overnight to many distant cities

Herald column June 6 2011

2011-06-08T19:45:00.002Z

A slight technical meltdown means The Herald website didn't get this up. Here's the raw copy for the multitudes that have requested it:

By Andrew McKie

Last Monday I took my life in my hands and ate a Greek salad. The cucumber was from Hertfordshire, which probably meant that it was free of deadly levels of E. coli, but also meant that it didn’t taste of very much, as tomatoes and cucumbers pumped full of water and grown in British or Dutch polytunnels usually don’t.
The food in Italy, a couple of days later, was better. On Wednesday, I had a small glass of white wine with my lunch (spaghetti con vongole) and a Campari-soda before a dinner – prosciutto, then pasta Bolognese, fegato alla Veneziana, and a big slice of parmigiano reggiano and an espresso instead of pudding – which I accompanied with half a litre of red wine.
Nice for you, readers may be thinking, but why tell us, unless the aim is to foster jealousy and undermine the appeal of our breakfast toast, instant coffee and the box of Coco Pops against which we’ve propped the newspaper?
Because, to echo a title by the food historian Margaret Visser, much depends on dinner. Eating those meals, I became embroiled in three major news stories: the row over food safety prompted by the E. coli outbreak centred on Germany, which by yesterday had killed 19 people and made more than 1,800 seriously ill; the declaration that one in three Scottish children is being brought up in a “binge-drinking” household; and the assertion by Barbara Stocking, Oxfam’s chief executive, that within decades there will “absolutely not be enough food” to feed the world’s population.
All three are significant stories which raise important issues. Naturally, the knee-jerk response of many lobbying groups is to demand government action. Specifically, in the words of Oxfam’s report, “to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest”. For Alcohol Focus Scotland, that means minimum pricing and stricter licensing; others have called for stricter rules on food production in Europe. It’s a depressingly familiar reaction to matters which are, at root, to do with individual choices by consumers.
Spanish cucumbers, it seems, did not cause this outbreak, but that has not stopped a catastrophic slump in sales of vegetables, and probably an expensive round of bureaucratic compensation payments. Yet such threats to public health have been well identified and controlled – particularly in Britain – for more than a century; which accounts for their rarity.
Of course, it is important to identify the cause of this outbreak and, if there are lessons to be learned, see that they are. But since E. coli can be avoided by very simple precautions (washing and cooking vegetables properly) by consumers themselves, racing to introduce sterner regulation would be a clumsy and damaging response.
Similarly, Scotland, and the rest of the United Kingdom, has an unenviable record when it comes to its drinking habits. But narrowly defining the real dangers of alcohol in terms of units or their cost in order to maximise the scare potential of the story, rather than looking at the behaviour and responsibilities of individuals, is to distort the picture. As this newspaper wisely pointed out, government measures are a peripheral distraction; the central issue is changing attitudes.
I dispute the claim in Friday’s editorial that no one wants to see a return to the 1950s, when self-control was seen in part as a moral issue. Older rituals of food and drink, tied to religious observances and balancing periods of abstinence with prescribed days for feasting, encouraged responsible behaviour more effectively than any blunt instrument Holyrood may devise.
Sensible drinking can add immensely to the store of human happiness, just as excessive drinking can generate terrible misery. The same is true of food. The “obesity epidemic” is caused by ignorance, reliance on unhealthy, disgusting, packaged and junk food, and by families failing to sit down to eat together. In this country, we do not just eat and drink badly, we buy and cook badly. We spend much less of our household income on food than most Continental Europeans, and throw out a third of what we buy untasted. The solution is not to manipulate the consumer price, nor to regulate manufacturers and producers of food and drink, but to make people care about their behaviour.
Oxfam is quite right to point out that it is an outrage that nearly a billion people go hungry while so many in the developed world are obese. It is right, too, to attack the dumping of crops by the EU and the USA – the equivalent of households throwing out the “buy one get one free” food they never get round to eating – and the mad subsidies which encourage the use of agricultural land to produce biofuels, in order to meet climate change targets.
But Oxfam seems unable to see that these absurdities have been created by governments doing exactly what they are asking for more of: prevention, intervention, correction, protection and investment. The single greatest thing oppressing farmers in the developing world is the existence of tariffs set by the EU and the USA to protect domestic producers.
The reason for the growth in yields in the West is precisely the large-scale farming and technology, including genetic modification and chemical fertilizers, which Oxfam opposes for the developing world on environmental grounds. Despite the price rises of the past few years, two of three world’s three staple crops (maize and wheat) are, in real terms, half the price they were in the 1940s, and a quarter cheaper than they were in the 1960s. India (which used to import rice) improved yields spectacularly by introducing such techniques, and by abolishing their equivalent of the Corn Laws. Regulation, the fashion for “sustainability” and the command economy solutions of the “Fair Trade” movement impoverish many more than they help.
Prosperous countries need to take food more seriously and consume it more responsibly. Poor countries need to be given the advantages the rich countries have already had from the introduction of modern agricultural practice and access to free markets. Doing that would prove the truth of the third aphorism with which Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin introduced La physiologie du goût: “The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.”

Herald Columns

2011-04-20T22:18:00.001Z

I'm trying to spot those which don't appear online & offer them here. I think this may have been missed from April 4.

If you’re taking part in a debate, it’s a good policy not to ask any questions that you don’t know the answer to. That’s because debate, like “abate” and their aphaeretic relative “bate” in all its various senses – diminution, strife, rage – ultimately shares a root with “batter”. Debates are for bashing the living daylights out of your opponents, not for establishing the truth, which may be why, having delivered what he no doubt thought was the knockout punch, Pontius Pilate didn’t stay for the answer.
But you and I are above all that sort of sophistry, so perhaps we can approach, in a spirit of honest, humble, Socratic inquiry, one of the urgent questions of our age: “Why is the Labour Party so remarkably useless?”
As attentive readers may have guessed, I haven’t generally delivered my vote in the direction of that party, even when it tempted me with Bob Gillespie in Govan. But I’m aware that, for unfathomable reasons, not everyone shares my views, and -– in the midst of what we keep being told are “savage cuts” – Labour’s comparative lack of support strikes me as genuinely rather puzzling.
True, the party is ahead in the national opinion polls by five or 10%, but during the “savage cuts” of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, it was regularly out in front by 20% or more, and it contrived to lose all those elections. For the Holyrood elections, as the Rev Ewan Aitken, Labour’s candidate for Edinburgh Eastern, put it yesterday: “We are not behind but we are not ahead.”
To be neck and neck with the governing party is an alarmingly feeble position for an opposition on the eve of an election but, as party managers must know, it is at least better than the frankly catastrophic showing of Iain Gray in the poll before last week’s STV debate, in which only 7% of respondents identified him as the best candidate for First Minister.
No doubt I should be heartened when Scottish voters rank their country’s Tory leader above the leader of its Labour party, but the truth is that I’m baffled. Or at least I was until I saw Mr Gray’s performance, which went some way to explaining it. Tavish Scott was a hole in the air, and managed to be more impressive; Patrick Harvie came out of it better, and he wasn’t even on the programme. But the fault isn’t just Iain Gray’s; Ed Miliband is faring no better south of the border.
Perhaps the polls are wrong. After all, three days before that Govan by-election in 1988, Labour were on 53% to the Nationalists’ 33%. The platitude of all politicians in the face of poor opinion polls – that the only poll that matters is on election day – has, like most clichés, the virtue of being true.
Nor, though I might wish it otherwise, can it be simple cause and effect derived from that other political cliché which brought Bill Clinton the presidency: “It’s the economy, stupid.” After all, despite Norman Lamont’s efforts, the economy was in pretty good shape by the end of John Major’s government, and it didn’t stop them from getting one of the worst bloody noses in electoral history. It may be more surprising that although Gordon Brown left the economy in the worst condition in living memory, it didn’t lead to a Tory landslide.
But it’s for precisely that reason that one would expect Labour to be in much better electoral shape almost a year on, now that the cuts to public services are beginning to take effect, and when growth remains hesitant. Where, for example, is the surge of support from all those Left-wing Liberal Democrats who feel betrayed?
I don’t know, but I suspect that the trouble for the Labour leaders, both at Holyrood and Westminster, is – appropriately enough – the same as the inept debater’s. They have no answer to offer. During his speech at the March for the Alternative, Mr Miliband neglected to say what the alternative was, and Mr Gray has not been much more forthcoming at differentiating Labour’s spending plans from those proposed by the Nationalists.
The public may dislike and fear the cuts being proposed by the Coalition government, but on the whole, they believe in their necessity. They may be sceptical about the SNP’s spending plans, but no competing vision is being offered by the Labour party, other than increasing the rate at which we borrow money. For the “savage cuts”, which amount to just over 3%, will only return us to the spending levels of 2008. We are not paying off our debts, but merely addressing the deficit by slowing the rate at which we are borrowing.
In many ways, the other week’s rally typified the Labour party’s problem. It brought together a large number of people who work in or depend on the public sector to complain noisily (though, I happily concede, almost entirely peacefully) about the level of cuts. But surely few, even among the protestors, would argue that no cuts are required. That irritating chant “No Ifs, No Buts, No [fill in the name of your special interest group here] Cuts” is not an argument.
There are lots of “ifs” and “buts”, yet no credible alternative vision is being suggested by Labour, not even an illusory one, such as Tony Blair’s specious “Third Way”. Even with the last government’s expansion of the public sector, the protestors are hugely outnumbered by voters who, for all their worries about public services, acknowledge that we cannot continue dunning taxpayers to expand the state forever.
Labour’s central support, of course, and the vast majority of its financing, comes from the public sector unions. Gordon Brown attempted to expand the party’s natural support by adding 800,000 people to the public payroll, and by dragging almost everyone he could think of (including families earning £60,000 a year) into the welfare system. That story had a very unhappy ending.
The Labour party has yet to find another political narrative to offer those outside its core constituency. Until it does, it will have trouble in parliamentary constituencies, whether for Holyrood or Westminster.

Every Little Helps...

2010-09-06T07:12:00.002Z

With the addition of tobacco, you could live in this aisle.

Bread baked

2010-07-30T14:23:00.001Z

overnight to many distant cities

Herald column June 6 2011

Herald Columns

Every Little Helps...

Bread baked

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Today's marmalade now on a rolling boil

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If on a winter's night a traveller discovered a previously unknown Victorian fantasy novel...

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Lemons & lime

China Mieville's Rejectamentalist Manifesto

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Snowy garden

Films perhaps worth watching

Commuting. On the train.

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Tree acquired & decorated

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Copy of Edgar Hunt (detail)

Colour Study Number 3

Blue

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Je ne suis qu'un fumeur de Gitanes

&

Anna Wintour's birthday present