With the election result looking tight, Labour have reached into the bag labeled ‘superficially attractive policies whose flaws won’t become evident before May 7th’ and pulled out rent controls.
Now to be clear, I agree rents are too high. But rent controls are a terrible way of dealing with that.
That’s the consensus amongst economists and not just right-wing ones either. Paul Krugman – Princeton professor, Nobel laureate, Republican flayer and Gordon Brown cheerleader – had this to say about it back them back in 2000:
The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and — among economists, anyway — one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ”a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.” Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go — and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out….and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.
But as Krugman warned:
”Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.”
The problem with the housing market is not that prices are high but that the quantity supplied is constrained artificially. That in turn leads to high rents but that’s a symptom. Whatever you do to stamp it out the fundamental problem of there being too few homes for the population will still need a solution.
That solution would of course be to build more homes. However, doing so would require taking on the ranks of organised NIMBYism: the CPRE, the Telegraph and the National Trust. But that would require precisely the kind of boldness Ed Miliband has shown himself to completely lack. So instead he’s gone for something out of the
‘superficially attractive policies whose flaws won’t become evident before May 7th’ bag.
A statue from the Hung temple on Nghia Linh mountain.
Dear Readers,
School is out next week as Vietnam celebrates the Hung Kings, the dynasty regarded as the ancestral founders of the nation. And by a fortuitous quirk of scheduling the following week I don’t have any classes till Thursday.
I’m using the time off to visit Cambodia and Laos. My laptop, however, is staying in Hanoi. So I’m unlikely to be doing more than minimal blogging between now and Thursday 7th May.
At that point, I imagine the trip and the British General Election will give me plenty to write about and blogging will resume with a vengance.
As my way of celebrating the impending release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, here’s my personal ranking of the ten films and three TV series that form the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) so far.
13. Iron Man 2 (2010)
Pros: The first film to move beyond hinting at a broader universe and start fleshing it out. Also it introduced us to Black Widow, and Don Cheadle is a better James Rhodes than Terrance Howard.
Cons: It’s all set up and no pay off. The filmmakers seem to have purposefully avoided anything too interesting lest that prevent them being able to use it later on. Perhaps because of this the story and script are a mess. Also, it wastes Sam Rockwell (a serious crime) but gives us plenty of Gwyneth Paltrow (an even worse crime).
Summary: The film that sacrificed itself for the good of the rest of the MCU.
12. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Pros: Nothing in particular.
Cons: Nothing in particular.
Summary: It’s really forgettable.
11. Thor (2011)
Pros: The scenes set on Earth are mostly fun.
Cons: Despite having superthesp Ken Brangh directing, the faux Shakespeare stuff doesn’t really work. That’s unfortunate because that’s most the scenes and in particular the most dramatic ones.
Summary: A film where some physicists taking readings in a backwater town in New Mexico is more interesting than the action sequences. That’s mostly not a good thing.
10. Thor: the Dark World (2013)
Pros: Loki only really came into his own when Whedon’s writing injected him with some menace and panache. The improvement carries over into this film, with by far the best scenes being the Whedon penned sparring between Thor and Loki. They are a joy to watch.
Cons: I really could not care less whether Thor manages to prevent the Dark Elves unleashing the Aether at the centre of the convergance.
Summary: Ideally Thor: Ragnarok will just be Tom Hiddleston delivering Whedon one-liners.
9. Captain America: the First Avenger (2011)
Pros: The by no means straightforward evolution of Steve Rodgers into Captain America is well played with nice twists like how the military’s first instinct is to use him for propaganda. The best part, however, is Hayley Atwell managing to elevate Peggy Carter from a generic supporting role to the core of the film.
Cons: The actions scenes are bland beyond words. As a result, the film actually tails off as it reaches its climax. Also Tommy Lee Jones gives the most “where’s my cheque?” performance of all time.
Summary: The first film to hint that Marvel was capable of doing smarter things. However, it gets the basics wrong and largely falls flat as a result.
8. Agents of Shield (2014-15)
Pros: It took a while getting there but this is now genuinely good telly. It’s pacey, delivers plenty of cliffhangers and has found interesting character dynamics to explore. It has also begun serving as a harbinger of the future development of the MCU.
Cons: Very little good can be said about the first sixteen episodes. It was corny with terrible CGI and a meandering story arc. It’s got a LOT better but it still has weaknesses. The most grating of which is overuse of on the nose exposition.
Summary: If I’d judged the two series separately then the second would have been higher placed. The first might well have been bringing up the rear.
7. Iron Man (2008)
Pros: Started the whole MCU, revived Robert Downey Jnr’s career and made post-credit stings a thing.
Cons: It’s a bit hammy in places.
Summary: If you ignore what it lead to, it’s a pretty generic blockbuster. Naught wrong with that mind.
6. Iron Man 3 (2013)
Pros: Impressive stripped down action sequences, a plot that makes sense and a good ensemble cast. And as much as it annoys comic purists, the twist is hilarious.
Cons: Gwyneth Paltrow is still in it.
Summary: Proved that Marvel could live up to the standards it set itself with the Avengers.
5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Pros: Rivals Scott Pilgrim as the funniest comic book film ever. Plus the sheer boldness of making a film with a racoon and a tree at its heart.
Cons: Marvel loves its McGuffins almost as much as its underwhelming villains. This film has two of the latter chasing after one of the former. It’s an indication of how good this film is that this only mildly undermines the fun of the movie.
Summary: If you didn’t enjoy this, I despair of the possibility you will ever be entertained.
4. The Avengers (2012)
Pros: Successfully married sci-fi epic and office comedy with phenomenal results. Created a new sub-genre: the superhero ensemble. In Mark Ruffallo, we finally get the movie Hulk we deserved, who let us not forget at one point destroys a massive alien spaceship with a single punch.
Cons: The plot is occasionally a bit thin (*cough* failsafe *cough*) and it introduced Thanos which on the evidence of Guardians was a mistake.
Cons: Marvel’s young fan base should definitely not be watching this. If you know any of them who are, report their parents to social services.
Summary: Daredevil is to Marvel, what Daniel Craig’s 007 is to the Bond franchise.
2. Captain America: the Winter Soldier (2014)
Pros: Another great ensemble. Fight scenes inspired by the Raid and a car chase based on the French Connection. I love how it adopts of a Seventies political thriller and the fact that it uses the space afforded by having a lead character called ‘Captain America’ to highlight the fact that not everything the American government does is desirable.
Cons: You can knit pick the plot and the massive battle scene at the end rather undermines the more grounded feel of the rest of the film.
Summary: In my initial review, I described the Winter Soldier as Marvel “coming of age”. I stand by that.
1. Agent Carter (2015)
Pros: A smart plot, a great lead performance, supporting actors who are almost as good, its wonderful evocation of the 1940s, a deliciously twisted villain, real pathos, a feminist message and its style.
Cons: Sometimes it feels a little like its rushing to get everything into the eight episodes it has. Other than that I really can’t think of anything.
Summary: Even in a golden age of television, there’s little else on at the moment that’s this entertaining.
“Paleolithic, vegan, raw, fruitarian, gluten-free, macrobiotic. Whatever diet it happens to be, the first question I ask is: “For the love of God, what’s going on?” I mean that literally. Because despite a veneer of scientific rhetoric, food fads are ultimately about devotion to dogma; religion, not science. The appeal of modern diet gurus lies in their promise of nutritional redemption—and resisting that appeal depends on our ability to recognize and dismiss the irrational basis of their authority.
It’s true that as a religious studies professor, I’m prone to analyze cultural practices in terms of religion. But with eating habits, the evidence is everywhere. Once, at a farmers market, I asked a juice vendor whether her product counted as “processed”—a vague, unscientific epithet that gets thrown around in discussions of what we should eat. After a moment of shock, she impressed upon me that processing fruit into juice doesn’t result in processed food. Only corporations, she insisted, were capable of making processed food. Not only that, but it wasn’t the processing that made something processed, so much as the presence of chemicals and additives.
Did the optional protein powder she offered count as a chemical additive, I pressed? A tan, gaunt customer, eager to purchase her cleansing smoothie, interrupted us. “It’s easy,” she said, staring at me intensely. “Processed food is evil.”
At least she was honest. Processed food is evil. Natural food is good. Evil foods harm you, but they are sinfully delicious, guilty pleasures. Good foods, on the other hand, are real and clean. These are religious mantras, helpfully dividing up foods according to moralistic dichotomies. Of course, natural and processed, like real and clean, are not scientific terms, and neither is good nor evil. Yet it is precisely such categories, largely unquestioned, that determine most people’s supposedly scientific decisions about what and how to eat.”
“There’s another, bigger problem. Nessie is usually described as a reptile — like the plesiosaur. But Loch Ness simply isn’t a suitable habitat for such a creature.
“The water is too cold for a reptile,” Prothero says. “There are only a few species of reptiles that live in Scotland, and a cold-blooded animal can’t live there unless it’s adapted. Plesiosaurs are tropical creatures, which we know from their evolution and where fossils are found.”
Of course, fans of Nessie might respond by saying the beast is actually warm-blooded, akin to the dolphins and seals spotted in the Loch. But a gigantic warm-blooded lizard-like creature that looked like Nessie is even more unlikely than a plesiosaur, since it would be different from anything we’ve encountered in the fossil record. And it’s even more unlikely considering that the lake hasn’t been around long enough for such a unique animal to evolve on its own.”
“You distinguish your approach—pricing carbon emissions—from the one recommended by Naomi Klein, who talks about “taxing the rich and the filthy”. Why do you think hers is the wrong approach?
She wants to stick it to the man. I want to stick it to CO2! Do I think capitalism is doing just splendidly, and everyone is benefiting from the rising tide? Of course not, there are plenty of problems. But what I would say is, let’s focus on one thing at a time. When it comes to doing something about climate change, then it is [aiming at] the wrong target to say we ought to revamp capitalism as we know it. We may want to do that too, for all sorts of other reasons. And “solving” climate change in the process may well be a side benefit. But I don’t think that focusing on sticking it to the man is the right approach to solving climate change—for one very important reason: it will take new technologies, their invention and deployment, to make a dent in the problem.
She warns that conservative congregations are failing to connect because they try to appeal on the basis of style rather than substance:
“I caution against the idea that the way to get young people into church is to be hip and cool and have a pastor who wears skinny jeans.”
For example, speaking about the trendy Mars Hill mega-church that collapsed amid scandal last year, she says
“the exterior was hip and edgy, but they made the old mistake of authoritarian leadership”
And of course music or fashion choices are going to do little to redress the damage done to a church’s image by regressive sexual politics.
Evans suggests, unsurprisingly, that the reasons for the inability of liberal churches to connect with millennials are different. She herself struggled to find a church because:
She was looking for a certain kind of message, which may resonate with others in a generation that came of age after 9/11, lived through two wars, and not-so-happily endured years of recession: a recognition that life is dark.
And:
“A lot of liberal, progressive people are afraid of the word sin,” she said in an interview. To some, the idea of a flawed human nature which leads to transgressions against God might be the same category as exorcisms—part of the “bizarre truth of Christian identity,” as Evans puts it.
But even for regular church-goers, she said, sin may not be something many readily embrace. “Why do we mumble through rote confessions and then conjure plastic Barbie and Ken smiles as we turn to one another to pass the peace?” she writes. “What makes us exchange the regular pleasantries—’I’m fine! How are you?’—while mingling beneath a cross upon which hangs a beaten, nearly naked man, suffering publicly on our behalf?”
Some of this is cultural, she said—the idea, particularly in the ever-hospitable, perfectly polished South, that you should “bring your best self to church.” But “even in faith communities that aren’t Southern, there can still be that pressure to perform, and be Instagram-y, and not be honest and talk about your sin,” she said.
That’s why upbeat music and stylish services don’t do it for Evans: Hers is a Christianity that is fully aware of darkness. “So much of what Christianity produces as far as books and literature and even music in our worship—it’s all very rosy, when that’s not really life, and that’s not really church,” she said. “We carry the weight of many, many centuries of injustice, and that matters, and we can’t just ignore that.”
I agree that sin is not a concept that liberal Christians should not be alarmed by. We can assert its truth while rejecting the notion it can be used to divide the world into righteous people like us and nasty sinners. Indeed perhaps Christianity’s most egalitarian assertion is that we are all without exception sinners.
I don’t know whether restoring this insight to its proper place at the heart of worship will bring millennials back into church or not. However, I am confident that doing so has a better chance than any number of cringe making attempts to mirror our choices of music, coffee and clothes.
My spoiler-light review of Marvel and Netflix’s reinterpretation of Daredevil.
The Avengers does not exactly lack for great lines of dialogue. However, my favourite comes after Thor has plucked the recently captured Loki from the Avengers’ custody. As Captain America puts on a parachute to pursue them, Black Widow warns him “I’d sit this one out: those guys are basically gods”. To which he replies “there’s only one God ma’am and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that!”
That in microcosm has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe up till now. It’s a place where deities exist but are the kind that use a magic hammer to summon lightning to destroy an alien spaceship. So it’s quite a departure for the opening of Daredevil to take place in a confessional. And the ‘one God’ makes his presence felt throughout the series by means of the central character’s tortured Catholic soul. The dramatic tension that animates the story is less whether the hero will stop the villain but how much of his soul will he sacrifice doing it.
Marvel has explored more sombre territory before: take the Winter Soldier or some of the more recent episodes of Agents of Shield. But Daredevil takes this to an altogether different level. Indeed, this Marvel/Netflix co-production feels spiritually closer to Netflix edgy prestige shows like House of Cards than Marvel’s ultra-mainstream blockbusters. The goofiness of the films is gone, and we are now in a part of the MCU where there are slum landlords, people struggle to pay hospital bills and superheros need patching up after fights. Even the action sequences are unlike anything Marvel has delivered before. They look like the product of the showrunner asking his stunt coordinator for something ‘like the Raidbut even crunchier.’
For my money this is overwhelmingly a good thing. As affectionate as I am when it comes to Marvel’s other big TV project, Agents of Shield, I loathe the way it is littered with clunky exposition that serves solely to ensure even the most obtuse viewer will not be left behind. By contrast, Daredevil is a paragon of showing rather than telling, not being afraid to convey information through the composition of a shot or have it emerge naturally from the interaction between characters.
And in a world where pain and suffering are permitted to exist, events carry more weight. Sure the stakes may theoretically be higher when Thor battles to prevent the Dark Elves unleashing the Aether at the centre of convergance* than when Daredevil is trying to rescue a kidnapped boy from the Russian mafia. But it really doesn’t feel that way.
But for all the things that can be said in favour of Daredevil’s concept, style and writing, what I suspect will sell it for many people is the acting. Charlie Cox, who incongruously I last saw playing a choir master in the Theory of Everything, makes an admirable lead. However, the real powerhouse of the series is Vincent D’Onofrio playing the villain Wilson Fisk (AKA Kingpin).** The Full Metal Jacket and Law & Order alumni establishes utterly convincingly that Fisk is a man of both immense destructive potential and great vulnerability. D’Onofrio maintains an admirable unity between the Fisk who’s intimidated by social situations and the one who unleashes almost indescribable hurricanes of violence when provoked. He’s generally an uncomfortable figure to watch, which makes it all the more remarkable that you can’t help doing so.
Indeed that’s kind of emblematic of Daredevil’s place in the MCU. A show that’s nastier, more demanding and frankly rather brutal winds up being just about the most satisfying thing Marvel has done to date.
Summary: 9/10 – if there’s a nine year old in your life with lots of Avengers toys for goodness sake don’t let them watch this. Everyone else, for goodness sake watch this!
*If you’ve not seen seen Thor: the Dark World, let that sentence serve as a warning that you really don’t need to.
**I’m struggling to think of two actors playing the same character more differently than D’Onofrio in this series and Michael Clarke Duncan in the abominable Daredevil film starring Ben Affleck.
This caused me to reflect that there’s something strange about the way people opposed to inheritance tax discuss it: it’s rather absolutist.
If you think income tax should be cut you’ll probably argue ‘it discourages work’ or if it’s VAT you are unhappy with you’ll probably say it ‘reduces consumption’. What you probably won’t claim is that the current levels of these taxes mean you cannot work or earn money at all. Yet that’s exactly what the tweet above and many other arguments against IHT do.
In reality, the couple most definitely can pass on something. A married couple can effectively pool their individual allowances. They would therefore be able to pass on £650,000 before having to pay a penny of IHT. That’s pretty clearly not nothing.
And indeed they can pass on an unlimited amount in excess of that. It’s just that at that point the recipients will start paying tax on it. This is no different from someone with a job earning more than £10,600 and thereby exhausting their personal allowance, so paying income tax. Few people at that point stop working. I don’t see why the existence of inheritance tax for estates beyond a certain size should not be thought of the same way.
Indeed, this strange way of talking seems to permeate all Conservative discussions of inheritance tax. Backing the party’s policy of creating another tax free allowance specifically for homes George Osbourne said that “We believe that your home…should belong to you and your family, not the taxman”. This leaves one wondering if the Chancellor believes that the VAT I paid on my laptop means it’s not mine but the taxman’s.
He went onto say it was about “the basic human instinct to provide for your children”. However, inheritance tax is pretty tangential to that. Parenthood is about a lot more than the estate you leave your children upon their death. And inheritance tax does not prevent passing on assets to them. There’s after all a difference between not being able to do something and not being able to do something without paying tax.
The dependence on emotive rhetoric that makes little sense when analysed is indicative of the weakness of this policy. It cannot survive rational scrutiny. It cannot be justified either in terms of efficiency or equality. So instead notions of parenthood are misdirected to support it. It is a feeble piece of pre-election pandering and it deserves to be roundly rejected.
In and of itself, there is no virtue in working, much less working hard. Tory ministers appear to disagree. The Conservative party conference was plastered with the phrase “hardworking” – “For Hardworking People”, the legend boasted from the platform – and a host of frontbench speakers milked the term for every last residue of rhetorical worth. This began a few months ago when George Osborne started his – God help us – #hardworkingpeople tweets. And it’s all been downhill from there.
….parents will be offered a new £175,000 allowance to enable them to pass property on to children tax-free after they die.
There’s clearly a contradiction here. If you wanted to reward work, your priority would be cutting income tax or boosting working tax credits. By contrast, an inheritance tax cut rewards people not for their effort or entrepreneurialism but having the foresight to emerge from the right uterus.
Opponents of inheritance-tax talk as if it is uniquely burdensome. In fact, what it is is particularly troublesome for the people they socialise with. As I’ve blogged before IHT has an enormous zero band rate (up to £650,000 in some cases), sweeping exemptions and can often be paid in installments. It should also be noted that it’s paid by just 4% of households. The advocates for whinging wealthy will protest that this percentage is higher in London and the South East. What they actually mean by that is that the people paying IHT in these regions are less of a minority than in the rest of the country. It also never seems to occur to them to explain why the fact that the upper middle classes of London now pay IHT makes cutting it a priority, when a big majority of households across the country pay income tax, national insurance and VAT.
George Osborne claimed this new policy was ‘about values‘. I’m afraid I agree. Consciously or (as I suspect) otherwise, this reflects a worldview in which the interests of the affluent are paramount. What it shows very clearly is that the Tories are no more opposed to entitlement than Labour. Rather they embody the sense of entitlement of people angry at only being able to inherit £325,000. A party that claims to stand for self-reliance winds up prioritising people who think they need more of Mummy and Daddy’s money and concluding that lives already blessed by all the advantages of being raised by an upper-middle class family need a further boost. Beneath the focus group tested platitudes Cameron and Osborne use to sell this policy is a much clearer message: life has given us so much but we want even more.
It is a policy that is not merely weak, but basically indefensible. It is profligacy in a time of austerity. Even more than that it is an insult to the majority of hard working people who this policy will do nothing for.
The SNP have made it very clear that Trident is a fundamental issue for the SNP so we would never be in any formal deal with a Labour government that is going to renew Trident and we would never vote for the renewal of Trident or for anything that facilitated the renewal of Trident.
This is a statement that alarms me. This is not because I’m especially attached to Trident: I’m pretty agnostic on Britain’s nuclear deterrent. But I worry that these kind of supposedly unbreakable commitments are about to collide with the brute fact that the country needs a government and that that government needs to be able to survive a vote of confidence in the House of Commons.
As the video below pretty clearly demonstrates this is going to be no easy task. It will almost certainly require some kind of arrangement between at least three parties.
This means that the number of viable coalitions is likely to be very limited. If Labour emerges as the largest party then it will be nigh on impossible to form a government without some kind of arrangement between it and the SNP. And in this kind of situation if red lines constrain options further then that’s quite a problem.
Let us dive further into this scenario and consider how it plays out if Labour and the SNP refuse to go beyond their mutually contradictory red lines. As I see it there are the following options:
1) Labour tries to get a majority in the Commons by working with parties other than the SNP. In practice that either means a grand coalition or Labour allying with every party in the commons that isn’t the Tories or SNP. The first would require a massive change in our political culture and the second would be an unwieldy involving lots of parties with very different objectives. And other parties also have red lines that such deals would probably require them to go beyond;
2) The SNP allies itself with the Tories. This would itself breach another SNP promise and would be as unwieldy as the second arrangement in point 1);
3) Call a new election. As we now have fixed-term parliaments this would be hard to achieve. This has lead some to advocate going back to a system where elections could be called at a whim. That doesn’t seem desirable: if we are going to have multi-party arrangements then it makes sense to push the parties to make them work rather than seek the most advantageous moment to exit. Even if we did have another election there’s no guarantee that it would not land us back in an equally intractable situation. And in any event it’s not going to be possible to repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act without first forming a government!
More likely than any of these are that someones supposed red line proves to be malleable after all. In the short-term that would be good for the ability to govern Britain. However, in the long term parties’ saying they will definitely stick to a position and then not doing so is going to be corrosive to public trust in politics. As is of course demonstrated by this:
It would be better if parties just avoided setting out anything beyond the bare minimum of red lines.
Matter Of Facts 