This blessed isle, this England

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are to have so many keeping watch over us.  An elderly woman running a B&B up here on the Norfolk Costa Geriatrica has not been paying attention to this good fortune.  Someone comes in from the village to help with making beds and the like.  As an employer she should have been complying with the rules on Legionnaires’ disease but, and I know it is hard to believe, the guidance had escaped her attention.  Its six pages are merely an introduction to “the Approved Code of Practice (ACOP) and [the] Legionnaires’ disease: The control of legionella bacteria in water systems … technical detail.” These rules apply to every employer. Specifically she should have been:

• identifying and assessing sources of risk;
• preparing a scheme (or course of action) for preventing or controlling the risk;
• implementing and managing the scheme – appointing a person to be managerially responsible, sometimes referred to as the ‘responsible person’;
• keeping records and check that what has been done is effective;

There are about 300 cases of the disease a year about 40% arising from overseas travel.  The UK cases arise in clusters, i.e. one faulty water system typically infects about 10 people who use it.  The numbers have been falling from a high of nearly 600 in 2006.  There are less than 20 cases a year in East Anglia which probably means, allowing for clusters and overseas travel, no cases in Norfolk at all.

This disease is clearly a local problem and, if regulations are needed at all, they should be local and focussed.

But the urge to regulate is a general UK problem not limited to health and safety.  It has grown massively since Margaret Thatcher invented regulators, originally for the utilities, in the 1980s.  We blame the EU but most of it is home-grown.

Universities provide a very different example.  Should they be truly independent as they were for hundreds of years?  After all, the whole point of a university is freedom to pursue knowledge unfettered by bureaucracy. And if they should be regulated at all, by whom?

If you were choosing a university for yourself or a loved one, which regulator would give most confidence in the integrity of that university?

The Open University proudly boasts, on its home website and emails “The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.”  No better guarantee than that.

Subverting the urge to regulate

Two golf clubs on the Costa Geriatrica north of London play by different rules. Club A pours out regulations and spreads little instructional notices around the course. The new health and safety leaflet is only picked up because it looks like a score card. No one ever reads it. The club even specifies the socks gentlemen are allowed to wear. Club B has none of that. If their Captain suggests a new rule, he is quietly taken to one side and urged to lie down in a dark room until the urge passes. No prizes for guessing which club is the more harmonious. Brussels and Whitehall both trumpet the need for deregulation and then do the opposite. Last week’s Research Note “EUtopian Regulation” discusses whether total regulation could be reduced by competition between the three factories, global, EU, and member states, and concludes that competition might decrease or increase total regulation. It is not the mechanism that matters, i.e. who regulates, but the will to deregulate. We need to take a hard look at the fundamental causes of the urge to regulate and then consider how the vice can be cured.

Yes, it is a vice. For example, complaints about the NHS have grown proportionately to the increase in its “management”, while malpractice in the City has grown in proportion to the number of regulators. I’m not suggesting that correlation is causality, merely that rule-making has improved satisfaction neither in the NHS nor in the banks, nor in golf clubs.

The drivers of regulation are at least threefold:

Cause One is the rise of the lobby group. Unions, NGOs and save-the-worlders all claim to represent ordinary people in pressing for additional regulations. Alongside all those telling government how to spend other people’s money, are those telling government to stop us doing whatever we happen to be doing. In a democracy, we should be free to express our opinions but that is not the same as getting the law changed to remove our freedoms. We should be governed by those we elect, not by those who think they know better. They should be taxed, for a start, on their gross income in order to compensate society for the amount of governmental time they waste.

Cause Two is the excessive number of levels of law-making and law-makers at each level. Every single one of them, like the Captain of a golf club, wants to leave his or her mark on society, to be famous for some Anti-X Act. We even hand out CBEs to these controllistas. Much better would be to reserve medals and pensions for those civil servants who can show that they have simplified and improved our lives. Performance should be measured by outcomes, not activity, i.e. the net reduction of regulation they have achieved.

Cause Three is the excessive number of supposedly independent regulators who have become arms of government. Margaret Thatcher introduced regulators to provide proxy-markets where competition did not exist, e.g. telecoms. The idea was to benefit consumers. Some still push prices down from time to time but too many are now working against consumers, e.g. imposing “compliance” costs, in order to carry out the wishes of government. As government in other colours, we should insist that regulators are funded not by levies on the private sector, but transparently by the government they represent. The squeeze on public expenditure to balance the books would then help bring sanity to regulation.

How can we subvert the urge to regulate? These three solutions should help but we need a much bigger change in the establishment mindset than that. It happened when nationalisation was found to fail and it will happen one day when we recognise the dangers to innovation, entrepreneurship and competition created by these factories of regulation. Bring it on.

Five reasons to hate Sunday trading laws

1. They’re inconsistent and arbitrary. If you’re a waiter, factory worker, nurse, construction worker, taxi driver, bus driver, security guard, journalist or even a retail worker at a small shop you can and often do work at any time on Sundays. The places that have to close at 6pm are ‘big’ shops. Bizarrely, ‘big’ is defined as being 281 square metres or bigger. That doesn’t make much sense and any argument that retail workers are ‘protected’ by Sunday trading laws would also imply that all those other workers are being exploited.
2. Life isn’t nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday, any more. Not that it ever was, really. Sunday trading laws inconvenience people who haven’t had time to buy their groceries during the rest of the week, and force them to rely on expensive local shops instead of cheaper supermarkets with more choice. For example, I like to do my shopping at my local Lidl. If I spend Sunday afternoon in the park with my friends instead of doing my shopping, and I need to buy something for that evening's dinner, I have to pay twice the price for a smaller range of inferior products at the Tesco Express down the road instead. That’s annoying. If I had a family to feed, it would be expensive.
3. The high street – and probably even small shops – will be better off. When Sunday trading laws were suspended during the Olympics, sales outside of London increased by 6.2%. They only increased by 2.8% inside London, probably because people were warned off the crowds. That’s good for smaller retailers too – no self-respecting retailer wants to exist just because her competitors are banned from trading, and more people out shopping means more customers to go round for everyone. They don't seem to have suffered during the Olympics suspension. If you’re worried about online retailers destroying the high street, this is one way to level the playing field.
4. Workers will have more hours available. It’s easy to talk about ‘protecting’ workers by stopping them from working on Sundays. But what about the ones that want to work then? Employers often end up having to pay workers more to work on Sundays – if you don’t think Sundays are sacred and want to earn a little more cash, the end of Sunday trading restrictions is good news for you. (Back when I was a teenage McDonald’s crew member, Sunday hours were a godsend.)
5. Lots of people actually like shopping. It’s very common to enjoy trips to the high street or the shopping centre with some friends. If you are interested in food, big grocery stores like Waitrose, Asda and Whole Foods can be interesting places to explore. Browsing clothes shops and buying new things can be really fun. I’ve seen lots of people sneer at this on Twitter, and no doubt it’s terribly gauche, but government shouldn’t be in the business of forcing snobs’ tastes on the rest of us. Some of us actually like consumerism.

There're times to obey the rules and there are times to strangle the last politician with the intestines of the last bureaucrat

Presented without any further comment than that headline:

Charles Murray is quick to add that he is perfectly fine with a wide range of sensible regulations, and that only a narrow subset of regulations ought to be disobeyed, offering this rule of thumb: if the matter in question were to become a news story in the mass media, the vast majority of Americans would side with the rule-breaker. He offered the example of a bartender with whom he corresponded––she was fined $3,000 for failing to card a customer, and while he granted the legitimacy of requiring alcohol sellers to check the ages of customers, he felt it was unfair to fine the bartender in this particular situation as the customer was her father.

But why is private property not allowed to leave the country, even if it is a Cezanne?

We find this all most odd: An important Cézanne landscape view of the Mediterranean, which has been on public view in Cambridge for nearly 30 years, is in danger of leaving the UK unless more than £13.5m can be raised.

The British government on Monday placed a temporary export bar on Cézanne’s Vue sur L’Estaque et le Château d’If.

Purchased by the industrialist Samuel Courtauld in 1936 and passed down through his family, it was on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1985 until last year when a decision was taken to sell it.

What justification is there for whoever owns this painting now not being allowed to take their private property where they wish?

After all, consider the peregrinations of the painting so far:

Provenance Ambroise Vollard, Paris, by whom acquired directly from the artist. Baron Denys Cochin, Paris, by 1904. Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, by whom acquired on 12 May 1905. Paul Cassirer, Berlin, by whom acquired on 21 September 1905. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, and Jos Hessel, Paris, by whom acquired on 2 April 1909. Jos Hessel, Paris, by whom acquired on 12 July 1910. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, by whom acquired on 12 October 1912. Walther Halvorsen, Oslo, by whom acquired on 21 April 1915. Erich Goeritz, Luxembourg, by 1936. Galerie Thannhauser, Lucerne, by whom acquired from the above on 9 July 1936. Wildenstein Galleries, Paris & London, by whom acquired from the above on 11 July 1936. Samuel Courtauld, London, by whom acquired from the above in November 1936, and thence by succession to the current owners.

What is there in all that which justifies the full majesty of the law being applied to keeping it in the UK?

Our general reading of such export bans is that they are a scam perpetrated upon the general public. Some small number of influential people rather like looking at the occasional French painting. But they'd prefer not to have to pay for their pleasures. Thus they manipulate the law so as to insist that their desires are catered to.

It's time for us to change this system: ban export bans now!

Sensible regulation

Regulation involves compliance costs that large businesses can afford more readily than can small firms.  Indeed, big business sometimes colludes with government and bureaucracy to have regulations that make market entry difficult for start-up and small competitors.

Regulation should be cost-effective, doing as little economic damage as possible, limiting competition or increasing prices as little as it can while achieving its objectives.  Above every regulator's desk should be inscribed the words: "Competition is the best regulator," for it is the ability of the customer to go elsewhere that compels firms to keep their quality high and their prices low.

Above all, regulation should be sensible.  Those who have no experience of business are unlikely to produce sensible regulations unless they consult with those who have.  Part of the problem is that things change.  New products and processes render old regulations irrelevant or inappropriate, and legislators struggle to add extra pages of detail to keep up with events.  The pile of regulatory requirements grows higher.

One possible solution might be to draw on the tradition of English Common Law, relying on precedent rather than on closely-written requirements.  For example, many pages of detail set out what toilet facilities employers have to provide for employees.  A general requirement that employers should have to provide 'decent toilet facilities' immediately begs the question of "What counts as decent?"  It could be determined by a series of decisions by juries and tribunals, so that an understanding of what was expected would soon emerge.

The advantage of this method is that it would incorporate the common sense of those sitting in judgement, and could adapt in response to changing times, just as Common Law does. 

This is not the Continental tradition of statute law.  Law there tends to be made by legislators and bureaucrats rather than by juries.  The rules are written down in advance and in detail, rather than emerging from a series of decisions dealing with circumstances.  EU regulations are made in this way, and there is little prospect of them changing.  

Mr Cameron might make part of his EU negotiating stance that the 95% of UK firms which do not export to the EU should not be subject to EU regulations.  A common law system of regulation could then be applied to them, making regulation more sympathetic and more flexible, lowering compliance costs and making it easier for new firms to start up.  It would give a significant boost to the economy.

Aim: Here’s to 20 more years

The Alternative Investment Market (Aim) – a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange that allows smaller companies to participate with greater regulatory flexibility than applies to the main market – is today celebrating its 20th anniversary. Aim has seen over 3,600 companies join since its 1995 launch and is now home to around 1,100 small and midsized companies. A less tightly regulated market than the main exchange, Aim provides a lower-cost alternative for small and mid-sized companies seeking investment.

But crucially, once afloat firms can raise further finance from their shareholders without going through the procedures enforced on those listed on the London Stock Exchange. And in a bid to ensure the flexible ambitions of SMEs are served even further, acquisitive companies and those looking to be acquired encounter far fewer controls than those on the main market.

Many successful companies have listed on Aim, including:Arbuthnot Banking Group Arbuthnot Banking Group, previously known as Secure Trust Banking Group, listed on the Alternative Investment Market (having previously been listed on the London Stock Exchange). Over the past five years, share prices have steadily risen, and have seen a 22.66 per cent rise in the past 12 months.

Asos Asos, the online fashion retailer, is one of the most famous success stories since Aim’s debut in 1995. Asos was initially priced at 3p and share prices once soared as high as £70 (now close to £38, after a major swing in value). Since the beginning of the year, shares have risen by 49 per cent.

Fevertree Drinks In 2005, Charles Rolls and Tim Warrillow joined forces to change the face of tonic water, finding an alternative preserver to sodium benzoate and instead using high quality quinine. A newbie to Aim, share prices have soared 65.51 per cent in the past six months. Today, the company sells more than 60m bottles of its premium mixers in 50 markets.

Fitbug Fitbug tracks sleep, steps, and estimates calories burned, and was founded in 2005 by ex-management consultant Paul Landau. At around £40, the Fitbug Orb device affordable compared to its competitors and it is now stocked by major retailers. Its share price soared late last year, and despite a correction this January, is still up 675 per cent in the past 52 weeks.

GW Pharmaceuticals One of Aim’s great success stories, GW Pharmaceuticals – the biopharmaceutical company founded in 1998 and best known for its MS treatment product Sativex – is listed on both the Nasdaq Global Market and Aim. In the past five years, share prices have rocketed from just over a pound, to 655p today.

Majestic Wine A favourite tipple of investors in the Aim for years, Majestic Vintners opened its first wine warehouse in Wood Green in 1980. In 1996, the company floated and it now has 200 stores and an online platform. Despite a rocky 2014, Majestic’s share price has risen 4.67 per cent in the past year.

Portmeirion You may be surprised to learn that a company specialising in tableware has become one of the most successful in the UK today. Over 40 per cent of its sales are to the North American market, and the company sells almost as much to South Korea as it does to the UK. Portmeirion has never cut its dividend and has been paying out since 1982.

Nevertheless, the market has been plagued by poor returns and a host of corporate failures – including some high profile fraud cases (the Langbar International fraud was once branded “the greatest stock market heist of all time”). And let us not forget that the market has performed pretty poorly over the years, with annualised total returns of -1.6 per cent per year when measured over the past two decades.

Nonetheless, Aim shares have surged in popularity since 2013, when they became eligible for inclusion in Isas. The high-risk factor had previously stopped the government from removing the restriction, but a desire to ensure that small and medium-sized companies – which are driving the economic recovery – have sufficient access to funding led to it reversing this decision.

It was the right choice: without Aim, there was a risk these companies would have turned to Nasdaq, or simply failed to grow. Research from Grant Thornton has also revealed that the companies listed on Aim paid £2.3bn in taxes in 2013 and directly employed 430,000 people at the end of that year.

For investors, Aim shares remain one of the most tax-advantaged options. If held through an Isa, benefits include no capital gains tax (CGT), no tax on dividend income, and no stamp duty. In addition, once certain Aim shares have been held in an Isa for a two-year period, they can qualify for Business Property Relief (BPR) and thus up to 100 per cent exemption from inheritance tax (IHT).

But the market is volatile: in 2008, for example, it lost around two-thirds of its value. Neither does the market offer plain sailing for the smaller companies that choose to list on it. Analysts predict that floating on Aim can cost anywhere between £400,000 and £1m – so for businesses with a projected market capitalisation of less than £25m, it may not be worth considering. 2014 research from accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young found that professional fees paid by companies to brokers and nominated advisers for a placing on aim accounted for 9.5 per cent of all funds raised.

And many of the mining, oil and gas companies (which account for a whopping 40 per cent of the market) that listed on Aim have since gone bust – among them ScotOil, African Minerals and Independent Energy Holdings. Firms involved in exploration for natural resources are among the riskiest of all: if a company digs for oil and there’s none to be found, the money raised for exploration has all but gone down the drain.

But should the government be doing more to serve the needs of smaller companies? Xavier Rolet, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, certainly thinks so. Compared to the US, there are relatively few UK companies that progress to mid-size (and then on to become multibillion pound corporations like Facebook or Google). And as Rolet recently told the CBI:

“The entire business and financial community is working to nurture and celebrate these firms. But we must continue to challenge the status quo and not become complacent. We need to carry on fostering, through policy and practice, a richer, more diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem, so that the UK’s high-growth firms can take root and flourish.”

Rolet is right. Although floating your company isn’t the only way to grow a business, it needs to remain a workable option: particularly if we are to get the share-owning democracy that so many in the current government crave.

This article was first published by The Entrepreneurs Network.

In which we come over all regal and medieval

It was never quite true that if a medieval king or ruler felt that the quality of the advice he was receiving was slipping a bit, that then there would be a nice bloody purge of said advisers in order to buck up the quality of policy on offer from those who remained. Britain, certainly, never had quite such absolutism, something for which of course we should all be grateful. But there are times, even in this modern era, when such a policy seems most attractive:

He said EU regulations are the “single biggest impact on our business”. The EU is unleashing Europe’s beet farmers in 2017 by removing a production cap, in a move that is expected to push down prices 15pc by 2020. Farmers will be subsidised to counteract this drop, while cane sugar imports continue to face tariffs of up to €339 (£246) per tonne.

Leave aside the bleatings of the business affected by these rules. And savour instead the absurdity of them.

There's poor people out there, poor people who would be delighted to sell us the sugar we desire at a price we'd be delighted to pay. So, instead of raising both our and their quality of life we tax what they would sell us. Then there's the very much richer farmers of Europe, who do not wish to produce sugar for us to consume at any price that we wish to pay. So, we subsidise them to do so. And bringing up the rear is the lamentable Action on Sugar who are insisting that the whole sector should groan under yet another layer of taxes to prevent us eating what we subsidise the production of.

It is obviously true that waving a broadsword through the apparatchicki of an entire continent is not a liberal proposal. But boy, oh boy, is it still a tempting one. This is of course Kip Esquire's Law, that if there were some rationalisation of the world, some attempt at planning, then we'd be the people getting to do said rationalising and planning rather than someone else doing it in a manner we might not appreciate so much. So back to the boring old, and markedly more liberal, ideas of persuasion, democratic politics and simple exposition of the absurd state of modern affairs.

We are subsidising the rich to produce something, we are taxing the poor who would provide us with that same thing and this is simply a nonsense. We should stop doing both.

Please, and our having asked nicely doesn't mean we don't enjoy the idea of getting a bit more regal and medieval about it all.

Excellent news; so there will be fewer milk farmers then?

Some people don't seem to get the point of this market thing:

The boss of British yoghurt-maker Yeo Valley has warned that the removal of the EU milk quota system, which previously capped production will be another blow for struggling farmers.

Tim Mead, chairman of the Somerset-based dairy producer, said the removal of restrictions will encourage the industry to ramp up production, leaving farmers with a surplus of dairy products that they are then unable to sell.

Yes, this is rather the point of the changes.

Currently there are restrictions upon production. This means that each producer is operating at inefficient levels: they require more inputs in the form of land, labour and capital than the level of their output should require, because of those production restrictions.

So, we remove those production restrictions and the more efficient of those producers will expand their production, from very much the same set of inputs. This does of course mean that the less efficient producers then go out of buseinss. Allowing those inputs, that land, labour and capital, to be repurposed to go off and produce something else which satiates some other human desire or want.

That is, we all become richer by removing those production constraints. Because, from our same set of inputs, we get more human desires satiated. And this is the point and purpose of having an economy in the first place: to satiate, as best we can, as many human desires and wishes as we are capable of.

Removing production quotas will mean some milk farmers go bust. Good, that's the point of removing the production quotas.

A blanket ban on psychoactive substances makes UK drugs policy even worse

It is a truth under-acknowledged that a drug user denied possession of their poison is in want of an alternative. The current 'explosion' in varied and easily-accessible 'legal highs' (also know as 'new psychoactive substances') are a clear example of this.

In June 2008 33 tonnes of sassafras oil - a key ingredient in the production of MDMA - were seized in Cambodia; enough to produce an estimated 245 million ecstasy tablets. The following year real ecstasy pills 'almost vanished' from Britain's clubs. At the same time the purity of street cocaine had also been steadily falling, from over 60% in 2002 to 22% in 2009.

Enter mephedrone: a legal high with similar effects to MDMA but readily available and for less than a quarter of the price. As the quality of ecstasy plummeted (as shown by the blue line on this graph) and substituted with things like piperazines, (the orange line) mephedrone usage soared (purple line). The 2010 (self-selecting, online) Global Drug Survey found that 51% of regular clubbers had used mephedrone that year, and official figures from the 2010/11 British Crime Survey estimate that around 4.4% 16 to 24 year olds had tried it in the past year.

Similarly, law changes and clampdowns in India resulted in a UK ketamine drought, leading to dabblers (both knowingly and unknowingly) taking things like (the once legal, now Class B) methoxetamine. And indeed, the majority of legal highs on offer are 'synthetic cannabinoids' which claim to mimic the effect of cannabis. In all, it's fairly safe to claim that were recreational drugs like ecstasy, cannabis and cocaine not so stringently prohibited, these 'legal highs' (about which we know very little) probably wouldn't be knocking about.

Still, governments tend to be of the view that any use of drugs is simply objectively bad, so the above is rather a moot point. But what anxious states can do, of course, is ban new legal highs as they crop up. However, even this apparently obvious solution has a few problems— the first being that there seems to be a near-limitless supply of cheap, experimental compounds to bring to market. When mephedrone was made a Class B controlled substance in 2010, alternative legal highs such NRG-1 and 'Benzo Fury' started to appear. In fact, over 550 NPS have been controlled since 2009. Generally less is known about each concoction than the last, presenting potentially far greater health risks to users.

At the same time, restricting a drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 requires evidence of the harm they cause (not that harm levels always bear much relation to a drug's legality), demanding actual research as opposed to sensationalist headlines. Even though temporary class drug orders were introduced in 2011 to speed up the process, a full-out ban still requires study, time and resources. Many have claimed the battle with the chemists in China  is one lawmakers are unlikely to win.

And so with all of this in mind, the Queen's Speech on Wednesday confirmed that Conservatives will take the next rational step in drug enforcement, namely, to simply ban ALL OF THE THINGS.

In order to automatically outlaw anything which can make people's heads go a bit funny, their proposed blanket ban (modelled on a similar Irish policy) will prohibit the trade of 'any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect', and will carry up to a 7-year prison sentence.

Somewhat ironically for a party so concerned with preserving the UK's legal identity it wants to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, this represents a break from centuries of British common law, under which we are free to do something unless the law expressly forbids it. This law enshrines the opposite. In fact, so heavy-handed and far-reaching is the definition of what it is prohibited to supply that special exemptions have to be granted for those everyday psychoactive drugs like caffeine, alcohol and tobacco. Whilst on first glance the ban might sound like sensible-enough tinkering at the edges of our already nonsensical drug policy, it really is rather sinister, setting a worrying precedent for the state to bestow upon citizens permission to behave in certain ways.

This law will probably (at least initially) wipe out the high street 'head shops' which the Daily Mail and Centre for Social Justice  are so concerned about. However, banning something has never yet simply made a drug disappear. An expert panel commissioned by the government to investigate legal highs acknowledged that a 50% increase in seizures of Class B drugs between 2011/12 and 2013/14 was driven by the continued sale of mephedrone and other once-legal highs like it. Usage has fallen from pre-ban levels, but so has its purity whilst the street price has doubled. Perhaps the most damning evidence, however, comes from the Home Office's own report into different national drug control strategies, which failed to find “any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country”.

The best that can be hoped for with this ridiculous plan is that with the banning of absolutely everything, dealers stick to pushing the tried and tested (and what seems to be safer) stuff. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case - mephedrone and and other legal and once-legal highs have been turning up in batches of drugs like MDMA and cocaine as adulterants, and even being passed off as the real things.  Funnily enough, the best chance of new psychoactive substances disappearing from use comes from a resurgence of super-strong ecstasy, thanks to the discovery of a way to make MDMA using less heavily-controlled ingredients.

The ASI has pointed out so. many. times. that the best way to reduce the harms associated with drug use is to decriminalise, license and tax recreational drugs. Sadly, it doesn't look like the Conservatives will see sense in the course of this parliament.  However, at least the mischievous can entertain themselves with the prospect that home-grown opiates could soon be on the horizon thanks to genetically modified wheat. And what a moral panic-cum-legislative nightmare that will be...