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The UK is currently distracted by the Conservative Party's contest for a new leader. I spotted in a BBC News article that Liz Truss, the front-runner,

"would launch a new UK survey of wildlife to understand which species are endangered"

...but no further explanation. Nor anything on Liz Truss' own website. Eventually I found the following statement in her article for the Conservative Environment Network:

"I will commission a nationwide nature survey [to] build an evidence base in a better way than the EU-derived Habitats Directive to help us understand UK-specific habitat & species issues, like what species are endangered & what we can improve."

Now what does this mean, I wondered? Firstly, UK wildlife is very well surveyed already, and a lot is known about which species are endangered. Secondly, within a leadership campaign, these kind of campaigning announcements aren't given out by accident - it must mean something, a message either to win party members over to her side, or to signal allegiances within the Tory party. But what?

It's worth remembering that Liz Truss was previously in the UK government as Environment Secretary. We can presume she has some knowledge of these issues, though her record as an environmental champion is decidedly mixed. I highly recommend this Buglife blog from 2015 about the Habitats Directive and Liz Truss. This was, of course, back way before Brexit. The article quotes The Telegraph newspaper as reporting:

"The Government will also seek to emasculate European directives that provide the main protection for British wildlife. Liz Truss – the reappointed, but hitherto unremarkable, Environment Secretary – is not expected to provide much resistance. But, then, nature conservation has never featured much in the Prime Minister’s [David Cameron's] greenery."

So, that's a perspective from back in 2015. Even back then, as Environment Minister she "cut taxpayer subsidies for solar panels on agricultural land, as her view was that the land could be better used to grow crops, food and vegetables" (wkp). So at least there's some consistency, depressing as this silly claim is. (Solar energy is not in competition with land for food. Land for biofuel, land for golf courses, and land for grouse shooting all take up dozens of times more space, why is she not concerned about those?) The 2015 and 2022 Trusses are also consistent in cutting funding (e.g. to the Environment Agency) and insisting it as a good thing.

What are the possible explanations for the 2022 Liz Truss, out on the campaign trail, actively pushing for a new "nationwide nature survey"? Some candidate explanations:

1. Just a simple post-Brexit update? After disentangling from the EU, it's sensible to refresh the UK's Habitats Directive in a more customised UK-specific way. This is a sensible idea but it doesn't explain at all why Truss would be shouting about it on the campaign trail. After all, many other laws are probably in a similar situation.
2. A genuine reflection of the need to update the species lists because everyone knows they're a bit out of date (as mentioned in the Buglife blog linked above)? Again, it's hard to imagine that this justifies putting it in your manifesto; but since Truss has background in the domain, maybe.
3. She needs at least one "green policy" to show to some voters, and needs something that sounds nice and caring but doesn't impact on other plans? Could be. She's already shown her ignorance and NIMBYism about green energy, showing off ideas about stopping farmers from installing solar panels in their fields (the farmers are not happy she's saying this!), so it's clear she's not going to have much to win the green Tories over.
4. In order to delay action? i.e. let's not take any new conservation measures until a big multi-year consultation and survey is complete.
5. In order to reduce the protection of some species/habitats, i.e. to label some species as not endagered, more than to label them as endangered? It's quite common that rare species and habitats are seen as "getting in the way" e.g. of construction or industry.

I'm currently reading Wild City, a delightful book by Florence Wilkinson (my business partner) about "Encounters With Urban Wildlife". I was interested to find this titbit about politics and conservation:

"In July 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a speech on job creation, in which he urged the nation to 'build, build, build'. And in doing so, he waged war on one of our rarest amphibians: 'Newt-counting delays are a massive drag on the prosperity of this country,' he blustered, referring to the great crested newt, which is a protected species under British law.

"For development to take place on a site occupied by great crested newts, adequate mitigation must be provided and the newts translocated to a suitable habitat elsewhere. Anyone found guilty of disturbing their resting places, breeding sites, or taking their eggs is liable for an unlimited fine and up to six months in prison.

"Johnson's comments soon faced wide condemnation, with the head of the Wildlife Trusts, Craig Bennett, describing the speech as 'pure fiction'. 'It may sound funny referring to newts,' he continued, 'but actually it was rather sinister. In the environmental movement we know referring to newts is a dog whistle to people on the right of his party who want environmental protections watered down.'"

So, here's an echo from the recent past. Neither Boris Johnson nor Liz Truss are visionaries, and I'm quite confident they are blown by the same winds: I wouldn't be surprised if they were influcenced by the same ideologues or generous funders in the Conservative Party, so this echo seems to support explanations four or five. Of course, multiple motives can be in play at once.

British nature organisations are clearly keeping an eye on all this too. The RSPB last week "weighed in to the Tory leadership contest". Notably, the first thing they highlighted was that EU-derived habitat regulations "have been vital in the protection of nature for the past thirty years," and they warn strongly against scrapping them or watering them down. The RSPB is also concerned about other related policy proposals such as absorbing Natural England into DEFRA, i.e. absorbing arms-length nature organisations into the government department, which clearly would reduce the independent voice for nature.

Postscript: I've been trying to keep to a neutral tone, but I can't really leave this topic without registering my horror at British politics. The UK's voting system, and now the Conservative party's system too, seem fatefully incapable of selecting for competence. In such important times as these, we have some very significant "live issues" to deal with, and the hollowing out of the UK political system is a cause for despair.

"Dark stores" is a stupid name. It refers to a new business model of rapid grocery deliveries (e.g. you can order some vegatables and milk and have it delivered in 10 minutes), and here in the Netherlands we see a lot of these shops popping up in towns with some fast-cycling bicycle couriers zooming around ("Gorillas" and "Getir" are the main brands we see around here).

The stupid name "dark stores" comes from an analogy with "dark kitchens", another recent invention: home takeaway food deliveries, where you might think you're ordering from "Wong's Palace", "Turkish Delight", or some other local restaurant with a cook who specialises in one particular cuisine - but in reality the food is prepared in some anonymous industrial-estate kitchen which churns out lots of different food under multiple assumed names. The yucky side of dark kitchens, even if they're done "well", is the dishonesty: using assumed names to give an aura of authenticity, and presumably stealing business from the genuine local restaurants who have been specialising in their own cuisines for years.

--- However, "dark stores" aren't dishonest at all. Assuming the business is done "well", then it's exactly the same as the established supermarket home-delivery services: groceries, sent out by couriers, but with a different approach to delivery planning and response times.

But these shops are coming in for criticism in the local press, and there's political discussion about what to do about them. It's often not quite clear what the complaint is, but it certainly includes:

• Dangerous speed-cycling making pedestrian/cycling safety worse
• Noise nuisance. From what...? Lots of cycle couriers and grocery deliveries, through into the evening, I think. It's not clear to me what makes this different from (a) home take-away deliveries (here in Leiden we see many many bicycle meal deliveries from Thuisbezorgt etc (the Dutch Justeat) on the streets) or (b) ordinary supermarket deliveries (we also see lots of supermarket vans driving around, daytime and evening).
• Town-centre locations - even though these services are simple deliveries, they set up lots of little shops in the middle of town, i.e. locations that might annoy locals. They do this because you can't really achieve "10-minute delivery" promises without setting up lots of small depots everywhere.

From my perspective, I'm a little bit baffled about why this business model is the new bete noir for some local politics. They're pretty much entirely using cycle couriers here (not mopeds or vans), so it seems very low-impact, no fumes or engine noise. But I think all of those factors I've listed combine to make them a focus of irritation. Perhaps also there's a hint of the usual irritation when new and unexpected things happen in one's neighbourhood.

What should be done? Well:

1. If these businesses shouldn't be setting up shops in the town centre or other neighbourhoods - they shouldn't have been giving licences to operate by the local council. I'm guessing that the local "zoning" and business regulations weren't designed with this business model in mind, so perhaps right now there's no way for town councils to regulate whether or not they should be in your high street. I'd imagine that an update to the zoning/regulations is needed, to make clear where they should put their depots. Amsterdam city council has "paused" any new locations opening up, and will spend this year deciding how to regulate them. Leiden's looking at it too, and other cities.
2. The speed-demon couriers - yes, I'd say that's a genuine issue, because when a business offers guaranteed 10-minute delivery etc, there's no way for that to be achieved without strongly incentivising your couriers to go fast, take cheeky shortcuts, and make everyone else feel a little less safe. The solution, then, isn't to punish the couriers, but perhaps to regulate the market so that no-one is allowed to guarantee 10-minute delivery times, nor to incentivise their staff for anything shorter than 30-minute times? Although it might seem an odd thing to regulate, setting 30 minutes as the quickest guarantee doesn't seem unreasonable to me. It might not entirely fix the speed-demons but it takes away what is obviously a very big incentive.

As I write this, I am flying through the night on a Nightjet night-train from the Netherlands to southern Germany. It's a delightful train ride with lots of nice little touches. Before bedtime, I sit here with a drink in my hand, watching the views go by outside. The view alternates between peaceful countryside and urban/industrial busyness. It really feels like you can see a lot from here.

I'm angry. I'm angry on behalf of my friends, family, and everyone else back home. The UK government has just upended plans for the HS2 and "Northern Powerhouse" railways. I left the UK partly because it has a stupid political setup that frustrates all attempts at (simultaneously) two important things: sensible evolution of policy, and sensible planning and provision for our future. One of the scraps of hope I held on to had been this: The HS2 rail project, imperfect as it is, was one of the few big projects that the UK had actually got its act together on, during my lifetime, or at least one of the few big projects outside London. As a northerner I need HS2 to be implemented sensibly, because I know and feel how left-behind we've been in terms of the over-centralised London government investing in us. Plus, of course, modern train systems mean there's less need to fly or drive: so even when they have some impact in being built, they're likely to be good for our climate aims as well as for providing nice things to ordinary people, making life a little better.

The UK political system means, to a first approximation, that it's pretty likely the wind will blow the opposite way every four years. This is because it's effectively trapped in a two-party system, seesawing between the two. Big projects might eventually get planned - but then they get canned, or at least bodged, a few years later. Thanks to the stupid voting system it's really unlikely this will change in the next couple of decades. In a more sensible system, such as a proportional system, people's votes actually have the effect they're meant to. Parties that were once top-dog can fade to nothing if they don't do good work.

And the UK's problems are even more stuck when you realise how heavily centralised it all is. I hadn't realised this until I left the country and saw other ways of doing it. Running the country from London, pushing all local democracy to the fringe and hoovering up the person-power (see stats from Tom Forth on this), is so blinkered it hurts. The broken voting system, mentioned above, wouldn't matter so much if our local regions (county councils) still had budgets and leverage to get stuff done.

I want the UK to be better. I want to help too. I tried to make a difference while I was there, and I hope I can do again one day. I tried, and in many ways I was stymied.

I'm now living in a European country which - while not perfect - gives me a sense of optimism, a sense that it's possible to make sensible investments and plans that will help everyone. The basic feeling is the feeling that at the top level (politics, civil society, whatever), the rules of the game are not fixed to fuck us over.

I'm flying through the pitch-dark countryside right now, in a delightful night-train that crosses three countries, and I'm still impressed that it can cross countries so effortlessly. - Funnily enough, night-trains were more common in the past before the era of the motorway. Many night train services were dismantled as the car took over. Now, though, we realise they're a good way to do things, and there are many night train services being rekindled across the continent, in an evolving mix of government planning and commercial endeavour. All democracies are messy, and all have good decades and bad decades. I feel hope here, seeing what happens when there's a foundation that allows for civil negotiation and long-term planning.

I just want to put some of this down for posterity - i.e. to remind myself in future, of what was obvious at the time.

• "Shut the damn pubs," I've been thinking to myself for weeks. Saying it to friends too. Back in August, I think, the scientific advisors Chris Whitty and Graham Medley floated the idea that the pubs should shut in September to allow the schools and universities to come back with some level of reassurance, some help to restrict the spread of the virus. The idea didn't seem to catch on. It wasn't debated much in the media. Now, with the benefit of hindsight it's clear that the start of term would have been the IDEAL moment to put the pubs (and some other similar parts of that sector) into an autumn furlough. It would clearly need a furlough or some other financial support.

  The public messaging would have been clear - a straightforward cutoff that we can all understand. "You've had your summer in the beer gardens, now let's get the kids back to school". Much much easier to manage publicly.

  (Update: we now find that the science advisers were indeed officially in September suggesting shutting bars and restaurants)

  The current 10pm shutting of pubs and restaurants struck me as a useless compromise. People will have already been boozing, hanging around with strangers indoors. It's looking, at the moment, like it actually may be doing more harm than good, with people gathering in streets, supermarkets, homes. That's more than I'd expected. I wonder if people are making the most of their time before the expected imposition of even tougher restrictions.

• The second wave of covid was clearly blooming BEFORE the schools and universities went back into their term. Given the time-lag in detection, and the fact that the wave was picking up approx 2 weeks beforehand anyway, it must have kicked off about a month before. It seems likely that one cause is people coming back from foreign holidays: a fairly high chance of bringing novel infections in. But maybe it's also just the gradual relaxation - of rules and of attitudes - that did it.

• The union, UCU, was right. They had more insight than I did - I wasn't particularly committed as to whether universities should be trying to restart their academic year on-campus.

  (And we could see the financial problem facing universities: if they didn't offer some kind of "on-campus teaching and socialising" promise, the students might not come at all, which puts the universities into a massive financial loss. That could be handled by the big well-endowed universities, but for many of the more normal universities - like the one I work at - there's no big money pot in the background giving them strategic flexibility, they live on the balance of incoming and outgoing, and a bank loan facility to allow strategic investment.)

  But the union UCU spoke forcefully, saying that the teaching term should not go back on campus until it was clear how to do it safely. I did not foresee this horrible situation of students in accommodation lockdown and big discussions about whether to let them leave for Christmas. The union's position was the right one.

• Should students get some money back? They've paid "normal" fees and are not getting a normal education. Well: the first thing to say is that university staff have been moving heaven and earth this summer to create, very rapidly, a seismic shift in how they do their teaching, making it possible to do blended or online as necessary, often completely reworking their courses. It's not me that moved heaven and earth - it's the lecturers and support staff, especially those teaching the big first-year courses. They are knackered. So. The "cost of education" has definitely not decreased. Frankly, students this year have received, unknowingly, hundreds of hours of added free labour from university staff busting a gut to get things in place. If the outcome is thought to be not good enough - because as we all know, it's the social, group-learning and extra-curricular side the students will be missing out on - then yes, it's worth compensating. I'm afraid it should be government-backed compensation, since the cost of teaching hasn't decreased, it's more like a furlough of students' in-person experience. So how about a per-university scheme that pairs lockdowns/go-homes with student compensation.

• It beggars belief that the government was saying, in late August, "Now is the time" to go back physically to work, in offices and workplaces. They were doing this, as was obvious, mere weeks before the schools went back. Why not wait and make sure the schools get back OK? Why not let individuals and businesses make up their own minds? Sure, there are economic costs to staying remote, staying in furlough, etc. But the most reasonable way to go seems to lay off the government messaging for a moment - allow our collective intelligence to work out how to work sensibly and safely in the new era. Not to coerce people back into unsafe conditions. Not to give some bosses (and I have a couple of my friends' bosses in mind) the backing to force people back into face-to-face work that they personally feel unsafe doing.

The UK's response to Covid-19 is a national tragedy. It's not just a case of "bad luck": we had approx 2 weeks extra time than Italy in coming up with our response, and yet we somehow managed to achieve a higher number of Covid deaths, and even, a higher number of Covid deaths-per-million.

For me, it's the deaths-per-million that is the number to care about, since it adjusts for the big differences in numbers you would get simply from a country being large or small. For a long time we were tracking along with the same rates as France and the Netherlands, both countries that "got the virus" at about the same time as us. Then our stats pulled away, now being twice the (normalised) fatality rate as those countries. Twice.

You can also measure "excess deaths" which helps account for deaths not necessarily labelled as "covid deaths". As of May 15th, the FT lists us as having 59,500 excess deaths (+65%), versus Italy's 46,700 (+47%) and Spain's 43,500 (+62%). (Update: the FT has an article on 28th May analysing our higher death rate in more detail.)

The minor differences in how each country reports their data are insignificant here. They can't possibly explain away this tragedy. We had two extra weeks to get our preparations in place. And there are plenty of reasons the UK should have been one of the best-prepared countries in the world. This BMJ editorial gives a good overview of the UK's public health failures in handling the coronavirus. There were (probably) mistakes in the scientific advice, and these are mentioned in the article. But don't let that misguide you - there were big, very big errors of judgment at the political level too. And it is the government which has the responsibility for getting us through crises like this. Our numbers should not have been anywhere near as bad as Italy's or Spain's.

Politicians are dedicated experts at pinning the blame on anyone but themselves, though. The UK government are already trumpeting loudly the defence that they're "following the science", and surely they will use that defence when the public inquiry comes.

So. Putting aside many of the other uncertainties - if they were indeed following the science, then:

• Why did Boris Johnson not turn up to any of the early Cobra meetings about Covid, to find out what the science was? (January, February - he missed all 5 of the Cobra Covid meetings, finally turning up to chair one on March 2nd.)

• Why did Boris Johnson give a speech on 3rd Feb in which he enthusiastically promoted an idea of the UK as a small plucky country that would refuse to close its borders, all in service of the ideal of free trade?

• Why were Dominic Cummings and other political advisors, able to be present at some SAGE meetings despite the strong risk of affecting the political neutrality (real or perceived) of the scientific advice?

• Why did the government, at any time between 2016 and 2020, not make preparations in response to the critical warnings from the 2016 Exercise Cygnus (pandemic preparedness exercise)?

• Why, when scientists advised that the public should not shake hands, did Boris Johnson announce gleefully that he had been shaking hands with everyone when he visited a hospital ward with Covid patients (March 3rd)?

• Why did the UK government advise the public not to go to pubs, while also not mandating that pubs should close? (March 16th) (Anecdotally: I walked past a couple of pubs, and saw them packed full with people, presumably grabbing a last chance before any potential closure. The closure eventually happened on March 20th.)

• Why were incoming flights still broadly permitted, without testing, even from highly-infected parts of the world, as late as April 16th?

• Why did the UK Government claim in May that they had "brought in the lockdown in care homes ahead of the general lockdown", when there was no lockdown in care homes until the general lockdown? (There was non-mandatory guidance, on 13th March.)

• Why did the UK Government redefine its "covid tests completed" statistic to include tests posted out to people, even if not returned or processed - creating obscurity about the true number of tests completed and thus the covid incidence rates? (The Chair of the UK Statistics Authority sent a strongly-worded rebuke to the UK Government (2nd June) about its test data reporting.)

• Why, when the government introduced its "alert levels", did it clearly state that alert level 4 would mean restrictions remain in place (May 11th), but then later (the first week of June) eased lockdown restrictions while also keeping the alert level at 4?

• Why, instead of maintaining clear public messaging about the safety rules, did 10 Downing Street and many cabinet ministers choose to leap to the defence of special advisor Dominic Cummings when he was revealed to have broken the guidance and potentially the law? (The government could perfectly well have declined to comment, citing it as a personal matter. I find it deeply troubling that they instead chose to risk the public trust in their messaging by linking it to Cummings' chosen behaviour.)

None of these are "science led" actions, even considering the differences in advice from different scientific advisors. I'm nervous that the scientists involved, who are presumably much less experienced at media and spin than the politicians, may end up scapegoated for mistakes and ambiguities which we can see in retrospect. One of the scariest implications of that would be the big disincentive for scientists to get involved with giving their expert advice to the UK government in future.

If you are involved in science: beware of framing your conversations around flaws/gaps in the scientists' advice - even though that can be an interesting discussion (particularly because it's more concrete than discussing politicians' ideologies). As the list above shows, the people in charge made lots of concrete statements and decisions that deserve clear scrutiny. Similarly, there's no point blaming politicians nor scientists for innocent mistakes. Instead, focus on clear deliberate actions such as listed above. So much of the UK's response was shaped strongly by political ideology and political allegiances. We need to investigate these.

Free markets? Democracy? High or low taxes? ... We're in an era when lots of commentators are in favour of "let the market decide". I was struck by this, funnily enough, when looking at the much-blogged and much-discussed opinions of Dominic Cummings. His writing has plenty of interesting detail, and a good understanding of technology, and of course there's plenty to agree with or disagree with. This is the quote that struck me:

"Economic theory, practice, and experiment have undermined the basis for Cartesian central planning: decentralised coordination via market prices is generally a better method for dealing with vast numbers of possibilities than Cartesian or Soviet planning, though obviously markets have problems particularly with monetary policy and financial regulation."

These aren't the problems that come to mind when I think of market mechanisms. The more fundamental are democracy, and equality of opportunity. You don't need to "pick a side" (not even the left side) in order to agree that market mechanisms have a "rich get richer" outcome baked into their core. "The rich get richer" is not an axiom, but it's an unavoidable consequence and inseparable from the processes that make markets "efficient".

By the way - "efficient", here, means that prices in the market reflect all available information about the values of the things in that market. Informally, it's the claim that markets are the best way of deciding what to do, once you've written down what value you attach to things and outcomes.

The claimed efficiency of markets has been a long-running debate. What we can see from recent history, though, is that the "free market" idea does generally seem to be effective in the sense that once you've set the rules of the market, all the different actors in that market (people, businesses, investors) play their part and it all adds up to produce something like the designed outcome. There's lots to criticise about markets, in particular "negative externalities" (bad things that aren't factored into the pricing - e.g. CO2 emissions), but let's not get into that right now. We should recognise the important core appeal: essentially, a market system is a way to loosely coordinate the brains of all concerned in finding an optimal outcome, and this is its key advantage over "central planning" in which we have to rely on the brains of whoever's in the central planning authority.

The fundamental democratic problem with free markets is as follows. They lead to an outcome that reflects value, but the actors involved don't all end up with the same treatment. Some get rich, some get poor. (See "Free market pros and cons".) They then have different amounts of leverage within that market: some have lots of power, some have very little. In some markets that's fine, but in anything that involves actual citizens, it's a recipe for inequality. We can tax profits, we can tax capital, and that's important so that at the very least, governments can provide essential services and a social safety net. But people on the economic right don't like such taxes, arguing that they reduce the incentives for market players and thus act as a drag on market efficiency.

Hence we arrive at the basic philosophical conflict between the economic right and the economic left. Market efficiency versus democratic fairness.

-

Now into that picture comes this other idea that has been in the ether for at least the past decade: universal basic income. Universal basic income (UBI) simply means giving a sum of money to every citizen, e.g. a lump of money every month or every year. It's unconditional - it doesn't matter if you're employed or not, for example.

There are various motivations for UBI, but one is that this is a much more efficient use of government money than the current alternative: a complex tangle of benefits, each with its own bureaucratic eligibility criteria, and the tangled benefits system leading to strange undesired outcomes. For example, unemployment benefits can often mean that some people end up losing money by accepting a low-paid job offer. In the world of UBI, there's no disincentive: accept the job if you want it, and you get extra income as well as your UBI.

UBI has been debated plenty during the 2010s. It has its advocates on the left and on the right. And its critics: critics on the right ask "but who's going to pay for it all?" and "wouldn't people just stop working and start freeloading?", while critics on the left ask "isn't this a right-wing excuse to slash the welfare state?"

Although there may be some well-reasoned criticism out there, I want to return to the fundamental issues. We have big debates and disagreements about how to organise our societies. We want the outcomes to be efficient as well as fair. We have many people passionately wedded to socialism, and many people passionately wedded to market mechanisms. The fundamental political question is, how do we get from here, to some better situation?

UBI seems to be one answer. Not just one answer - it's the only answer I know of that could appeal to people of many shades of the political spectrum, and is also something that can be tried, can be piloted within our existing countries without having to rewrite or dismantle decades of complex policy. The key is that UBI directly resolves the conflict between market mechanisms and fairness. It doesn't fix everything (negative externalities, for example), but it allows us to move to a situation where democrats and market fundamentalists can work together to produce efficient outcomes for all.

I know there are many implementation details of UBI to talk about, and I'm sure there are some imperfections in general. But can we afford to dither about the details, when we have so many problems to solve, and so many winners and losers from the current economic systems in place around the world?

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