Flasher at large

After a chore-packed morning I logged onto Twitter to be confronted by multiple tweets proclaiming how beautiful the day was. Everyone seemed to be outdoors except me. So after lunch, a little neighbourhood walk with Dave was in order.

We can only have been five minutes into the walk, and we were already ambling along the River Cole, which we're lucky enough to have at the bottom of our road. As we approached Sarehole Mill (see pic), we were jolted out of our mid-afternoon reverie by some sort of fracas between a couple of men on the other side of the "river" (at the risk of compromising my neighbourhood pride, it's really more like a stream - I think I jumped it once when I was out running). My initial impression, as I focused on the situation at hand, was that they might be drunk, but in any case there was something so aggressive about the situation that I was immediately ill at ease. I smiled one of those smiles that says please don't involve me in your drama and prepared to move on, but Dave had already started to engage with them. On our side of the river there wasn't just me and Dave - there was also a family of about 6 children with their mother. I was sure that at least two of the children were laughing. I turned to the men. One of the men, who was holding the other man down, told Dave, in the midst of a seemingly unstoppable rant, that the other man had been flashing his penis to the children, but was defending himself by claiming that he was actually taking a piss. He was clearly a paedophile, the man said (ranted). Dave calmly asked whether the police had been called, to which the answer was yes. When I looked back at the children, I realised that two of them were crying their eyes out, and as their Mum moved them on, they called out to their Dad, the ranter on the other side of the river.

We passed the mill and crossed over the road, and then before we proceeded with the rest of the walk, Dave stopped and went into self-doubt mode. "Have you got your phone on you?" he asked. Neither of us had brought our phones out. It's a new sort of downturn thing with me that I delight in leaving the house with as few possessions (generally money but other stuff as well) as possible. We wondered whether the man had really phoned the police. We agonised, like the couple of middle class liberals that we are, as to whether we should go back and confront the situation. We worried that the man was going to beat the living crap out of the suspected paedophile.

Above all, however, we questioned whether the man really was the paedophile he was accused of being. He looked like a middle-aged homeless man who might well have been relieving himself after an afternoon of drinking. On the other hand, it could have been more sinister. We waited for a while but the police didn't turn up, for whatever reason.

When I was little, one of my friends was a girl called Katie Warford and she lived on Church Lane in Ashton-on-Mersey. She would delight in recounting to me that the old man in the big house down the road would stand at his front door every Sunday morning and expose himself to all the church-goers passing by. We both thought it was hilarious. We were 10.

Thinking back then to this afternoon's incident, was it really the flasher that had upset those children, or was it in fact the angry reaction of their father and the intensely disruptive effect it was having on an otherwise playful and harmonious afternoon? Does the media's treatment of paedophilia prevent us from taking a measured approach, and in turn, is this causing children even more harm on top of problem itself (horrific though the problem unquestionably is)?

Dave and I copped out of the situation in the end. I argued that I had enough problems of my own without taking on someone else's as well - a position I've pretty much maintained since I intervened in an argument at a party when I was 21 and by some miracle survived the vicious assault that ensued.

My Top 10 experiences of 2008

Along the lines of what Dave and I do every New Year's Eve, here's my favourite experiences of the year, in no particular order...

1. Re-establishing contact with my Spanish friends (lived in Santiago de Compostela in 1985) by bumping into Karen (see pic, second left) in the Modus Vivendi bar, Santiago. Thanks to Dave for giving me the space to catch up properly, and a special mention to Tito (aka Andres Pineiro on left) for travelling from El Ferrol with a day's notice to see me. I was so happy that I sat in the cathedral one day and cried. Also on the picture - Carlos.

2. Seeing David Tennant play Hamlet (my favourite play) at Stratford-upon-Avon, October, with Sandra.

3. My presentation at the ER&L Conference, Atlanta, is a resounding success, in March. Plus I make friends with the indomitable Christine Orr and we dine at Mary Mac's Tea Room - truly a unique experience.

4. The highlight of my first trip to New York at Easter with Dave is drinking cocktails at the Flat Iron Lounge, an Art Deco extravaganza.

5. Sandra and I throw a fantastic party in the room above Patrick Kavanagh pub, Kings Heath, in October. Jo, Alistair and Bill all stay over.

6. Dave and I become very good friends with our neighbours Andy and Helen over the course of the year. One particular highlight is the neighbourhood barbecue in our communal back lane in August.

7. Another great year for the national schools competition, Debating Matters. As inspiring and energising as ever.

8. My headaches become manageable for the first time in 15 years.

9. I run the 10K Great Manchester Run effortlessly in May, and enjoy the whole experience.

10. Dave and I have a fab time at Fiona's 40th in September (see previous post), staying out until 4.30am with Fiona and her friends Ros and Ben.

Manchester says No to congestion charge

Given that I'm a highly opinionated person, I express surprisingly few of my opinions on this blog. But I'm going to make an exception in this instance. Today I'm pretty proud to be a Mancunian, even though I knew really that the congestion charge vote would go to a No as I didn't know a single Mancunian who was voting in favour.

Some of the comments in the Guardian demonstrate the kind of contempt for the views of ordinary people that I've come to expect from this government. One very astutely draws parallel with the Irish referendum over the summer that rejected the European Lisbon treaty and as a result drew ugly responses negating the validity of democratic mechanisms when you don't get the result you want. Responses along the lines of "those ungrateful Irish after all that Europe has done for them" and "we'll carry on run the vote again until we get the right result" are not guaranteed to bring universal harmony across national and social divides any time soon. However, they're extremely likely to bring out the inner rebel in quite a lot of people, certainly those with any self-respect.

I don't agree with people who are saying, albeit sympathetically, that it's about reluctance to vote for extra taxes at the start of an economic downturn. And it's certainly not true that the No vote is a vote against public transport; Mancunians are justly proud of their tram system. I really think it's about people getting fed up of being told what to think (where was the No campaign, for example?), and that is a good thing, surely, for everyone, no matter where they live.

Thai green fish curry

Way back in October, Rob Styles tagged me to get me to blog a recipe. It's a token of the esteem that I hold for Rob that I'm prepared do divulge my favourite and most admired recipe.

So here's how you make the best Thai green fish curry ever, for 2-3 people. It's on the soupy side, and it's fragrant and flavoursome rather than red hot. But that's the way I like it.

Besides the fact that it tastes great and everyone loves it, the beauty of this recipe is that you can make the paste well in advance, and then the rest of the curry can be made in a matter of minutes.

Ingredients for the paste:

2 stalks of lemon grass finely chopped

3 hot green chillis, deseeded and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and chopped

1 shallot peeled and finely chopped

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only

Half a level teaspoon of ground cumin

Half a level teaspoon of ground coriander

1 tablespoon of lime juice

1 tablespoon of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Half a level teaspoon of ground black peppercorns

Ingredients for the curry:

500g haddock fillets, skinned, cut into wide pieces

200g bag of frozen, cooked and peeled extra large prawns

1 tablespoon of groundnut oil

250ml coconut milk

250ml fish stock

8 lime leaves

15g fresh basil, leaves only, torn

Half a 15g pack of fresh coriander, leaves only, torn

Method:

Put all the paste ingredients into a food processor and blitz into a rough paste, stopping to scrape down sides with rubber spatula as necessary.

Fry paste in the oil for 1-2 minutes, stirring so it doesn't colour.

Pour in coconut milk and add stock, lime leaves, haddock and prawns.

Simmer until fish starts to turn opaque, stirring regularly so the sauce doesn't catch - 7-8 minutes.

Add basil and coriander leaves. Check seasoning.

Remove lime leaves before serving.

That debatable time of year...

Can it really be a year since I drove over to University of Aston one autumn evening in 2007, and had the most terrifying and also rewarding evening in years?

Once again the opening rounds of the national schools competition Debating Matters are taking place across the land, and this year the venue for me, as one of the judges, was Wolverhampton High School for Girls. The competition has presumably grown so much in the past year that there are now two opening rounds in the West Midlands instead of one. Which is utterly fantastic, as Debating Matters must be one of the finest cerebral experiences you can have, either as a sixth former or as a judge.

This year the three subjects for debate in the opening round were

• Space Travel - Manned or unmanned?
• Privacy
• Congestion charge

The passing year had not dimmed the memory of the sheer tedium of ecotourism and the various arcane offsetting schemes that I had to ingest for last year's competition, so naturally I avoided the congestion charge like the plague. This was a shame because it produced the liveliest debate of the night. Having done quite a lot of the recommended reading on space travel and privacy, then, and considered some tricky questions to ask the hapless debaters, I drove off to Wolverhampton and managed to arrive on time by some quirk of luck entirely unrelated to the degree of journey planning carried out.

In fact I felt like crap; I had done all day, so I'd worked from home, secure in the belief that the sight of me rocking back and forth in physical pain might cause some consternation among my colleagues. But by the end of the evening, I felt great, and just like last year, the whole experience gave me a boost of energy that lasted for days. I think I wrote words to this effect in my blog posting on this subject last (academic) year, but it bears repeating. When you are privileged enough to share a room with these 17 year olds who are unbelievably well prepared and arguing so passionately and skilfully, all your anxieties about our dumbed down society just fall away and you remember that the very best of humanity can prevail in the most unlikely of circumstances.

All of this was underlined by the content of the Space Travel debate. I plead guilty to having been completely ignorant about the manned vs unmanned debate prior to preparing for Debating Matters, whereas I am now a veteran of over 3 articles from The Space Review!! The arguments in favour of manned space exploration are unapologetically humanist. It's not even a pro-science versus anti-science thing. Right now, to take a purely pro-science stance involves arguing for unmanned not manned space travel - the progress that robotic and other forms of unmanned exploration have made in a number of fields vastly outweighs the scientific achievements of the Apollo missions. But apparently, as a result of those Apollo missions, admissions to undergraduate science courses doubled in the US, as did PhD applications. The very existence of Silicon Valley is testimony to the inspiration that the moon landings created among us earth-dwellers. Manned space travel is also extremely unsafe and bloody expensive! So it's pretty difficult to argue its case, particularly in the straitened economic circumstances (not to mention the prevailing mood of risk-aversion) that we're all experiencing right now. But sometimes you've just got to take a long term view. Because if a bunch of British 17 year olds, brought up in an era of Reality TV and ubiquitous corporate branding, can demonstrate rigorous and passionate debating beyond their years, just think what they might achieve if human space explorers once again go beyond what was previously considered to be unachievable.

Meanwhile, Debating Matters goes from strength to strength, as indeed it should. It was recently announced that The British Council will be bringing the competition to India, using its network of schools and educational institutions, and the plan is that the contest will gradually be developed into "a real-time television reality show" according to India edunews. Time to revise my opinions of reality TV? Let's have a debate!

Emerging Economies Question Time @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:

• John Dovey – acting president, UK Corporates BT Global Services
• Jim O’Neill – MD Global Economic Research, Goldman Sachs, creator of the acronym BRICS
• Stuart Simpson – Financial Analyst and journalist
• Dr Linda Yueh – Oxford University, author of Macroeconomics and globalisation and economic growth in China
• Professor Slavo Redosovich, LSE
  

Main arguments:
What will be the foreign policy consequences of the crisis for China and India?

• Linda: India and China are grappling with the potential foreign policy consequences of the global downturn. China sees itself as an emerging economy, focusing primarily on the growth of its own economy.
• Jim: Next week France will formally propose that the G7 be expanded to include the BRICs. This is long overdue, especially in view of the crisis. It’s going to be important that the Chinese economy be led by internal consumption rather than export, as there won’t be a US economy to export to .
• Stuart: We need to differentiate between China entering the world stage, and China as a global manager. China is not yet a rich country.
  

Why so much talk about China and India, why so little attention to Brazil and Russia?

• Jim: India has 1.1 bn people; China has 1.3 bn. Russian and Brazilian populations are small in comparison. With urbanisation a key driver for both China and India, the scale of their potential is of a different order. It is wrong to focus on India and China though. Brazil and Russia are much more powerful economically than in the past. Brazil keeps good macroeconomic stability, and in 30 years time could be one of the biggest 7-8 economies of the world. Brazil has handled itself very well in the crisis to date. Russia is far too dependent on oil. It needs to reduce this dependency to reach its potential.
  Traditionally economic downturns have impacted the developing world disproportionately. Is this still true?
• Stuart: The decoupling issue. China et al are becoming more self-reliant. Unless some solutions are arrived at, though, some countries will really suffer. Some countries can’t rely on national banks, foreign exchange reserves, i.e. those mechanisms currently being widely used across the globe to deal with the crisis.
• Jim: The BRIC economies are still developing in the classical sense. Now they’re an integral part of the world economy with their own multinationals and so on. The consensus is that the BRICs will continue to grow in the next 30 years.
• John: The world is a lot more complex. The average price in Chinese designer shops is a lot higher than in the Western equivalents. And most of the shoppers there are Chinese not tourists. So there’s a significant middle-class emerging.
• Linda: Are they themselves in financial crisis? All markets are interlinked. One potential problem is protectionism. The view that opening the borders for trade isn’t helpful is a bit dated. Brazil has brought actions against US and Europe and won. Virtually no country in the world truly has free trade and open borders. In the NGO world, protectionism will be strongly under consideration. The IMF will have to provide bail-out packages for Pakistan, but they shouldn’t be telling them how to run their own country. The IMF is weaker than it was 10 years ago, in any case.
• Jim: There is a difference between modest protection for countries in an emergent phase and the aggressive protectionism of the 1930s. Germany has been sustained over the past 2 years by exports to China and Russia. IMF seems strongly pro-international trade at the moment. The Norman Foster partnership, with 1400 employees the biggest employer in Wandsworth, is almost entirely dependent on China.
  

Could international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF become obsolete?

• Linda: IMF has just appointed its first Chief Economist from an emerging economy – China. So it’s trying to reinvent itself although it may be too slow.
• Slavo: World Bank started this process earlier with its “Learning from the 90s” document. It’s trying to fashion itself as a developing agency.
• Stuart: The IMF doesn’t have the resources to perform the same role as before. Partly because of BRIC growth - the reserves of China dwarf IMF reserves. Years ago, South Korea needed IMF help. So the IMF came in and dictated how South Korea was to be run. China saw this and decided the same would never happen to him,a nd built its foreign exchange reserves.
• Jim: The world has blown up. This is a very powerful and scary crisis. Without powerful responses by multiple countries, it would be a lot worse. The IMF is currently back in business because a couple of developing countries have been very irresponsible. But the IMF and the World Bank need to become institutions reflecting the complexity of the modern world. So Western nations need to agree to substantial structural changes. The IMF and World Bank are currently well past their sell-by date.

To what extent is the crisis due to under-consumption in China?

• John: Are the financial sectors of the West clearly at fault? Complex financial derivatives have produced a classic bubble.
• Jim: Indirectly, part of the crisis is caused by China saving so much. The global savings glut has led indirectly to the overheating of the US property market.
• Linda: In macroeconomics, these are just identities, rather than causes and effects. Americans were consuming too much way before China started saving too much. China needs to look internally and determine why is its consumption so low. Culturally, they have fears of catastrophic health events, and worry about their children’s education. It’s not a blame thing.
• Jim: Global economic crises happen. Human behaviour goes between greed and fear. The Chinese authorities wanted the decade to be dominated by an export strategy, and only now do we see that it was unsustainable.
• Stuart: US consumes 72% of its GDP. [Jim: This is way too much.] A lot of capital goes to the US in the form of debt, with China buying US Treasury bonds. There’s a lot of saving in the Chinese corporate sector as well. US business didn’t take advantage of the cheap credits. The money didn’t go into production. Why not?
• Linda: Usually, if there are low savings, it should be expensive to borrow.
• Jim: This is not a static environment right now. This year US’s current account deficit is starting to disappear. US is selling more cars abroad than it is importing. Surpluses in the emerging economies are slowing down – Russia, India and Brazil now have deficits. Countries will no longer be able to depend on exporting to the US.
• Jim: The current situation feels bad. But it is reality. Global growth is forecast at 3%. Last year it was 3.2%, so it isn’t the end of the world. Price mechanisms work themselves through – both sides of the US election are committed to exploring alternative forms of energy. China has done more for globalisation than the US in the past decade. Countries like Nigeria are intellectually very energised by the example of China and how they’ve raised themselves from poverty without behaving like the US.
• Stuart: There is much more political freedom for developing countries now with China in the picture.
• Linda: 56% of the Chinese population is still rural. We should be wary of learning too much from a country whose path is not yet set.
• Jim: The last decade shows that international trade is one of the few win-win games that exist. Global inequalities are no declining rapidly. In the next 30 years, there will be an additional 30 billion new members of the middle class.
  

But in Africa, aren’t some countries still undeveloped?

• Stuart: Development since the industrial revolution has been characterised by divergence between developed and developing countries. Only with China has that changed. China shows the way out of poverty – with massive infrastructural projects and engagement with the global economy, rather than the small-scale projects proposed by NGOs.
• Linda: Political reform is happening in China, but in a quiet slow way because the Chinese government wants to be responsive and stay in power. So it does it by focus groups etc. but rejects the Western model.
• Stuart? Yes! It’s following the anti-democratic practices of Western political forces like New Labour!

Growing pains: the pros and cons of economic dynamism @Battle of Ideas

Panellists at this session were:
· Daniel Ben-Ami, finance and economics journalist
· Dr Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge
· Paul Mason, TV broadcast journalist
· Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times

Takeaways:

• Dynamism is the most profound concept for our civilisation. It matters because it transforms people’s lives. It underpins our life expectancy, food, the expectations of the next generation reaching adulthood. It both signifies and generates change. It generates a range of opportunities unimaginable to previous generations. In agrarian societies, serfdom was normal, and the prosperous had to live from their labours. It has also transformed the position of women, with labour devices, contraception and so forth. Political democracy is both a natural expression and a concomitant of economic dynamism. A positive sum society – with the total number of goods and services rising over time.
• In the early 1950s the life expectancy of people in the third world was 41, whereas today it’s 63-4. This is a measure of the huge benefits of growth for developing countries.
• Ha-Joon Chang was born in South Korea in 1963, and has experienced phenomenal changes in the standard of living during his lifetime. It’s not just about having more money and things – it’s life expectancy, reductions in infant mortality and so on. In one and a half generations, South Korea has acquired the life expectancy of Switzerland! But this is unachievable without brutality and dislocation. Nevertheless, in undeveloped countries, there’s a lot more violence and destitution. Child labour was abolished in South Korea in the early 1960s, so there are labour rights and freedoms in place now. So the main problem with today’s liberal democracy is that growth is not executed well enough.
• Paul Mason maintained that it’s correct to question the conditions of growth. In early capitalism, it was believed that capitalism would collapse without the labour of 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. Then we saw that after the Factories Act, regulated capitalism was actually more dynamic. This is inimical to the Ayn Rand principle – that only selfishness can act as a dynamo for growth. A mature debate is needed around the distribution of wealth.
• Martin Wolf argued that the pursuit of GDP per se is meaningless. The biggest change in economics over the past 30 years has been the integration of Asian labour into the global economy.
• Up to the 1980s, a great proportion of the gains of capitalism went to the working classes of industrialised countries. This is partly because of the internal politics of those countries. The interests of the UK and Chinese working classes are directly antithetical. Paul countered this by saying that labour movements have been a fundamental part of capitalism since the first strike in Lancashire in 1818. China has just passed its own Factories Act – The Contract Labour Law was passed this year. Some factories have moved to Cambodia as a result, but the Chinese government is firm that labour regulations will be enforced.
• Local pollution will ultimately be fixed by local political processes. But are there global constraints, and if so how will they be handled? Drinking water is a real constraint to growth in both India and China. Ditto petrol. India can’t afford oil at $100 a barrel, and it’s forecast to rise to $500. Paul argued that the issue of water in China isn’t about quantity but quality. Why is the Yangtse so polluted? It’s because of a succession of paper factories killing everything in the river. Daniel argued that there is no inevitability of water shortage in India. They need infrastructural investment, that’s all. There’s always desalination if all else fails – look at Dubai, Arizona etc. There is a classic Malthusian confusion of infrastructural issues and god-given problems. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of Stone. Martin argued back that over-dependence on fossil fuels is a problem – the water problem in India is exaggerated, but the fuel problem isn’t. India’s challenges are unique but unbelievably exciting.
• Daniel Ben-Ami argued that the problem with the term “sustainability” is that it’s used in so many ways. He opposes the idea that entire generations should hold themselves back because of the risk of damage to future generations. The real problem is unbalanced growth that is insufficiently productive.
• In Germany in the 19th century, the average number of working hours per week was 90, whereas now it’s 35. US work about 20-30% longer than us.
• In all countries, as soon as women start having a choice, they stop having the children they don’t want.
• In India and China the benefits of growth are ceasing to spread among the population – this is a significant problem.