E-books

I have to declare a vested interest in e-books, as I will be launching a new e-book publishing venture with my business partner in the coming months. Consequently,  this blog is not going to be a lament for the woes of print publishing. Feel free to dismiss all my comments as PR patter, if you are die-hard print enthusiast. But if you are open-minded about books and e-books, I'd like to dispel a few myths surrounding books and the book trade.

Major print publishers tell a lot of tall tales about their industry. Their favourite fairy story goes lie this:

A long time ago, before the evil internet, authors were very happy. They were protected by the big publishing knights and the Net Book Agreement, which kept everybody safe from the monsters outside the city walls - like competition and efficiency. Authors got one silver piece for every ten the publishers received for selling their books. Everyone agreed was more than enough, as it's much harder running a big publishing castle with all those copying scribes and executive marketing lords than it is actually writing a book. There were many magic bookshops, run by wise book elves, who knew what a customer wanted the moment they walked in the door. The people agreed that things were just as good as they possibly could be. Then along came a dragon called Amazon, from the sulphurous depths of the web, and set everything on fire. The end. 

Publishers large and small deliberately conflate the business of selling books, with books as cultural artefacts and the art of writing. They are not guardians of culture, the truth is they are businesses, who depend on hawking their products to consumers. Their model relies on a handful of authors shifting millions of books, which in turn part subsidise other less popular writers. Or put it another way, one hundred copies of a novel about a troubled cop who can see into the minds of serial killers pays for a stream of conscious story about the nature of self. It almost makes you believe that publishers are philanthropists and patrons of the arts. What a beguiling fable, if only the numbers worked.

The average earnings of a professional writer in the UK are £28,340 which sounds acceptable, unless you don't factor the extreme variability and riskiness of their income. Of course the average is skewed heavily by the big earners, the ten percent of authors who make fifty percent of the sales. If you take a median income for writers, it's £12,300. Bearing in mind that's the figure that splits your sample in two equal halves, there will be plenty below the £12,300 mark or just above minimum wage. Consider this paradox: the lowliest, entry-level employee in a major publishing concern earns more than most writers. And I'm not talking about wannabe writers who pump out fan fiction. Proper authors with reviews in newspapers and the TLS earn less than the minimum wage.

And no, the reason that writers don't make enough predates the internet and Amazon. It's simple maths, the standard royalty deal for a print book is that the author receives ten percent of the sale price. To match average UK earnings of £26,500 per year, an author would have to sell 30 to 40,000 copies a year, if the typical retail price is £8. That's a lot of books, many never hit those numbers. Remember writing the book may have taken six months or years to complete. They may receive an advance on their royalties - which is just that an advance. It doesn't boost their income overall. If they are a first timer, then there's no income from previous titles and even if their book does well it takes months for those royalty payments to arrive. Meanwhile in publishing, every month people's salaries arrive in their accounts like clockwork. If you want to know where  the other ninety percent of the print book's sale price goes, think about all those people employed in the book trade.

Shouldn't writers write for the love of writing, not for money? It's interesting that people who express that opinion tend not be writers, musicians or artists. We don't apply this principle to any other area of life. All the doctors and medical researchers I know are motivated by a desire to benefit humanity, they also get paid proper wages. Same holds true for teachers, it's a vocation with a salary. Money is not an enemy of creativity and it's naive to believe it is. When I met a number of literary fiction authors who were selected for a famous anthology, most of them had day jobs. Now if you like literary fiction, wouldn't it be preferable that writers spent their time writing, rather fitting it around their university lecture schedule? In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth, most novelists were independently wealthy. I'm not sure we should depend on today's elite for our fiction. Let's say they did write novels, what about the other writers, don't they deserve to make a career from their craft?

So what's different about e-books? The main innovation is the potential royalty share for writers, in some cases up to 70%. Most publishers don't share the vastly higher margins with their authors, then tend to complain about e-books and bemoan the loss of independent bookshops. You'll notice I've not mentioned the quality of the books. The fact is most books are not masterpieces, some have artistic merit, others are base and crude - the same holds true of print. Enhanced royalties benefit all authors equally, which in turn means more writers writing full time - that's something to celebrate. If you are a lover of books, I urge you to buy e-books as well as hard copies.

Now here's the contentious bit: bookshops. I love independent bookshops; personal favourites are Daunts in Marylebone and Salt's Mill's bookstore. They are special places indeed to be cherished. There's something in the air, the smell of books, the rows of titles, the tables of the staff picks - a place where learning and culture hold sway in a world obsessed by celebrity vacuity. Yes, I did get a bit carried away.  As for chain bookstores, like Waterstones, one  is much like another, if they open a new branch or close one I'm indifferent. Yet it's a shame if an independent bookshop closes and many have in recent years. But.. if the advent of e-books reduces the number of bookshops whilst raising the money a writer earns , then that is better situation than before.

There are many pressures on high street retail unrelated to online commerce. Business rates hit small firms on the high street much harder than out of town retailers, as they are calculated on rateable values. Many local authorities ratchet up business rates, keeping council tax down and then watch their high streets wither. E-books may be one of the reasons that bookshops struggle; they are one factor of several. As the MD of a business with nine employees and five freelancers, costs like employers NI and business rates hurt. (Don't get me started on how hard it is to get credit.) Independent bookshops carry the same burdens, which we chose to impose through our crazy tax system. The evidence suggests however, that well-run, intelligently-curated bookshops can survive and prosper. Daunt Books are profitable and growing. Some independents may fall by the wayside, it's not a justification for preserving the status quo.

I've spent much of this blog discussing the vulgar subject of money over literature and the writer's craft, for the simple reason that writers cannot live by goodwill and favourable reviews alone. My evaluation of traditional publishing is the same as the music industry ten years ago. Yes, there are talented, dedicated people working there, that doesn't make it a worthwhile model. To make a crude generalisation, large publishing firms are inefficient, inward-looking, wedded to obsolete practises and prioritise their own earnings over those of writers. Here's a telling example: to celebrate the record sales of 'Fifty Shades of Grey', Random House US awarded every employee a bonus of $5000 dollars. None of their authors received a bonus.

Writers deserve a better deal. Vive La E-book Revolution!

Jumping Reds

If conversation flags, I sometimes play Devil's Advocate to provoke a reaction, in so doing I carry on a fine family tradition of arguing just for argument's sake. A recent gambit was a suggestion that Scotland be made independent, no matter how they voted in a referendum. (Think about it for a moment, it's not such a bad idea). But none of my attempts to stir up debate with contrarian comments, have generated anything like the response as a sincere statement that as a London cyclist, on occasion, I jump red lights.

Even through cyberspace, I can hear the intakes of breath, the clenching of fists, the snorts of rage. Before you organise a lynch mob of angry drivers and pedestrians to beat me to death with my own bike chain, allow me to explain myself. There's no justification for cyclists barrelling through a pedestrian crossing with people walking across - it's reckless and dangerous. One of my work colleagues mentioned two of his friends had their arms broken in accidents with cyclists, one going the wrong way up a one-way street, the other at a crossing, both did not stop. They were cycle couriers, who as we all know have a collective death wish  and in some cases their wish is granted. Let's be clear, the kind of cycling just described is indefensible.

But, I do jump red lights under certain circumstances. For example at a left hand turn, where there are no pedestrians at the crossing, it's safe to do so. Likewise at a pedestrian crossing, when no one is crossing or about to cross - I think that's perfectly safe. When I've admitted this practise to social groups, the general reaction that I am an evil-lawbreaker, similar to a hit and run driver. What's odd is that cyclists flouting traffic laws seems to provoke fury out of all proportion to the danger it poses. Virtually every pedestrian in London fails to observe the law - they cross when the red man light is showing, if they use a pedestrian crossing at all. They often don't look either way and show a casual disregard for their own safety. You read articles about 'lycra louts' regularly in the right-wing press, not one about 'perilous pedestrians'.

Motorists and their favoured commentators, have a special dislike for cyclists, especially those like me who sometimes skip a red light. Their venom is largely directed a straw man rider - invented by the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Rod Liddle's of this world to serve their rhetorical purposes. Apparently cyclists are evangelical, eco-freaks, clogging up the roads, patronising car drivers, whilst breaking the law. It's a compelling image, if only it had any basis in truth. In my twenty-five years a London cyclist, I've hardly every encountered of these types. And yes, I have seen bad behaviour by cyclists, roughly out-numbered by a factor of 5 to 1 by road users. When Rod Liddle vents his fury at cyclists who deliberately ride two abreast on country roads, he sees this as a deliberate affront to his right to speed round blind corners and narrow lanes at up to seventy miles an hour. Whereas the other interpretation is that these cyclists do not want to be hit by a car at a speed that will certainly be fatal. Sorry, Rod you might have to wait a few minutes. Is your life so much important than everyone else's that a few seconds delay constitutes an assault on your fundamental liberties? And if so, roadworks are more deserving of your bile.

On the London roads, I've seen numerous accidents involving cyclists and vehicles, several of them serious - in every case it was the motorist's fault. On a weekly basis, when cycling I experience the following.

- car door opened as I ride past.
- driver turns left without indicating as I cycle on the inside.
- driver overtaking then cutting left across my path.
- car driving so close it almost touches my handlebars.
- vehicle veers to one side, nearly pushing me into the curb or against another vehicle.

Now I'm not the sort of rider who opts for the British reserve in these situations. I tend to make my feelings know very vocally to motorists when they turn left and nearly send me flying over the bonnet. To my knowledge, I have had two apologies in twenty years. In most other instances, even the motorists was clearly in the wrong, hadn't looked and was driving dangerously, you get either indifference or abuse. One guy memorably accused me a of being a narcissist when I challenged him about opening his door without looking. Apparently it was self-centred not to expect that a car door might open as I rode past, he bore no responsibility. (To give you more context, by the this stage, I had followed him into an estate agents and was haranguing him in front of ten people - so I suppose he didn't want to lose face).

Yet it's 'lycra-louts' to blame for their own deaths on the roads, according to Boris Johnson. He recently quoted a statistic that was out by a factor of between 10 to 30, after the fifth cyclist was killed in two weeks. The Met Police's own figures say that at most cyclist law-breaking might be a factor in 6% of fatalities. That leaves the other 94%. The Evening Standard will continue its long-running campaign of lies about cyclists, I suppose because on occasion some of their journalists have to step back as one went past. The cars and trucks that drive dangerously never seem to generate an article.

Bizarrely, Kat Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall, even goes so far as to propose that cyclists be registered. I have heard similar ideas from motorists included the suggestion of paying road tax, which makes little sense. The best rebuttal was in a recent Guardian article that pointed out basic physics. The kinetic energy of one person on a moped travelling at 15mph is roughly four times that of a cyclist, a car forty times, a lorry hundreds. Motor vehicles, especially heavy trucks, damage roads every metre they move; they generate pollution triggering respiratory illness and are by definition the cause of traffic. When motor vehicles collide with pedestrians they can cause serious injury or kill. This, in answer to the petrol heads is why motorists pay road tax and must have insurance - their impact is vastly greater than a bike.

Conversely, cycles make no impact on the road and very little on other road users - I should know, having smacked into the back of a van. My bike was trashed, the van untouched - that one was my doing entirely, new bike without extension levers for the brakes.

Taking a short cut

I think what really aggravates the likes of Kate Hooey and Rod Liddle as they sit a in car, is  seeing a cyclist skip a light, whereas they can't. Yet as I've hopefully established, pedal cycles should be compared with pedestrians, not powered vehicles. So they must have watched 10,000s of pedestrians skip lights, why no call for them to be registered? Why no cries that mothers with pushchairs pay road tax?

And there is another reason that I jump lights, it's physics again. Once you've got a little bit of momentum, braking to a halt and then starting up is hard work. So if there's a chance not to stop and I can do so safely, I take that opportunity. There, I'm a lazy cyclist as well. Dear Met Police, you know where I live.

The whole debate seems to be back to front, fuelled as these controversies often are by deliberate misinformation in the popular media. Cycling isn't a political statement, it's just a means of travelling from point A to point B. There are other benefits, such as raising your fitness levels, but it is a mode of transport not a manifesto. As such, cyclists deserve the same protection as other road users. Yet I can only recall police officers chastising cyclists for skipping lights, I've never seen them stop a motorist for cutting up a bike-rider. It is much easier for officers patrol junctions where riders are known to jump than to deal with bad driving by construction vehicles, for example. And before you ask, yes I have been given the lecture by the boys (and girls)  in blue for jumping reds (three times if I recall), no I've never had to pay a fine.

It is a cheap trick to employ anecdotes in debate, well I'm cheap as well a law-breaker. A good friend of mine was knocked off his bike by a van driver two years ago. His head was centimetres from going under the back wheels. Following his accident, two of his spinal discs ruptured, leading to severe pain and partial paralysis of the arm. Thanks to surgery, he regained the use of his arm, the pain abated, once the discs were replaced with artificial ones.  The motorist was prosecuted by the police for dangerous driving, as there were plenty of witnesses. Bear in mind that the driver very nearly killed my friend and caused him serious injury, guess what punishment this uninsured driver with a criminal record received? Six points and a fifty pound fine. That story is not an isolated episode, this happens all the time.

There is my confession: I jump red lights. And I will carry on doing so  until cycle lanes have a physical barriers from traffic and the police treat cyclists the same as motorists and truck drivers.

Political Parties

My childhood was highly politicised. On the left wing was my father, Labour party councillor, CND marcher, Fabian; on the right was my grandmother,  a pro-nuclear, Tebbit enthusiast who was the campaign organiser for a Conservative MP. Some of my earliest memories are singing the Red Flag in the Islington Council Chamber and visiting the Houses of Parliament with my gran.

My father even dragged me and my brother along on his brave attempt to be elected Labour MP for Faversham. I use 'brave' in the Charge of the Light Brigade sense of the word. This was Kent in 1983, so Labour was about as welcome as radioactive waste. Oddly enough, my grandmother in her ongoing attempt to offset her son's leftie influence on her grandchildren would regularly drive us to look at the Bradwell nuclear reactor. I am not entirely sure what point she was making; but these visits usually took place after a visit to a seaside funfair. Her crude psychology may have worked, as I now associate uranium with enjoyable afternoons at an arcade.

My father and my grandmother violently disagreed on every aspect of politics, save one thing. They both hated the Lib-Dems (or SDP as they then were). These competing influences have shaped me, granting me a greater, more balanced understanding of the wider world. I also hate the Lib Dems.

There is another subject where my now deceased relatives would find common ground. They would both mourn the demise of mass membership political parties. The Tory party now only has 134,000 members, half the number when Cameron took over leadership in 2005. They are literally a dying breed. Now some of you might celebrate the extinction of the Tory party activist, in particular the Young Tory. I met some of this rare species eight years ago, when doing a BBC show at the conferences. They are a very odd bunch indeed, like people grown in a laboratory when the scientists weren't paying attention. Before any left-wingers get smug, try meeting Labour youth activists. You'll be pining for those Sloane Rangers wearing 'This Lady's Not for Turning' badges soon enough. Labour's membership may not have fallen; it has stagnated for over ten years at the low level of 150,000.

Halfway through their conference and I am not surprised that no one joins the Conservatives any more. They have come to resemble a cluster of  lobbyists working for their paymasters rather than a mass movement. If there is a guiding ideology, it is leave the City of London alone. Britain experienced one of the worst financial crises in history, brought in large measure by negligent and fraudulent practises in the financial sector. Yet no one has gone to prison, nor have been their meaningful reforms. The fact that the Tory party receives nearly all its funding from the City may be pure coincidence. Not.

If the Tory party's craven brown-nosing of its donors is off-putting, Labour's policies do seem equally partisan and shallow. They are no longer party of the underdog or the disadvantaged, rather a means for public sector workers to protect their pay and conditions. Labour's philosophy seems to involve everyone in the private sector working harder, longer and for less money, so those in the public sector can retire early. And they wonder why their membership flatlines?

You'll notice that I have not mentioned the Lib-Dems. See third paragraph.

Policies alone do not explain the decline in party rolls, modern politics itself is off-putting. Thanks to media training and aggressive Paxman-style interviewers, most TV debate is the repetition of soundbites and key messages. The only drama exists in an interviewer finding a minor discrepancy between what one person may have said on one occasion as opposed to another. Apparently, the ideal we strive for these days is consistency, not intelligent thought. Better to be wrong all of the time, than right occasionally.

Yet people will still take to the street in their 10,000s for issues ranging from austerity cuts to fox-hunting, so voters are not apathetic about specific causes. They are apathetic about political parties. Unfortunately this makes the parties more reliant than ever on their donors, who represent special interest groups, not the general public. They continue their transition from million strong movements, to hollow shells, fronted by a professional political cliques.

Maybe the slow death of the political party is a good thing, a sign of less a polarised era with more consensus. Or maybe that's the childhood uranium exposure talking.

Breaking Bad

( SPOILER ALERT - This blog takes its inspiration from 'Breaking Bad', the American TV series where a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with lung cancer decides to cook meth to provide for his family. There might be occasional plot point referenced, so apologies if you are still on series one or have yet to watch an episode. Hurry up! )

TV reviewers are a conflicted bunch. Forced to critique an episode of 'House of Cards' in the same column as 'Come Dine with Me', they are never entirely at ease with the medium or themselves. Book reviewers, by contrast, are rarely obliged to review Nigel Slater's new cookbook in the same article as Hillary Mantel's latest offering. 'The AA Easy Read  Atlas 2013' and Will Self's new novel, 'Umbrella' are both books but that is a odd basis of comparison.

Yet when it comes to TV, reviewers and viewers remain confused. Fearful of sounding too high-brow or elitist, reviewers generally avoid in depth debate, taking refuge in facile lists of shows. Which is the greatest TV series of all:'The Wire', 'Mad Men' or 'The Departed'? It is the High Fidelity syndrome, where a music buff spends more time ranking and re-ranking albums than he does appreciating their own merits. List-making is how we shop for food successfully, zero use when it comes to culture.

Of course you may have no interest in TV as a cultural activity and prefer trash, go right ahead. One of my guilty pleasures is '999 What's My Emergency?'. Incidentally, my conclusion after watching many episodes is that the principle emergency is many callers have is their IQ resembles that of a donkey - a dead, stupid donkey. I digress.

'Breaking Bad'  is worth watching, worth re-watching and worth discussing as a unique character study. Many dramas have given us flawed heroes, indeed the standard trope for police procedurals is a hard-drinking, confrontational maverick who gets the job done where others fail, 'Cracker' being a perfect example. 'The Sopranos' broke new ground by showing us an anti-hero, Tony, that we liked in spite of ourselves. Yes, he might have killed a man; true he has had serial affairs and casual sex. But we do feel a pang of sympathy for the big guy when he shuffles into his kitchen only to receive one complaint after another from his ungrateful, demanding family. Yet  flawed heroes and anti-heroes always stay true to their archetype. A maverick cop does not become a serial killer; a mobster remains a criminal no matter how many therapy sessions he attends.

Walter White, the main character of 'Breaking Bad', is another creation entirely. Across five series, he mutates from a humble, high school teacher to a ruthless drug king pin, ordering the murder of ten informants. Hanging over Walt is the delayed death sentence he receives in episode one, a lung cancer diagnosis. This triggers his decision to start cooking meth for quick cash; it does not explain the mayhem that follows. What is fascinating about Walt is the presentation of an ordinary man, living an average suburban existence who becomes capable of the most appalling violence, delivered with calculation and malice. He becomes a monster. When his old friend Hank confronts him in the most recent episode, he says 'I don't even know who you are any more' and intriguingly neither do we are the viewers.

I think if we want to know about evil, we are more likely to find answers in fiction such as 'Breaking Bad' than we will in news stories or documentaries. There is a tendency because the modern world is so safe and so protected to fool ourselves into believing evil is to identify and neutralise. Endless Nazi documentaries and comic-book films reinforce our natural tendency to assume bad people look and dress differently. They wear skull and crossbones on their black uniforms, have dark, pitiless eyes and sometimes they display a different body shape and skin tone - the devil in other words.

Make no mistake, Walt is evil. Unlike other screen villains he doesn't have horns poking out of his head. He walks, talks and acts the same as you and I... because he is the same. Maybe you or I would not make the choices Walt does, maybe we would have more compassion, more sense of consequence. Maybe. Walt would not have believed himself capable of murder when he first started cooking meth but he discovers doing wrong brings its own emotional rewards: it is fun. That for me is the mark of great art, it tells us a truth we do not want to hear but should. Vince Gilligan, the show's creator and principle writer should be proud of his achievement: proving there's a little bit of Walt in all of us, some more than others.

Banning Khat

Last week, Home Secretary Teresa May decided to ban khat, a stimulant herb used by the Somali and Yemeni community. It will now be classified as a Class C drug, alongside the likes of ketamine and diazepam (better known as Valium). As highs go, khat is apparently hard work for your hit. Users must sit chewing mouthfuls of green leaves for several hours, before the active ingredient cathinone is released in sufficient doses into the mucous membranes. Its effects are mild euphoria, alertness and loss of appetite; think strong coffee with a dash of speed instead of hazelnut-flavoured syrup.  

Khat has never inspired gangster films, as cocaine did in the eighties thanks to its obvious limitations. Scarface’s bloody finale would not carry the same punch on khat. Tony Montana buries his face into a mound of hedge clippings, to rise up like a hyperactive giraffe, one cheek massively distended by his herb bolus.

Given that khat is an acquired taste which most people decline to acquire, why then did Teresa May spend precious departmental time and political capital banning it? I wondered what calculations she made to prioritise the prohibition of a mildly intoxicating shrub over, for example, the prevention of terrorism. 

Moreover, no other drug is as exclusively associated with such a narrow sub-section of the population. When the Home Secretary bans khat, she is guaranteeing that her hideously white police force will be arresting only black men from the Horn of Africa. Therefore the prohibtion only makes rational sense if Ms May received expert advice from scientists and doctors about the terrible impact of khat on its users and the wider community. Wrong.

Britain's leading medical journal, The Lancet, produced a table ranking various substances for harm and likelihood of addiction. Khat scored the lowest of all.

Khat is not completely harmless, but neither is my preferred hangover cure, a venti capuccino with an extra shot. And yes, to any barrista that asks me again, I am aware it equates to four shots of espresso. That is the point.

The Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), published in 2013, with the catchy title “Khat: A Review of its potential harms to the individual communities in the UK.” Their conclusions were:

“On the basis of the available evidence, the overwhelming majority of Council members consider that khat should not be controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. In summary the reason for this is that, save for the issue of liver toxicity, although there may be a correlation or association between the use of khat and various negative social indicators, it is not possible to conclude that there is any causal link. The ACMD considers that the evidence of harms associated with the use of khat is insufficient to justify control and it would be inappropriate and disproportionate to classify khat under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.”

Yet Teresa May banned it anyway. Possession of khat for personal use will now carry a two year maximum sentence. Thus our Home Secretary believes a Somali man who possesses a bag of khat which he chews for his own enjoyment is committing a crime as a serious as:

- Attempted incest by a man with a girl over the age of 13 years

- Racially aggravated common order assault

- Unlawful marketing of combat knives

Now it is worth mentioning that the sentencing guidelines for possession offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act are much more lenient than any other category of offence. The courts, in essence, are very reluctant to send people to prison for possession of controlled substances. I suppose because courts are in the main, administered by sane, rational people.

The same leniency does not hold true, however, for the khat supplier. Previously he was importing a legal herb. If he continues to trade khat, he mutates into a drug dealer. Possession with intent to supply carries a maximum sentence of up to 14 years which Teresa May considers as serious a crime as:

- Placing explosives with the intent to cause bodily injury

- Causing or inciting child prostitution or pornography

- Causing death by serious driving

Those penalties seem proportionate to the harms caused by shrub-trafficking. 

Not.

You would think our Home Secretary had better things to do.

Benign Neglect

Through my work, I've read, listened to or skimmed through at speed a large number of business books and self-improvement guides. Whether they are citing Eastern spirituality, referencing fashionable management sages or quoting Yogi Berra to prove they have a sense of humour, there is a unifying thread: a belief in activism. Reform yourself, reform your management style, reform your company. Apparently the key to success in human affairs is relentless action. What they never propose is a forgotten approach to life’s challenges: benign neglect.

Yet if flares, shoulder pads and leggings can rise from the dead, we could give enlightened neglect a whirl. Our struggling Coalition government might benefit from this old-fashioned, indifferent approach to statecraft; it would most likely save money too. So why in certain cases, is the right course to do less and care less?

The law of unintended consequences

Our governments pass a lot of laws, what they rarely do is ask themselves the counterfactual: could this legislation make things worse? Like most of us, ministers and civil servants fall into the fallacy of thinking that a positive intention guarantees a positive outcome. When you believe that wanting to do good automatically results in you doing good, you run the risk of massive overconfidence and confusing beliefs with real world outcomes. As husbands buying gifts for their wives on Valentine's Day will attest, thinking and hoping she might like the lingerie you selected is just that...wishful thinking. 

I will offer a simple case study to illustrate this issue: bats. Bats are protected by a host of laws. It is a criminal offence to “intentionally disturb a group of bats in its nest” or to damage or destroy a bat roosting place (even if bats are not roosting there at the time). Stern stuff. You might imagine that these draconian protections are helping the little flappers to flourish; sadly most bat species remain on the endangered list.

Thanks to these comprehensive legal protections, bats become a problem if you are, for example, a property developer looking to renovate or demolish an old building. Should you find bats or even just an empty bat nest, all activity should cease. An ecological consultant must provide an assessment before you can proceed with your venture.

You may have borrowed £100,000s to develop the site, with construction workers on the payroll and everything has to grind to a halt because of a bat nest. It could be weeks or months before work could resume, by which time you might have gone bankrupt when your cash runs out and the bank recalls the loan. 

This assumes you comply with the law and notify the authorities. Or… maybe… just maybe…you could destroy the nest and the bats, when no one is looking. There are likely to be a few more Fliedermaus im Himmel.

So the legislation to protect bats almost certainly makes them more likely to be harmed than before; a little bit of neglect might have done better by the bats than concerned and dedicated action.

Concentrated Benefits, Dispersed Costs

The main function of government is to take money from certain groups of people and organisations and give these funds to others. Often these sets overlap, so the government will take tax off the low paid only to give them funds back via housing benefit. Unfortunately, like an eccentric relative, who gives one grandson £1,000 in cash each Christmas and the other a £1 Boots Token that expired in1992, government often does not distribute its largesse with any discernible logic. Governments and ministers do not set out to be wasteful or perverse, but they are hamstrung by a defining feature of politics: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.

I am going to use a fictional example to demonstrate the point, as you may already consider me a bat murder advocate and I don’t want to lose you entirely. Imagine pressure group existed, called G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. whose catchy acronym stands for “Ginger People Called Alice Who are Left-Handed Deserve Free Taxis”. They know the name needs work, but they are very effective at lobbying government. The Minister for Transport is persuaded by their clever PR campaign to pass legislation, mandating that all left handed women called Alice with ginger hair were entitled to a free taxi service to wherever they want in perpetuity. By pure coincidence the minister’s daughter was a leftie red-head, whose first name rhymes malice.

Whatever the minister’s motives, he gets the bill passed. There are heated debates about whether phonetic spellings of Alys as opposed to Alice are valid for the travel subsidy or strawberry blond counts as red hair. But following a government inquiry, legislation tightened up all loopholes and all Alices (phonetic or otherwise) with red hair (not strawberry blond) who were left-handed (or ambidextrous) are delighted to receive free taxis.

The cost to the British state is a mere £500 million a year, even though some Alices insist on driving back and forth from Scotland just because they can. Regular, non-Alice taxpayers like you and I might grumble about the unfairness of this taxi subsidy, yet it only costs us each an additional £16 a year in tax. In other words, one cab-ride less for ourselves, which is hard to get enraged about.

Then a new Transport of Minister comes into post and she is appalled by this daft and partisan subsidy, especially when her predecessor’s child was a beneficiary. She moves to cut the free taxis and all hell breaks loose.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. (remember that catchy name) mobilise their lobbying resources once more. There are tearful, emotional protests outside the Department for Transport by red-heads distraught at these cuts to much need services. Newspapers run articles by a left-handed writer, first name Alice,  who can no longer afford to visit her ailing grandmother now her taxi service is under threat. The colour picture by her column shows lustrous red locks. Our poor minister doesn’t know what hit her;  turns out it was eggs hurled by furious Alices.

So after she’s been hit with the fifth egg in one day by a screaming Alice and facing investigation by the Commission for Racial Enquiry about possible ginger bigotry, the minister backs down and leaves the subsidised travel service as it is.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. claims victory; the rest of us moan about politicians being spineless and then continue trawling through the Mail Online crack bar.

Now if the Minister of Transport had practiced a little bit of benign neglect when lobbied by G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T, we would not be saddled with another spending commitment that is impossible to remove.

Imperfect Knowledge

The third reason why benign neglect should be a legitimate policy response is in that in many instances, ministers and civil servants base their policy responses on studies or data sets that are for too inconclusive or contradictory to justify such faith. Let's go back to the real world now; relax no bats are harmed in the following paragraphs. 

In the early 1980s, government dietary advice changed, telling us that saturated fat was dangerous. The secret to healthy living was apparently cutting out fat, counting calories and eating five portions a day of fruit and vegetables (of which up to 3 could be fruit juice). Now given that adults today eat 600 calories less on average than they did in the 1980s, children do roughly the same amount of exercise and many of us followed this advice, often guzzling several smoothies a day, you might wonder why the obesity rate is 40% and climbing.

It turns out that much of the diet advice of the last thirty years has been worse than useless, it has been actively harmful. Fat was never the villain, if it were you would have to explain how the Innuit make to old age on a diet of 80% seal blubber or for indeed how any of us made it through the ice age.

This blog is too limited to go into great detail, but suffice to say sugar is the cause of the obesity epidemic and its most toxic form is fructose. When fructose is delivered in a liquid, fibre-free form such as a fruit smoothie, it is worse for you than a can of Coke and has much the same effect on your liver as a shot of whiskey (unless you’ve just done intensive exercise and are glycogen depleted). 

Without getting too melodramatic, if benign neglect had been applied to the dietary advice in the early 1980s, we would all be a lot thinner, happier and healthier than we currently are. When you consider too that benign neglect of the processed food lobby might have prevented high fructose corn syrup being introduced into everything in packets, doing nothing at all would have saved lives.

There you go, there powerful and compelling arguments why doing nothing is sometimes a noble and virtuous course of action.Vive la indifference!

Now if only we could persuade our politicians to take longer holidays, who knows how quickly things might improve.