, and only publishes the relative risks - which is bad statistical practice and a breach of The Lancet's guidelines - was a warning sign.

David Spiegelhalter, professor for the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, has led criticism of the alcohol study's scaremongering, improving what would otherwise have been woefully misleading media coverage.

The risks of getting bad expert advice are real enough. But the risks of listening to no expert advice at all, are far greater.

Brexit ideology will be bad for exports

If visions from ministers were effective in boosting UK exports we would long ago have surpassed the £1 trillion target set by George Osborne when he was chancellor.

Last year we managed total overseas sales of £616bn, according to the latest official data. With just three years to go before we were supposed to hit the magic £1 trillion figure, we need exports to grow at an average annual rate of 17 per cent. So only triple the average rate of 5 per cent achieved since the turn of the millennium.

Could it be a sign of intruding realism that the trade secretary Liam Fox has quietly dropped the £1 trillion target and replaced it not with a nominal target for exports, but a target as a share of GDP? Fox, in a speech yesterday, said he wants total UK exports to be equivalent to 35 per cent of GDP, up from the current share of around 30 per cent. That at least gives him the opportunity of hitting the mark via a big UK recession and consequent collapse in GDP even if exports sales don't actually budge.

The past eight years have been a nightmare for the Greek economy, but its exports as a share of its (collapsing) GDP have leapt from 20 per cent to 32 per cent.

But then perhaps realism hasn't yet breached the walls of the trade department because Fox is still burbling vacuously about the great trade "opportunity" presented by Brexit.

There's something supremely frustrating about hearing Fox rabbit on about the potent'exporting superpower'ial of selling more luxury goods to the Chinese when the preeminent trade challenge over the coming years for the UK is simply standing still.

Leave aside, for a moment, the question of our future trade arrangements with our dominant commercial partner, the EU. We also urgently need to "grandfather" the 50-odd existing trade deals between the EU and other countries, from Mexico, to South Korea, whose coverage the UK will fall out of after the post-Brexit transition ends at the end of 2020.

This is by no means a simple task, either politically or technically, as Peter Holmes and Michael Gasiorek of the UK Trade Policy Observatory have painstakingly explained. Some countries may seek to extract concessions from the UK as a price of rolling them over. And then there's a planet sized headache over "rules of origin", relating to finished exports made with components from third countries.

The details are too complicated to outline here but the bottom line is that successfully grandfathering these trade agreements would require the agreement not only of the UK and the third countries involved, but of the EU as well.

There was not a word on any of that in Fox's speech. Instead we got a cargo container of spurious assertions.

Fox spoke as if world trade intensity is booming. But it's not. Since the global financial crisis a decade ago trade as a share of global GDP has actually fallen from 60 per cent to 55 per cent. And then there's Donald Trump's trade war and the White House's attempts to undermine the World Trade Organisation, which Brexiteers routinely herald as the UK's safety net in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Again, all this seems to have passed our chronically incurious trade secretary by.

So does the fact that the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government's own official forecaster, expects the UK's share of global trade to stagnate, not grow, over the coming years. We should probably just be relieved he didn't call the OBR traitors, trying to sabotage Brexit Britain.

But the fact is that only an incorrigible ideologue could survey the horizon in 2018 and see a vista of burgeoning trade opportunities.

The views of Fox on the Brexit negotiations are of little value given he's been kept well away from them by Theresa May. But, when asked about them yesterday, he offered this warning: "If the European Union decides that it wants to put...the ideological purity of the bureaucracy of Brussels ahead of the wellbeing of the people of Europe, it will send a very big signal to the rest of the world about exactly where Europe is heading." But the fetish for ideological purity belongs not to Brussels, but to the Brexiteers.

And that, alas, shows the direction they're dragging us.

Why posh white men get more second chances

One of the salient features of Boris Johnson's career is just how many second chances he's been given over the years.

He fabricated a quote when he worked at The Times, a mortal sin for a journalist. He was fired, but rapidly popped up at The Telegraph as if nothing had happened.

As an MP, he later brazenly lied to his party leader over an affair, got fired as a shadow minister, but was later selected as the Conservative candidate for London mayor. As foreign secretary he endangered a British citizen imprisoned in Iran through sheer incompetence. He wasn't fired.

The list goes on and on. Perhaps it's a class thing.

The former Test Match Special cricket commentator Henry Blofeld, an Old Etonian like Johnson, was much loved. But he often made basic mistakes, including misidentifying players.

As my colleague Jonathan Liew pointed out in a memorable article, it's hard to imagine that someone younger, someone without Blower's grand social background, would have lasted so long.

Or is it a gender thing? Charlotte Hogg felt she had to resign last year from a senior role at the Bank of England after failing to follow the code of conduct she had set, as its chief operating officer, for declaring interests, specifically failing to record that her brother worked for Barclays.

By coincidence, around the same time, it emerged that Barclays' chief executive, Jes Staley, had been trying to root out a whistleblower, disregarding the rules of the bank. But Staley wasn't required to resign.

The outcome was a fine, a bonus cancellation and a slap on the wrist from the regulator.

Or perhaps such double standards are a race thing? As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written of Donald Trump: "The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape, fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House."

It certainly feels that some people have more leeway than others; that there's more indulgence when they break the rules; that different standards apply.

A new study by Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru - which looks at how women working in US financial advisory services are treated relative to men when they break the rules - backs up this intuition.

The researchers found that women face a harsher punishment for similar misconduct. Men also get a second chance in the industry much more than women. The paper's authors call it a "gender punishment gap".

But they found a similar effect for ethnic minority workers. African and Hispanic workers tend to get more severely punished for similar misdemeanours to white financial advisors.

Every large organisation nowadays proclaims its commitment to non-discrimination. Are they lying? Is it cynical public relations flannel? Perhaps in some cases. But not necessarily. The bias may be unconscious.

We've all seen how women can be somehow valued less than men, even when doing the same job.

Superiors seem to have trouble envisioning ethnic minorities as managers, despite their ambition. And when those workers err, they don't get the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the researchers found more evidence of double standards in companies with fewer female and ethnic minority managers.

This is one of the reasons ethnic, gender and social class diversity in management is beneficial. It can short circuit the programme of unconscious bias of a management "in-group" when it comes to treatment of staff, whether it's in relation to punishment, pay or promotion.

But this is a tough nut to crack. Like tends to hire and promote like. As most of us probably know, office politics often dominate merit when it comes to elevation. That cements a management's composition and also its biases.

In the end, it's about power. Inequalities of treatment stem from inequalities of power within an organisation. You'll know when an institution is serious about tackling the former when it takes serious steps to rectify the latter.

Tory actions speak louder than words on social housing

"I don't understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing - it just creates Labour voters."

Nick Clegg doesn't recall whether it was David Cameron or George Osborne who uttered these words.

But he knows it was one of them. Why? Because he was sitting across the table from them in one of the coalition's "guad" meetings when this nugget of unguarded Tory honesty slipped out.

The former deputy prime minister is in no doubt that this represented the cynicism-drenched view of the Conservative leadership on social housing and its residents, going all the way back to Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy revolution in 1980.

Have things changed? Ministers, scarred by the eruption of anger over the treatment of social housing tenants and government housing policy in general in the wake of the Grenfell disaster, want us to think so.

"Regardless of whether you own your home or rent in the social sector, residents deserve security, dignity and the opportunities to build a better life," says the communities secretary James Brokenshire.

The new green paper on social housing talks of "tackling stigma", "empowering residents" and "ensuring homes are safe and decent". All sorely needed. But then there's the kicker: "expanding supply".

What better way for the Conservatives to bury the perception that they secretly regard social housing tenants as Labour-voting deadbeats than by creating more of them? But will they? Despite colossal pent-up demand - more than a million households have been on social housing waiting lists for at least a decade - the coalition deliberately ran down construction rates of homes for social rent.

The Conservatives, governing alone, have carried on with the policy since 2015. Official figures show that just 5,380 new homes for social rent were created in 2016-17, down from around 40,000 in 2010-11.

Cameron and Osborne devised a new category of social housing called "affordable rent", which essentially means subsidised housing that is more expensive for tenants without being quite as dear as open market rents. It was essentially an indirect means of reducing government funding for social housing (although it didn't contribute to cutting the deficit because it simply meant tenants needed to claim more in housing benefit to pay their rent).

The supply of new affordable-rent homes rose from zero in 2010-11 to 24,350 in 2016-17. But even if one adds new affordable rent to new social rent the supply of subsidised rental housing is still around a third lower than it was six years ago.

Kit Malthouse is the new housing minister, the eighth in eight years. He admitted yesterday that the annual supply of new social rent housing by 2021 is not likely to rise above 12,500. Which is not terribly surprising given the government, despite many flashy pledges of new funding, has not announced any major additional grants for social landlords to enable them to ramp up construction.

And the Treasury is still resisting pleas to scrap the borrowing limit on local authorities, something needed to enable them to start building council housing in serious volumes again, as they did between the Second World War and the 1980s.

There is a vigorous debate taking place among economists over whether increasing national housing construction rates to 300,000 a year, as the government is targeting, will actually have a significant impact on house prices. But regardless of the impact on house prices, it's clear that the UK needs more and better quality social housing, whether from housing associations or councils.

There are some 80,000 households in temporary private accommodation because councils cannot house them permanently, up 64 per cent since 2010. And those who have secured social housing are more likely to be overcrowded than they were a decade ago.

The numbers of families living in unsuitable private rented accommodation has shot up, as home ownership rates have collapsed. Many of them would be better off in social housing - and that is what hundreds of thousands of them say that they want.

Given that there are around 4 million subsidised rental homes, many of which will need to be replaced due to age, Malthouse's pathetic projected levels of new supply are essentially a prescription for the sector to wither.

Words are cheap. Creating more social housing isn't. Ministers will rightly be judged on what they actually deliver.

Turkey's economic crisis is a glimpse into the future of Trump's America

The charismatic president wins elections, but he's also an unabashed authoritarian.

He fires up his predominantly rural and religiously conservative base with populist and divisive rants. He trashes multilateral institutions and insults nations that displease him. He puts his relatives in positions of power. He propagates idiotic economic theories. He complains about interest rate hikes by the independent central bank.

Donald Trump? No, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey.

Erdogan proclaims that phrases such as "democracy, freedom and rule of law" have "absolutely no value any longer". Trump describes the media as the "enemy of the people" and attacks judicial decisions with which he disagrees. Erdogan has appointed his son-in-law, Berat Albayrak, as finance minister. Trump's 37-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is his "senior advisor".

Erdogan believes, despite all the evidence in the world, that low interest rates curb inflation, rather than stoking it. Donald Trump thinks, contrary to the view of every credible economist, that the US trade deficit can be eliminated by tariff hikes and trade wars, and that a current account surplus represents some kind of a national economic victory.

Erdogan says the United Nations has "collapsed" and describes the Dutch as "Nazi remnants". Trump labels the World Trade Organisation a "disaster" and talks of "shithole countries" in Africa.

Erdogan describes high interest rates as "the mother and father of all evil" and pledges to "take responsibility" for such issues. Trump says he's "not happy" about the Federal Reserve putting up the cost of borrowing.

The big difference between the two men? That, for Erdogan, the economic reckoning for all this populist destruction has arrived. The Turkish lira is in free fall. After Erdogan's interference with its independence, few trust the central bank to be allowed to do what is necessary to restore calm to foreign exchange markets. The son-in-law finance minister lacks any credibility. This is what happens when you undermine independent institutions, trample over norms of good governance, ignore expert advice and give free rein to nepotism.

Turkey is, of course, in a profoundly different place from the US. The failed coup in 2016 was what accelerated Erdogan's march into autocracy. Opponents of Trump are not locked up, unlike in Turkey.

Journalists are not jailed in the US, unlike in Turkey. Yet things can unravel remarkably quickly.

Just 14 years ago, Turkey's institutions were considered to be of such sufficient quality - with its politics, too, moving rapidly in the right direction - that EU membership was a serious proposition. In 2006 even one Boris Johnson was making the case for its entry into the club. In those days Erdogan took advice from technocrats and experienced, credible political figures such as Ali Babacan and Mehmet Simsek. Few predicted he would morph into today's demagogue.

Now consider the US's trajectory under Trump. Degrading conduct by the president that would have been jaw-dropping from any of his predecessors has become routine. Republicans turn a blind eye to behaviour that would have sent them running to start impeachment proceedings had it come from Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton (or Hillary).

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, as philosopher and economist Adam Smith once told us. By that, he meant that it's usually premature to announce that a country is finished. Nation states can cope with a great deal of stupidity and corruption from their leaders and folly from their populations.

There's momentum in an economy. Foreign capital continued to sluice into Turkey in great volumes despite Erdogan's authoritarian turn. The US economy is growing at its fastest rate in years, partly thanks to the decent foundation from the Obama years and partly thanks to Trump's unfunded tax cuts.

Unemployment is at its lowest in two decades. The stock market is booming. Yet there comes a point when the ground gives way. And when the breakdown happens, it can happen very fast.

Turkey, under Erdogan, appears to have reached that point. How long will it be before America does the same? To have posed that question only two years ago would have seemed absurd. Alas, thanks to Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, no longer.

Thanks to austerity the modern policeman's lot is not a happy one

A policeman's lot is not a happy one. 

If Gilbert and Sullivan were writing today would they cite not only the "enterprising burglar" and his "felonious little plans" but also the misery of payday loans and the need to take a second job as a driving instructor? 

According to a new survey by the Police Federation, almost half its members worry about their finances and 12 per cent feel they don't get paid enough to cover essentials. 

Eight per cent of respondents say they have taken a second job - up from six per cent of those surveyed last year. That implies around 10,000 police officers are doing something on the side to make extra money, whether taxi driving, plumbing or fitness training.

"[It] clearly cannot be right or acceptable that those employed to keep the public safe cannot make ends meet or put food on tables for their families," says John Apter, the Federation's chair.

Apter also links government cuts to rising violent crime rates. "We are in crisis and that is a direct result of the pressure the government has put on by a reduction in funding," he says.

That's a verdict echoed by Labour, which has pledged to recruit an extra 10,000 officers by 2022.

It's not particularly surprising to see the Federation pressing for more money for members. The police are part of a swelling chorus of public sector anger over eight long years of government-imposed pay restraint.

Is the police service in as dire a condition as the Federation claims? And is government austerity to blame? The data point unambiguously to a major squeeze. Spending on individual forces in England and Wales is down by between 10 and 20 per cent. The number of full-time equivalent police officers has collapsed from a peak of 144,000 in 2009 to 123,000 last year.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the median annual pay of a police officer last year was £ 40,616. In 2010 it was £ 38,464. That's a rise of 6 per cent. But prices have risen 15 per cent over the same period, meaning officers' real terms average pay has fallen by close to 10 per cent.

Are drastic cuts in numbers responsible for recent increases in violent crime? Are real terms pay reductions creating a demoralised and increasingly ineffective force? It's difficult to be categorical. Looking back over recent decades, there's no clear correlation between police numbers and reported crime. Police numbers and funding rose strongly in the 2000s, when recorded crime was falling. But that was a continuation of a longer term trend which began in the mid-1990s and which was seen across the Western world.

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows no clear association since 2010 between the scale of cuts in each force and key performance measures from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Yet a rise in reported stress levels among officers certainly coincides with the cuts. The recent disturbing spike in violent crime such as robberies is also consistent with police forces being overstretched.

A leaked internal report from the Home Office suggested the fall in police numbers "may be an underlying driver". The most recent independent police pay review report highlighted a "significant reduction" in new recruits in 2016.

And the new home secretary, Sajid Javid, has broken with the denials of his predecessor Amber Rudd and pledged to fight the Treasury for more "resources" for the police.

Other austerity policies in recent years have contributed to a growing and more complex workload for the police. "Many of the problems the police are now dealing with - homelessness, mental illness, children leaving home - were previously picked up by other departments of local government," points out the University of Sussex's Richard Disney, someone who has studied the economics of UK policing in depth.

Even if, being generous to the government, austerity did succeed in squeezing some inefficiency out of the police, it's a strategy that has now pretty clearly run out of road. Further cuts to funding and real terms pay reductions for officers really will hollow out the service.

If the modern police officer's lot is not a happy one, ultimately, the same will be true of the public.