Anyone for golf?

Tweet Clearly, the fact that the Ryder Cup is being held in Wales will attract publicity for Wales; and it's reasonable to hope that it will increase Wales' profile and improve our image internationally. It will also give people in Wales a chance to see world class sportspeople in action. Those are worthy aims in themselves.

I'm not convinced that it will bring the claimed economic benefits, though. And the efforts of government spokespeople to spin this in terms of £s and jobs look to me as though figures are more or less being plucked out of the air. That there will be some benefit to local businesses particularly in catering and accommodation seems reasonably certain; but whether it repays the investment looks rather less so.

But does it matter? Should we really look at events like this solely in terms of pounds and pennies? If we always took such a narrow view, then Wales would never bid for any major events, and we would be confining ourselves to the backwaters.

A confident, outward-looking Wales has a role to play in the world, and that includes hosting international events from time to time. We might need to pick and choose which we can afford, and which we think will do most for us and the people of Wales, but we shouldn't just decline to consider any such events on the basis of a simple profit and loss exercise. Neither should we seek to justify them on the basis of figures which are, at best, of dubious provenance.

My concern isn't about whether such events achieve the results which the government promise in advance (and which are ultimately pretty unprovable anyway), it's about whether we choose the right events, and whether we are able to afford the ones we select. Oh - and where the money comes from. I'm not sure that is is right or sensible to spend economic development money on such events.

Using the wrong arguments

Tweet Last week, the Druid hosted a keen debate about Wylfa B after posting on the government’s attitude to a consumer-funded levy. It looks increasingly as though the framework being set by the UK Government for a new generation of nuclear power stations makes the proposed Wylfa B an unlikely prospect.

If the power station never gets built as a result, I’d see that as good news; but it seems to me to be the wrong reason for stopping the development – just as most of those arguing in favour seem to me to be using the wrong arguments. I suppose there’s a certain irony there, though. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with subsidising nuclear power if we think it’s the right energy policy - after all, we subsidise renewables on that basis.

But I've never understood why so many of those who support the building of new nuclear power stations do so primarily on the basis of the jobs it would create. I think I could make a much stronger case on other grounds.

It's not that it wouldn't bring good, well-paid jobs; nor that we don't need such jobs. It's more that those jobs could equally be provided on the basis of a policy of using renewable energy, so the need for jobs is not a valid argument for favouring one energy policy over another. Coal mining also provides jobs; but it's not a reason to build new coal-fired power stations.

There are a number of arguments against nuclear energy. For me the single most important one has long been that we simply don't have a worked out solution to the issue of nuclear waste. (And, associated with that, there is the little matter of economics. If we don't know what we're going to do with the waste, we don't know what it's going to cost either – and that means that we really don't know the cost of nuclear energy. I am utterly convinced that, whatever the politicians say, the taxpayer will end up picking up the cost for decommissioning and waste management.)

But there are arguments in favour as well, and if I was going to make a case for supporting a new nuclear station, I'd make it on the basis of energy security and on environmental grounds, not jobs. I still don't personally believe the case to be strong enough, mind; but I'm conscious that I'd then have to argue against the likes of James Loveluck and Sir John Houghton, both of whom have come to the conclusion that nuclear energy is something we have to embrace. And I've certainly heard Sir John make a powerful case.

What would it take to convince me?

I have to admit that I'd start to waver a little if the UK Government were to announce that it would decommission all the UK's nuclear weapons and use the plutonium therein as a nuclear fuel. That would be a real case of 'swords into plough shares'.

It still wouldn't be enough though. What I would really need is to be satisfied about the management and disposal of waste; and we're nowhere near achieving that. Without that, the abiding problem of nuclear energy is that we buy plentiful secure electricity today at the cost of leaving a dangerous and costly legacy to the future. And that's why I believe that it's still right to argue against nuclear energy.

He wins - so who loses?

Tweet The Daily Mail reports on the man who earned the highest salary in the city last year. He managed to take home a cool £60 million from the profits of his hedge fund management company. According to the story, the profits come from successful betting on the futures markets.

At first reading, this is simply a story of a clever and successful man, who's turned his mathematical skills to making money, lots of it, by trading. The question that I wanted an answer to though seems not to have even been asked by the newspaper.

If he and his accomplices are making these vast amounts of money, who's losing them? Because 'hedging' is not a victimless process. As with any other type of betting, for every £ won by one person, someone else has to have lost a £; the money doesn’t just appear out of thin air.

I have a feeling that the answer to my question is actually “the rest of us”.

Hidden decisions

Tweet The Lib Dems are seeking to hide their acquiescence in the Trident replacement programme behind a suggestion that the 'final decision', which is currently due in late 2014 or early 2015, may be delayed until after the next General Election in May 2015.

It's a nice try, but it'e believable only to those who want to believe it. Delaying a decision isn't the same as delaying the programme; work on the replacement programme is following a schedule agreed by the previous government, and includes design and pre-contract activity. The 'in principle' decision to replace has already been taken, and the government is spending our money on progressing the scheme on the basis of that decision.

The fact that there's no major 'decision point' in the programme between now and 2015 doesn't mean that no work - or expenditure - is taking place. And neither does it mean that a decision to halt the programme could not be taken now.

The absence of any decision to halt the programme is effectively a decision to continue with it. In this case, not saying 'no' is the same as saying 'yes'. The Lib Dems in government, like their Conservative colleagues - and their Labour predecessors - are party to the continuation of the programme. They should stop trying to pretend otherwise.

Lib Dems and Marxism

Tweet I was surprised to see that Vince Cable is strenuously trying to deny that he is a Marxist after his speech to his party's conference. I've long believed that Marxism is integral to the Lib Dems' ability to say different things to different audiences in different areas - they've just got their Marxes confused.

It was, after all, Groucho, not Karl, who declared that "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them, I've got some other ones".

Back to the future

Tweet Conservative-leaning think tank, the Policy Exchange, have published some proposals for railways in the UK. They claim to be looking to the future - what I read was a series of unfortunate echoes of the past, most particularly the Beeching era.

The problem with their proposals is that they’re starting from what is, for me, completely the wrong place. Their basic premise seems to be that the railways are a drain on the public purse which needs to be stemmed, whereas I start from the premise that a switch to rail travel is something to be encouraged on environmental grounds.

Do we want to reduce capacity so as to service only commercially-viable demand, or do we want to add to capacity and stimulate demand? The first approach leads to a switch from rail to road, the second encourages a switch in the opposite direction.

Because they are starting from economics, rather than transport or environmental policy, some of their recommendations look positively perverse to me. For instance, heavier and faster trains cause more wear on the track, so if we use shorter and slower trains, track maintenance costs can be reduced. Another is to allow train companies to run fewer services, or stop at fewer stations if by so doing they can reduce their costs by only carrying the most profitable passengers.

Services from Aberystwyth are amongst those specifically mentioned by them as being ones where "niche operators may be willing to fill the gap..."; but if no-one wants to run such services without subsidy, then 'local people' should be free to decide what happens. "They can have a rail service, with the subsidy paid for locally, or they can choose to keep their cash and the line closes". It is a recipe for undoing the work of the last 20 years to rebuild rail services and encourage people out of their cars – and for removing rail services from much of Wales.

I wouldn’t argue that we should be running empty, or near empty, trains ‘just because’; and the report does make some sensible suggestions about flexibility in franchising and the disincentives that can exist within the franchising approach. But we do need to think about what we want the railway system to achieve – and profitability is not at the top of my list.

The report makes what I consider to be a wholly invalid comparison between the railways and low-cost air services, claiming that those air services "separate the essentials from the nice to have", and yet "still offer a product that people want to use". And that really sums up the huge difference between the approach that they adopt and the approach I think we should be adopting.

The railway system shouldn’t be seen as simply a commercial exercise in responding in the cheapest possible way to a demand for rail travel; it should be seen as something that we positively encourage people to use as an alternative to other forms of travel. And that means that we deliberately need to make it more attractive than the alternatives, not reduce it to the same level.

Attempting to run the railways as an entirely commercial operation was what led to the loss of so much of our rail infrastructure in the past. It’s a step backwards which we should reject.

Misleading arguments

Tweet I understand why some people feel that wind farms are unattractive to look at, and can spoil the view. Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; but some beholders consider them an ugly intrusion. I'm also aware of the problems which local communities can face during construction - we saw that for ourselves during the recent construction of a wind farm just up the road near Alltwalis. And I know that there are some unresolved issues surrounding noise in some cases which can cause major problems for some residents.

But most of the other reasons used by those campaigning against wind farms - particularly when they attempt to stray into technical areas - seem to be exaggerated, wilfully misinterpreted, or else just plain wrong. It's a pity, because it can mean that genuine and valid concerns about specific sites can end up getting lost in an ill-informed debate about the principle.

Today's letter in the Western Mail (Danish lesson) is a case in point. To read it, one might conclude that both the Danish Government and its power company have decided that building onshore wind farms was a huge mistake which they have now come to regret.

However, as this report shows, that is significantly at variance with the truth. But why let mere facts get in the way of a good piece of rhetoric?

Sharing out the rewards

Tweet I’m not sure that I’m really terribly worried about the fact that there are thousands of people in the public sector paid more than the Prime Minister. Superficially it may seem odd that there should be any, but it’s nothing new; senior civil servants have long been paid more than their political bosses.

It’s very often the people working in our public services, rather than the politicians, who have the real expertise. Although there are politicians who have detailed knowledge and expertise in a range of fields, the only formal ‘qualification’ that they need is the ability to persuade people to vote for them. Or perhaps more accurately, get themselves selected where people are going to vote for their party anyway.

I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with paying experts more than politicians; so the real question for me isn’t how many people are being paid more than the PM, it’s whether they have the relevant expertise and skill to justify their rewards.

The element of the story which interested me more was the comments by Francis Maude. He said that it should not be necessary to offer "stupendous amounts" of money in the public sector, and went on to add:

"You can square the circle of having really good people not on telephone number salaries and massive built-in bonuses. That public service ethos is very important. People will come and work in a public sector for salaries that aren't competitive in a private sector sense."

Up to a point, I agree with him. People who are committed to the ethos of the organisations for which they work, or the services which they are providing, will not necessarily be forever seeking the highest possible level of personal rewards. But what does that say about the private sector?

Are the high rewards of some therefore correspondingly justified by their lack of commitment to what they are doing? Is it right that the highest rewards go to those who place their own personal acquisitiveness above the wider needs of society?

Maude seems to be saying that the most selfless amongst the most able should reap the lowest rewards, whilst the highest rewards go to the most selfish, even if, in pursuit of their own interests, their actions are directly detrimental to the interests of the majority.

At its heart, it's a statement of an ideological position about the nature of human society, where resources are distributed on the basis of competition, but it doesn’t fit my own view of what attributes ought to attract reward. And it is certainly not an approach based on any evaluation of the contribution people make.

To infinity and beyond

Tweet It looks like Nick Clegg got a bit carried away with his own rhetoric during his launch of the campaign for a 'yes' to the AV system yesterday. Considering that it's a system that the Lib Dems have never argued for, I suppose he was always in for a tough time convincing his own troops, but this quote is a classic.

"I know AV may not be the favourite voting system of everyone here, but ... we all agree that AV is infinitely fairer than what we have at the moment."

How much fairer than 'infinitely fairer' does he think STV can be, I wonder?

Assessing Value

Tweet The report that David Cameron remains committed to replacing Trident was hardly a surprise. The conversion of the Lib Dems during the last election campaign to support for nuclear weapons was rather more of a surprise; probably especially so to many of their members.

What interested me in this report, though, was that the MoD will try and "ensure that the renewal of the deterrent provides value for money". It's a worthy aim, of course, and something which should apply to all government expenditure. Calculating the monetary cost is one side of the equation, and is probably the easy part, although based on most MoD procurement exercises, the final cost will no doubt be many times the initial estimates. But how will they assess 'value'?

If the 'deterrent' ever has to be used, then its 'value' could presumably be assessed in terms of the number of people killed and amount of damage caused, but the whole point of a 'deterrent' is that it is never actually used.

However, it isn't enough to argue that because it has never been used, that must prove it deterred people who might otherwise have attacked the UK. It could equally be the case that they wouldn't have attacked anyway, in which case the actual value delivered is a big fat zero.

So, where is the evidence that the UK's possession of a nuclear weapons capability over the past 60 years has ever actually deterred an attack on the UK? I understand the argument that the nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR were so massive that any nuclear attack by one on the other would result in the utter destruction of both (and an extreme case of 'collateral damage' for the rest of us). It meant that only a lunatic would ever launch such an attack, thereby making it less likely (although I have to confess to occasional concerns about the sanity of certain occupants of both the White House and the Kremlin during the cold war).

But 'mutually assured destruction' never really applied to the UK's stockpile; it was never big enough for any other hostile nuclear power (with the possible exception of France, with whom the UK hasn't always been the best of friends!) to feel certain that they couldn't 'win' a nuclear exchange. So, what have Polaris and Trident actually deterred? If, as I suspect, the answer to that is nothing at all, then the 'value' of possessing them is also zero. And the 'value' of the proposed replacement is likely to be of the same order.