richardfjbrown

In recovery

What do you say to someone who has recovered from coronavirus, an email sent to a colleague asked this week? Probably something like ‘well done’, or ‘congratulations’. As most of us anxiously interrogate every cough and ache, some people have successfully ‘come out the other side’.

As of 22 March, 135 people had officiallyrecovered from Covid 19 (though government is looking for a new way to measure recovery). In any case, this must be a huge underestimate. Testing of people with symptoms has been abandoned for the last two weeks, unless they are ill enough for admission to critical care in hospital, so the figures for recovery must be the tip of the iceberg, just as figures for the total numbers of cases are.

Anecdotes are not data, but the fact that I know at least four people who appear to have had and recovered from the virus (three unconnected to each other) suggests there are many more cases below the waterline. What we don’t yet know is how many. A recent paper by Sunetra Gupta and others was first seized on as an indicator that the virus was much more widespread than was being revealed in official figures, then vilified as resting on some very dubious assumptions about fatality rates. In fact, as I understand it, the paper’s main argument was that we needed much more testing to understand which of various plausible epidemiological scenarios was correct.

And it seems we will soon have the infrastructure for such testing. 3.5 million antibody tests, which test for whether subjects have been infected in the past rather than are infected currently, have been ordered by the government, and are expected to become available from next week. There has been some confusion about how these are to be made available, with NHS staff obviously in the front line, and when. But there is surely an argument for wider distribution (ideally randomised) to establish what levels of infection have taken place across the population, what the real fatality rates are, and how near or far we might be from ‘herd immunity’.

Knowing this will help us think about our national recovery, which feels increasingly urgent. In recent weeks we have seen the impressive exercise of state power to bring trade, travel and social life to a grinding halt. Restarting may be a lot tougher. The current plan, in the UK at least, appears to be to maintain some level of restraint on mixing for a year or more, while a vaccine is developed and tested. It is possible that restrictions may be relaxed for a few months in the summer, but likely that they will have to be re-imposed as soon as new outbreaks flare up.

Seeing an economy and a nation in suspended animation for a few months is an extraordinary thing; the idea of this stretching over 12 to 18 months feels beyond belief. Even if restrictions are loosened, the crisis of contagion will be replaced by a crisis of confidence: who will buy a house, start a new business, or plan a holiday, a festival or a wedding, when a new outbreak could lead to cancellation with days’ or weeks’ notice?

Which suggests to me that we may need a more proportional and variegated approach to the disease, once this initial outbreak has been brought under control. As more and more people establish immunity, could they begin to work and socialise normally? Could they be issued with certificates that would allow them to return to normal-ish life, as is rumoured to be planned in Germany? Could those yet to be infected stay home, or would a more resilient health service enable them to re-establish minimal contact at their own risk, while the strongest protections remain in place for the most vulnerable?

There’s something that feels a bit distasteful about this, for sure. The bureaucracy of certification feels intrusive and even authoritarian, and such a policy would be divisive, undermining the sense of collective sacrifice that the government has been so keen to nurture. But the fact of the matter is that we are not ‘all in it together’ now: people with large houses, extensive gardens and savings accounts are having a very different experience from those who have none of these. And without some rekindling of the UK and global economy, the only thing we will all be in together is an ever-deepening and intransigent recession.

My countries right or wrong?

I was surprised by the strength of emotion when my Irish passport arrived. I had never particularly thought about national identity before; in a rather unconsidered and snobby way, I probably felt myself to be beyond such atavistic notions. But the EU referendum, and the eddying and fractious national debate that followed, put paid to that.

The prospect of long queues at passport control, and loss of rights – to live and work abroad – that I have barely used, spurred me (like thousands of other Brits) to apply for an Irish passport. After some weeks, and very helpful discussions with the Department for Foreign Affairs (my family background is complicated by adoption), my passport arrived with a picture of me that somehow looks about five times more Irish than I ever have in the flesh. And I suddenly felt a forceful sense of attachment, a spark of connection to a country that I visit regularly but have never lived in. Did I feel Irish? Not really, but I felt something.

I’ve been turning this over in my mind since, as the debate over the future of nations and unions after Brexit has intensified, trying to assess my own perceptions of national identity, and considering how these might be affected by possible futures. My first conclusion is that we use the term ‘national identity’ too broadly. We treat it as one thing, when in fact the term covers quite distinct and potentially divergent affiliations. They don’t overlap or compete (though they can do both of those), but rather describe different types of relationship. I can count three (but I’m sure others have undertaken a more sophisticated analysis): cultural identity, personal identity and political identity.

My cultural identity is probably split between England and Ireland. I’ve always balked at the Shamrock ’n’ Shillelaghs sentimentalism of plastic paddies, but I do feel cultural affinity with Ireland. Sure, some of my favourite poets and writers are Irish, but some of my favourite singer-songwriters are Canadian so there must be more to it than that – a shared sense of humour perhaps, a love of wordplay, a dank melancholia, a complicated relationship with rain and catholicism. This identity has strengthened – or possibly felt able to ‘come out’ – in the past decades as Ireland emerged from the dour shadow of Eamon de Valera’s insular conservatism, to become highly internationalised and socially progressive.

My personal identity is more clearly English. I have lived in England all my life, and it is England’s urban and rural landscape that seems familiar and homely to me. To be fair, this is probably concentrated in southern England – between the Cotswolds, the Chilterns and the South Downs, with towns and villages of red brick, golden stone and steely flint. But I have lived as far north as County Durham, have a partner from Scarborough and holiday every year in the Lake District, so my tendrils of attachment stretch across the country.

Do I mean British by this? I really don’t think I do. I have enjoyed visiting Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but they are clearly distinct places – the shops, the language, the beer, even the banknotes are different. They may not feel as distinct as continental European countries, but they are not ‘home’ either.

And to be honest, devolution has deepened this sense of difference. If part of citizenship is knowing how to secure your rights from and undertake your duties to the state, then my citizenship feels increasingly limited to England. I no more understand the Scottish criminal justice or social care system than I do the French.

Which raises the question of political identity. Here my affiliation is to the United Kingdom. I vote for a UK government, carry a UK passport and pay my taxes to the UK state (while I was in favour of remaining in the EU, I’ve never really felt like a ‘citizen of Europe’). But that affiliation feels more and more contingent, and unrooted in any of the deeper affection that I feel towards England or even Ireland. I have none of the passion for ‘the Union’ that is ritually expressed by politicians. When I see Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish politicians arguing for independence, I find it hard to argue against them, and hard not to think that I would do the same in their place.

There are downsides to the calls for independence of course. Politically, loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland would tilt the English and Welsh rump further to the right: the Conservatives would have won a majority in every election since 2005 without Scotland and Northern Ireland. But then again, as a Scottish Nationalist MSP forcefully pointed out to me some time ago, it is not Scotland’s job to counterbalance a conservative majority in England and Wales.

It feels to me quite likely that calls for Irish reunification and Scottish independence will grow over the next Parliament, and it is hard to see how they can be resisted over the long term. Whether I carry a passport from the United Kingdom of England and Wales, or – who knows – the United Republic of Ireland and Scotland, may affect where my taxes are paid, who governs me and how easily I can travel abroad, but it won’t make much difference to the way that I think of myself and my countries.

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On the bold and the dutiful

I don’t find myself naturally warming to Dominic Cummings. Our politics are different, I’m suspicious of some of his tactics, and I find his airy dismissal of ‘London liberals’ every bit as glib and patronising as the elite attitudes he is so keen to denounce.

Since the beginning of the year, Cummings’ call out for ‘super-talented weirdos’ to work with him at the heart of government has provided a focal point for his many detractors (alongside the affectedly casual dress sense – the Steve Hilton de nos jours). The language is geeky and alienating; it flies in the face of proper recruitment practice; it betrays an over-familiarity with game theory and cyberpunk fiction, and an under-acquaintance with the realities of public administration.

All true up to a point (though the blog’s language is no more obscure than the half-digested formulas of regular HR-speak – “socialising key metrics with wider stakeholders to drive outcomes” etc). But behind the buzz-words, you can detect the anxiety faced by any reforming administration: how on earth can the machinery of government deliver radical change?

The caution and conservatism of the civil service is canonical. In episode after episode of ‘Yes Minister’, Minister Jim Hacker comes up with a seeming common-sense proposal, only to be talked out of it (“a very boldproposal, Minister”) by Sir Humphrey, permanent secretary and inertia incarnate. Yes Minister was broadcast forty years ago, but still resonates with anyone who works with or in government, despite endless civil service modernisation, change and transformation programmes.

My first encounter with ‘Yes Minister Live’ was a memo (or ‘minute’ to use the Whitehall terminology) that I found when setting up the Greater London Authority. It referred to one of Notting Hill Carnival’s periodic financial crises, and wondered whether there as a case for government intervention. A handwritten note by a senior civil servant concluded: “I think we should re-assure ourselves there is nothing we can do.”

A few years later, preparing for the London Olympics, I moved from the GLA, where the lawyers and finance teams did their best to find a way of legally doing what the mayor wanted to do, to a government department, which seemed beset by other departments – in particular the Treasury and the Treasury Solicitors (government legal service) – trying to make it difficult to do what the Cabinet had agreed and the Prime Minister had announced.

Part of this is cultural: few in Whitehall ever lost their job for doing nothing. But I don’t think it is good enough simply to demand culture change in the civil service. Nobody was acting irrationally, but in accordance with long-established principles about how public spending is agreed, monitored and reported – and how politics is performed. Any ministerial tendency to innovation quickly wilts when faced with a request for formal directions from civil servants or the rough music of a Public Accounts Committee hearing.

In any case, for all the enthusiastic praise of ‘disruption’, mantras like Facebook’s “move fast and break things” feel a bit off when applied to public services, given that the ‘things’ that might be broken are people’s lives, rather than clever widgets for a search engine. In public administration, there is an understandably greater tolerance for poor performance that can be corrected over time than there is for the risk of dramatic failure that requires a fresh start.

But, all that said, we do need policy-making and -delivery that is better informed, more agile, more capable of experimentation and adaptation. This requires internal changes in Whitehall, and fresh people thinking fresh ideas, but they will run into the sand without a transformation in the operating environment provided by Westminster and the media.

Ministers should feel as comfortable admitting the failures of policy initiatives as they are spinning (often dubious) successes. They should acknowledge complexity rather than signal-boosting simple solutions. Parliamentarians and press commentators should step aside from ‘gotcha’ denunciations to respect such honest admissions and discussions.

Yeah, and pigs should fly. It is hard to see any of this happening in such a febrile and fractious environment. But we need change if we are to re-tool government for the challenges of this decade, or even this century. Perhaps this Government, and this Prime Minister, with the security provided by their majority, could take the first steps in the way they talk about, implement and evaluate policy. Issues like post-Brexit trade, social care, climate change, and regional economic policy require innovation, agility and honesty, rather than the staleness, inertia and bad faith that dominate today.

Donning the Cap?

Social care for older people is one of those issues that every political party professes to care about, but none is willing to tackle. At election times, it is ritually acknowledged as important, then sidelined by voters and politicians alike.

The one exception to this was the 2017 election, when Theresa May\’s Conservative Party had a rare moment of political courage and came up with a proposal that was at least rational and and thought through. They were duly punished, for reasons which we\’ll come back to, and which probably explain the timidity across the spectrum. This time round main parties\’ manifestos are artfully evasive – all but conspiring to avoid the subject – but point the way to a possible consensus in the next Parliament.

Before considering the parties\’ proposals, such as they are, it is worth looking at how social care operates at the moment. Unlike the NHS, the glamorous sibling that carries us through critical moments of our life and is never far from TV screens whether in dramas, documentaries or new bulletins, social care for the elderly lurks in the shadows. It\’s one of those things best not known about it, until you have to learn a lot in a hurry (I have, so this rant is all a bit parti pris).

Care today, gone tomorrow
If an older person needs help living in their own home, with everything from moving around, to washing and dressing, to using the loo, the local council\’s social services department will appoint carers to visit up to four times a day to help out with those tasks (\’domiciliary care\’). If needs are more severe, you may have to go into a care home, or a nursing home with more specialist medical staff.

Costs mount up quickly: four visits a day can cost £400-500 per week (£26,000 a year), while residential care can cost twice as much. And, if you have capital assets above £23,250, you will have to meet those costs (or make your own arrangements). If you have less than £14,250, the council will pay all your costs. If you are receiving care at home, and own that home, you won\’t have to include that in your assets; but if you are in a care home, it will be included, unless you have a partner or dependents living there.

There is one big exception to all this – \’continuing health care\’ (CHC). A 1999 court decision held that all the care needs of a particular severely disabled adult were in essence \’health care\’ needs, and should therefore be funded in full by the NHS, at home as much as they would be in hospital. CHC is a big cost for the NHS, more than £3 billion per year, and getting it involves an undignified argument about precise levels of enfeeblement with clinical commissioning groups who will fight hard to avoid assessing patients as eligible.

The inequitable split between means-tested social care and universalised health care was one of the things that sunk Mrs May\’s modest proposal in 2017. She proposed that people would be required to pay for social care until their assets reached £100,000 – a much higher threshold than currently, but this time including the value of property (which would not have to be sold until after death). But why should someone with dementia have to impoverish themselves – or rather eat into their children\’s expected inheritance – while someone with cancer would receive their treatment free, the critics asked? Dementia Tax, they shouted! After that, the deluge, a hung Parliament, and all the fun that has ensued.

Caps and consensus
Which brings us to the parties\’ manifestos this time round. The Conservatives\’ is triumphantly vague, allocating around £1 billion a year extra to budgets for adult social care (currently just over £21 billion), and promising to build a consensus for reform.

Beyond that, there is a promise that \”nobody needing care should be forced to sell their home to pay for it\”. As discussed above, there are only a few circumstances today where people are forced to sell their homes, and giving the same exemption to a £50 million mansion as to a £50,000 flat seems a little arbitrary.

The Daily Mail, which has campaigned vigorously against people being forced to sell their homes, might be more enthusiastic about the Labour Party\’s plans for universally free personal care for over-65s (except, you know, socialism, Corbyn etc). But Labour\’s plans are themselves unclear: the Manifesto promises a \’National Care Service\’ providing free personal care to the over-65s – but then talks, confusingly, about eligibility criteria and lifetime cap of £100,000 on individuals\’ payments towards their care.

The idea of a cap on costs goes back to the 2011 Dilnot Commission, which recommended a cap on lifetime costs of around £35,000. It certainly makes more financial sense than universal free provision, which has been priced at £6 billion a year. The fact that Labour\’s spending plans show the cost of social care reform as £2 billion suggests that capping costs, rather than free provision, is the real plan.

It is one idea that might even attract cross-party support. The coalition government\’s 2014 Care Act provided for a cap to be set, and a cap of £72,000 was proposed for 2020, but the idea has been quietly dropped, as the long-awaited Green Paper on Social Care continues to be, erm, awaited. The idea of a cap also appears in the Liberal Democrat manifesto, bashfully buried at the end of a waffly paragraph about \’sustainable\’ and \’joined-up\’ funding.

A cap is essentially a form of social insurance: we don\’t know whether we will need care when we get older, so the state insures us, but will levy an \’excess\’ of up to £100,000 from those who can afford it. It is perhaps more surprising to find such a measure in a Labour manifesto. On its own a cap is deeply regressive, hitting the poorest hardest, while allowing the rich to retain the bulk of their wealth. Admittedly, the Dilnot Review recommended that the cap be combined with a means-tested threshold, so people would not have to pay anything if they had less than £100,000 in assets (as reflected in Mrs May\’s fateful 2017 proposal).

Such a cap and threshold approach would protect the poorest, but still privilege the rich over the moderately wealthy. While 30 per cent of people leave less than £100,000, so would be not have to pay anything towards care costs, 55 per cent of people leave between £100,000 and £500,000, so would take a significant hit. It might not be as much as they would pay without a cap, but voters may not see it like that: nobody plans to lose in the lottery of long-term care.

The parties\’ proposals leave a lot of issues unaddressed. The quality of care provided by carers rushing from appointment to appointment can be highly variable, and the working conditions and pay are so poor that the profession tends to attract the dedicated or the desperate. In much of the UK, care agencies are dependent on workers from overseas, so Brexit and a change in the immigration regime may be an additional threat. But half-hidden within the parties\’ manifestos is the germ of a consensus, a potential route through the treacherous terrain of funding services that few of us plan to use, but most of us will.

Civil contingencies

In my more histrionic moments, I wonder whether this is what the early days of a civil war feel like.

Since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, I\’ve been fascinated at how peaceful modern societies slip into bloody conflict. How do friends, neighbours and citizens drift from fellowship, to disassociation, to mistrust, to hostility, and eventually to murder, concentration camps and ethnic cleansing? Is there a moment when the rift becomes unbridgeable and conflict all but inevitable, or is the descent so slow, smooth and subtle that it can hardly be spotted? Ignorance and suspicion replace understanding and empathy, and provide fertile ground for rumour, conspiracy theory and paranoia.

We are – of course – nowhere near there. As I said, \’histrionic\’. But we are not as far away as I\’d like us to be. Brexit splits feel sharper and deeper than those of party politics. The subject is avoided with family and friends, rather than fuelling debate and discussion. Social and conventional media deploy the rhetoric of \’treachery\’, \’racism\’, \’bad faith\’ and \’ignorance\’. Both leavers and remainers, for example, lambast the BBC for its bias in the others\’ favour.

Perhaps it is made worse by the way that the conflict is seen as existential for people\’s identities, for the United Kingdom, for sovereignty, for a sense of engagement and inclusion in the world. When you re playing for keeps, rather than \’giving the other lot a go\’ for the next five years, you think in more manichean or even apocalyptic terms about the struggle, to be won or lost for all time.

The compromises that might have made everyone slightly happy three years ago seem more and more remote. Only the unambiguous victory of a \’clean Brexit\’ or a revocation of Article 50 is acceptable to the ultras, and they are largely in control of the discourse, ready to assail the motives of anyone ready to settle for seond best.

Still, this is not the Balkans and this is not 1991. But you do wonder whether things may have turned out differently if, in some small Bosnian grad thirty years ago, Milan had paused to consider whether Ahmet really was the scheming fifth columnist that the papers were suggesting, rather than the neighbour who he had known since childhood, and to consider whether there was some way of resolving differences that did not involve displacement, hostility and the unmaking of nations.

Colonel Blimp\’s Brexit

At the London Conference last week, Michael Heseltine seemed positively sprightly despite his 86 years. Interviewed by my boss Ben Rogers, he reflected on how his interventions had transformed urban policy in England.

It was only at the end that Ben asked about Brexit, and what made Heseltine so fervently pro-EU. \”I was a product of the Second World War,\” Heseltine replied. \”I was born in 1933, on the day Hitler came to power in Germany. Even now I can hear Neville Chamberlain announcing the declaration of war in 1939, and I can remember the the bombers that came at 9 o\’clock every night when we were living in Swansea. It Must Never Happen Again. It is why Europe is what it is.\”

This was a powerful expression of a common narrative among the generation that estabished and strengthened the European Union, that it is a bulwark against the genocidal forces of nationalism and fascism that tore the continent apart twice in the 20th Century. It was what Heseltine said next that was more striking.

Britain had won the war, but \”perhaps the psychology of victory had its own problems. We had stood alone. Without us, what possible victory was there? We had a special relationship with the US, we were head of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. How could we throw our lot in with these defeated boring people?\”

This sense of proud isolationism, so iconically captured in Low\’s June 1940 cartoon above, seems as powerful a force in anti-EU sentiment as the narrative of \’never again\’ is among the Union\’s advocates. It is reflected in the endless invocation the spirit of the blitz, in talk of treachery and enemies, in complaints of \”bullying by Germans\”, in romantic notions of trade alliances with former colonies.

And there of course is the point. Britain was never truly alone. 3.5 million troops from the British Empire fought in the Far East, the Mediterrranean and the Atlantic, 5 million Russians pushed the Nazis back on the Eastern Front, and 16 million US troops fought (2 million in Europe). But the myth is powerful, and underpinned by the endless cyle of remembrance of battles and – perhaps most poignantly – defeats such as Dunkirk.

But Britain really could be alone after Brexit, even more so if Scotland and Northern Ireland secede. Myths of military glory, of victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, of davids knocking down goliaths, are part of every nation\’s narrative patrimony – harmless if sometimes distastefully jingoistic. But they shouldn\’t be mistaken for political prescriptions, or blind us to the messy realities of yesterday and today.

Time for some conscious uncoupling of London\’s Green Belt

[First published in Estates Gazette, 1 November 2019)]

Tackling the housing crisis was top of Sadiq Khan’s policy agenda in 2016. So, with the next mayoral election six months away, the publication of the planning inspectors’ report into the mayor’s draft London Plan – the blueprint for London’s growth – is a big moment.

There is some good news for City Hall in the report, published last week. The inspectors back the mayor’s plan as a whole, his assessment of housing need and also his affordable housing policies – including the threshold approach to fast-track permission, which they say is “appearing to bear fruit”.

But the report does challenge the mayor’s assessment of housing capacity, and in particular his expectation that small sites could supply 25,000 of the 65,000 homes planned each year. As the inspectors acknowledge, this would require a 250% increase in building on small sites in outer London boroughs – the very locations where dense development can provoke the most furious rows among neighbours, politicians and community groups. “Whilst the policy approach is aspirational,” the inspectors conclude, “its delivery is not realistic.”

They recommend halving the small sites target to 12,000 homes a year, giving an overall housing target of 52,000 a year. Given that London is projected to need 66,000 homes a year, of which 55,000 are simply to keep up with population growth (the rest being to deal with the backlog of need), this would leave London with a worsening housing shortage. The gap looks even wider if you use the government’s new calculations of need, which come up with an annual figure of 72,000 homes.

This may all seem a bit moot when London is only building around 30,000 homes a year, but balancing need and capacity is a foundation stone of town planning. The inspectors reject the Sisyphean suggestion – made by former secretary of state James Brokenshire what seems like a political aeon ago – that the plan should be immediately reviewed. Instead, they recommend that the mayor should lead a strategic review of London’s green belt, in the light of the projected shortfall of land for housing (and industrial uses).

This presents the mayor with a dilemma. His commitment to tackling London’s housing crisis is matched only by his commitment to preserving London’s green belt. And you can see why. Green belt reviews are popular among planners and policy wonks, but toxic for the general public; recent polling shows that opposition to building on or reviewing the green belt is as strong as ever.

All of which may suggest that it would be a “bold” politician (in the Yes Minister sense of the word) who agreed to lead a green belt review in what may be a multiple election year. Positions are entrenched, and debates about the green belt can be as fervent – and as futile – as debates about Brexit. But there is an opportunity here too: the mayor could bring light where there is currently just heat, and show that elected mayors can take the lead where governments freeze like marginal-seated rabbits in the headlights.

A review, in partnership with councils and communities, would be an opportunity to discuss the green belt’s role as a constraint on sprawl, for public recreation and as habitat, and to consider how different land uses meet these aims – rather than defending the green belt as sacrosanct in principle while allowing it to be nibbled away and leap-frogged in practice.

It could explore different options for change, from allowing building in railway station catchment areas to planning and building urban extensions, as exemplars of “good growth” rather than incoherent and exclusive car-based suburbs. It could consider how to substitute for any green space lost, and how to enhance the quality and accessibility of what remains.

The inspectors’ report suggests that, having grown by 30% in three decades, London is starting to strain against its boundaries. It feels like the moment for an open and rational debate about how the next 30 years’ growth can be environmentally responsible and socially inclusive. The next mayor of London – whoever that is – should lead this debate.

What would a ‘Singapore-style’ Brexit mean for London?

[Originally published in CityMetric, 9 October 2019)

A few months ago, a senior EU official told a friend of mine that their most feared outcome from Brexit negotiations would be the UK diverging from EU standards to become a low-tax, low-regulation “northern Singapore” on the continent’s doorstep.

Reports over recent weeks suggest that this is precisely what the government’s attempted renegotiation of the EU Withdrawal Agreement is seeking to achieve – more room for divergence from Brussels on standards and regulation. Whatever the desirability or feasibility of such a shift, what might it mean for London?

Singapore is an occasionally liberating reminder that there are other ways of running cities. The island city-state off the coast of Malaysia is the magic mirror of urban policy, in which both right and left can see what they wish to see. The right sees low personal and corporate taxes (public spending is half the level it is in the UK), business-friendly regulation, self-reliance promoted through compulsory savings for retirement and health insurance, draconian law and order policies including capital and corporal punishment, and active promotion of family values – for example through giving married couples with children priority allocations of flats.

The left looks to another side of Singapore. It sees active regulation for environmental protection and reduction in congestion, through restrictions on car ownership and use (albeit administered through a regressive system of high-priced permits and road tolling). It also sees the Housing Development Board (HDB), the government agency whose flats house 80 per cent of Singapore’s citizens. Most are sold at 20 to 50 per cent of the price for an equivalent open market flat, though some are available at low rents of five to 20 per cent of household income. A complex formula is used to ensure a representative ethnic cross-section in every development – part of an explicit commitment to engineering a cohesive nation state from Singapore’s various ethnic groups.

The HDB makes a loss every year (around £1.8bn in 2017-18), but the rationale for its work is aspirational rather than welfarist. In the words of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew: “That loss is to give the man an asset which he will value, which will grow in price as the country develops, as his surroundings become better.”

Both sides may also look at Singapore’s education system in admiration. The city spends less on education than the UK (as a proportion of GDP), but Singapore consistently ranks at the top of the PISA international education league tables. The system emphasises teacher-led education and is accused of prioritising rote learning over creativity, but it is also based on paying excellent salaries for the best teachers, and rigorous testing of educational reforms.

It is simplistic to think that one can simply replicate the conditions and practices of a tropical city-state in south east Asia in a northern European city. Culture, history and geography all underline differences. But the focus on housing and education does respond to two of the biggest challenges of maintaining social cohesion and economic welfare in an open global city economy.

As London’s economy has opened up, the city has already seen a surge in both house prices and workforce qualification levels. Londoners are competing for housing and jobs with people from across the UK and beyond. House prices have jumped from seven to 13 times median salaries since 2002, putting them out of reach of more and more Londoners on modest incomes and without access to capital, and dramatically widening wealth inequality.

Similarly, London is highly qualified: 53 per cent of London’s workers are qualified to degree level (compared to 31 per cent in the rest of the UK). But the population as a whole doesn’t compare so well: London scores less well than many other global cities – and less well than other English regions – when compared on the basis of international tests such as PISA and PIAAC. Without the wealth or skills to compete, it is hard for Londoners or other British citizens to make their way in the capital.

Singapore’s oddity is that it includes both low-tax, low-regulation elements that commend it to global capital; and active intervention in transport, housing and education policy to protect the environment, ensure social cohesion, and to enable the local population to benefit from the opportunities that global city trading can offer. Whether or not the UK chooses the former, London urgently needs to consider the latter if all citizens are to feel they have a stake in their city and an opportunity to share in its prosperity.

Loads of bull

In a tapas bar in Spain (well, ok, Marbella) last weekend, I saw this poster for Fundador, a Domecq brandy that was my mother\’s favourite tipple on family holidays in the seventies and eighties.

The poster shows an angry-looking bull rearing over a fence, on the other side of which a young man lies sprawled in the grass, his capote de brega (bullfighter\’s cape) half-covering his legs. He has been trying his luck with the bull, we infer, and has been chased over the fence by it. AL Kennedy writes, in her elegant study of bullfighting, that it was not unusual (though definitely discouraged) for aspirant toreros to steal onto rural granaderos (cattle ranches) by night to hone their skills.

Bulls are a popular motif for Spanish brandies. Domecq\’s previous advertising for Fundador had included a poster of a young picnicker chased up a tree. Don Alvaro Domecq y Diéz, who ran the family company from 1937, was a bull-fighter and -breeder. And Osborne\’s bull signs, seen on hilltops in silhouette against the harsh Spanish sun, have become one of the most instantly recognisable symbols of the country.

But I couldn\’t help thinking there was something else going on here, perhaps because I\’ve been reading Giles Tremlett\’s excellent book on Spain and its carefully curated amnesia.

The poster dates from 1968, the tail end of the Francoist era, when its harsh Catholic Nationalist ideology was increasingly under siege, not least from the bikini-clad holiday makers who were starting to arrive in Benidorm and points south. Does the poster reflect the anxieties of the beleaguered?

The young man is not dressed in traditional Spanish peasant clothes, let alone in a bullfighter\’s traje de luces. Rather, he is wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and his hair may have seen some pomade. His boots even look like they might have a cuban heel. He looks more like a rocker than a bull-fighter, a symbol of the threat to Spanish values posed by teenage rebellion and delinquency. In which case, perhaps the bull represents his nemesis, Spain\’s eternal Francoist essence – virile, macho, tied to the land, \’natural\’.

A Domecq poster representing the triumph of traditionalism and machismo over coiffed modernist degeneracy would, I suspect, have fitted with the boss\’s politics. Don Alvaro was not only a bull-fighter. but more significantly a keen Francoist, fighting for the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and being appointed Mayor of Jerez by Franco, and also a member of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei.

But I wonder whether there\’s something more. As the young man sprawls helplessly in the grass (his legs at very odd angles, but that\’s another story) and the bull eyes him, it all looks a bit \’Tom of Finland\’. Is the bull after a bit more than just goring (as Zeus was when he appeared as a bull to rape Europa in Greek myth)? Is it a sly joke, or a subconscious reference? Or is it simply advertising? Sometimes, as Freud never said, a bull is just a bull.

Slow Train Coming – apocalyptic glee and abandoned adoration

It was forty years ago today (or last Tuesday anyhow) that Bob Dylan unleashed on the world the stream of invective, religious chauvinism, misogyny and racism that is Slow Train Coming, the first of his born-again albums. All these years later, Slow Train is still shocking and enthralling in equal measure; much against my better judgement, it’s one of my favourite Dylan albums.

Mark Knopfler’s guitar has rarely sounded better than it does casting shimmering chords and arpeggios around the punchy backbone of the Muscle Shoals Horns and Pick Withers’ drumming. Helena Springs and Dylan’s future wife Carolyn Dennis provide backing ballast to Dylan’s voice, which sounds unusually clear, lively, committed.

Most of the good stuff is on the first side. The loping Gotta Serve Somebody sets up the album’s basic Manichean thesis – the world is divided into the godly and the wicked, and you gotta choose your side. Three tracks later, the belligerently swaggering title track pours scorn on everything from food surpluses, to OPEC, to Alabama road safety regulation.

But it is the tracks that these two sandwich which draw me back to the album time and again. Dylan starts Precious Angel thankful for his damascene conversion, but swiftly moves on to excoriating those who remain unredeemed. Then he switches to a chorus – “Shine your light, shine your light on me” – that is sparkling and joyous, a sincere riposte to the woozy gospel posturing of Shine a Light on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St a few years earlier.

One of the song’s joys is the way that, over six minutes, the pace picks up and Bob Dylan’s voice audibly warms and becomes more enthusiastic. By verse two, he directs his attention to his immediate circle:

“My so-called friends have fallen under a spell;

They look me squarely in the eye and they say, ‘Well all is well’.

Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high

When men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die?”

The pay-off stings like a slap in the face – talk about throwing shade – and the lines are sung with almost indecent glee. Dylan has not found a friend in Jesus but rather a harsh avenger.

The next track, I Believe In You, is very different in tone. Rather than triumphantly overseeing the apocalypse, Dylan is himself cast out, persecuted for his beliefs, for his love. The song mixes divine and secular imagery, sometimes seeming to address itself to a one-night stand, sometimes to an absent lover, sometimes to a forsaking deity. “Don’t!” – twice Dylan pleads not to be abandoned, his voice contorting into the yelp of wounded animal. Few Dylan songs sound so raw and direct, so adoring, with some of the eroticised longing that early medieval hymns direct at the bloodied body of Christ.

It’s the sound of someone utterly convinced of his righteousness, in love with his own new-found passion. It is as captivating as it is horrifying.

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