Healthy
Spain: It's been confirmed that
Spain is one of Europe's healthiest countries, with a life expectancy
now of 81.4 years, 70.9 of which are spent in 'full health'. Only
Switzerland in Europe and Japan do better. Reasons cited
include a Spanish psyche which includes more walking and sports
(thanks to the weather), as well as home cooking and a
healthy diet, even when eating out. I'm a bit surprised by the last
factor as restaurant meals in Spain aren't big on vegetables. Though
there's always a salad. Irrelevantly for me as I hate the stuff.
Unless it's rocket doused in a spicy sauce. Finally on this: One
curious aspect of Spain's high life expectancy is that those who are
now in their 60s, 70s and 80s were born during some of the
least-healthy years in the country's history – between the 1930s
and 1950s, when they would have grown up at the height of the wartime
and post-war famine which persisted for much of the Franco
dictatorship; a factor which suggests Spaniards born in later decades
may fare even better on the health and longevity front.
Iran's
Elections: You may have seen
that the moderates made significant gains in these. Of course,
when you contemplate the public execution numbers I cited the other
day, you realise that 'moderate' is a very relative term. One day the
evil religious madness will be over and Iran will once again be a
wonderful place to visit. It's not bad even now, if you can keep your
mouth shut. And your head on.
Henry
Tonks (1862–1937): I saw somewhere a laudatory reference to
this chap. He was a British painter of figure subjects, chiefly
interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher.
He was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the
French Impressionists and was an associate of many of the more
progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James
McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George
Clausen. Type 'henry tonks pictures' in Google Images if you want
to see some of his output. But, be warned: he was also a surgeon!
Las
Fallas: If you don't know what these are, click here. I cite
them because I've just realised I'll be able to see them, for the
first time, when I'm down in Jávea mid March. BTW . . . Flying to
Valencia for this would trip would cost me at least 4 times as much
as flying to Alicante, on the other side of Jávea on the east coast.
Finally
. . . . A new English word? Slebdom. People famous for
being famous. In Spain the classic example is the ex girlfriend of
some bullfighter, Belén Esteban, who's impossible to ignore as she
seems to appear on every TV program that I'm forced to view.
It beats me, as she gets uglier and more stupid by the day. And perhaps ever more outlandish. Presumably the Spanish like this. Hugely. Despite (because of?) being useless and pugnacious, she won the Spanish version of Celebrity Come Dancing. Say no more. Click here for more fotos. Sadly, she was once quite pretty. Especially before her misbegotten plastic surgery. BTW . . . I recently bumped into her outside a hospital in northern Madrid. We ignored each other. Even though we share a birthday. Her loss, of course.
Blognote: Readership of this blog averages around 450 a day. Recently, though, this has rocketed to over 800. I suspect this is due to be posting my efforts on the Facebook page of the lovely people of Os Porcos Bravos. If so, Graciñas, amigos. BTW . . . They kindly gave me an award last year. Then photoshopped my image into the ceremony pix, after I unforgivably forgot to turn up. What gents!
It beats me, as she gets uglier and more stupid by the day. And perhaps ever more outlandish. Presumably the Spanish like this. Hugely. Despite (because of?) being useless and pugnacious, she won the Spanish version of Celebrity Come Dancing. Say no more. Click here for more fotos. Sadly, she was once quite pretty. Especially before her misbegotten plastic surgery. BTW . . . I recently bumped into her outside a hospital in northern Madrid. We ignored each other. Even though we share a birthday. Her loss, of course.
Blognote: Readership of this blog averages around 450 a day. Recently, though, this has rocketed to over 800. I suspect this is due to be posting my efforts on the Facebook page of the lovely people of Os Porcos Bravos. If so, Graciñas, amigos. BTW . . . They kindly gave me an award last year. Then photoshopped my image into the ceremony pix, after I unforgivably forgot to turn up. What gents!
BREXIT
SUPPLEMENT
The
Old Old Labour party used to seriously dislike the EU/EEC. And it
voted against the UK joining in 1976. But now the New Old Labour
party rejects the Brexit and hopes its supporters will ensure it
doesn't happen. No one knows what Jeremy Corbyn and his lieutenants
think, but there's nothing knew in that. JC, in fact, has continued
to oppose the EU for the last 40 years. So, fun times ahead.
Another
Outer, in The Times:
Pass
the bourbon and I’ll pour you a hard shot of truth about the EU
It’s
good to see the chancellor doing his bit for British exports by
talking down the pound. That, at least, is the only creditable
explanation for George Osborne’s warning on Friday that British
exit from the European Union would be an “enormous economic gamble”
and would cause “a profound economic shock for our country”.
The
less appealing explanation is that the chancellor is so desperate to
discourage Britons from voting “leave” in the June 23 referendum
on our membership, he is prepared to behave like the fat boy in The
Pickwick Papers (“I wants to make your flesh creep”). This
technique of Conservative ministers supporting the “remain”
campaign has been called “Project Fear”.
A
further example of the lurid language employed by its promoters was
supplied on Thursday night by the environment secretary, Liz Truss,
who told the viewers of BBC’s Question Time that if this country
voted to leave the EU, we would be entering “the Twilight Zone”.
We’ve
got four more months before the vote. To what level of rhetorical
scaremongering will the “remainians” sink when we get properly
close to the moment of decision? “Abandon all hope, ye who Brexit
here”?
This
doesn’t mean their strategy is misguided. When you are arguing for
the status quo, it is normal to warn about the “unknown” events
that a vote for “change” might bring. Hence the prime minister’s
incantation that leaving the EU would be “a leap in the dark”.
More particularly, he has expressed this uncertainty in financial
terms, knowing the British voters generally have economic security at
the top of their lists of concerns.
The
relevance of this could be seen in the results of a ComRes poll
published last week. It showed that about twice as many thought we
would be economically worse off if we left the EU as thought our
economy would improve. If that balance of opinion continued to the
end of the campaign, I see very little prospect of a majority voting
“leave” on June 23, even though the issue of uncontrolled
migration from the EU will prompt millions to support Brexit.
Yet
here’s the thing. Despite all the corporate endorsements of Project
Fear (with about a third of the bosses of FTSE 100 companies
dutifully agreeing to put their names to a screed dictated by No 10),
disinterested think tanks and economists have tended to coalesce
around the view that, economically, the pluses and minuses for the UK
— between staying in or leaving the EU — will balance out.
For
many years, those arguing that we should remain in the EU have cited
the figure of 3m as the number of jobs that could be “lost” as a
result of “leaving the single market”. Oddly, this round number
has never varied, whatever the state of our own economy or of that of
any of the other 27 members.
Three
years ago Channel 4 News’s FactCheck dug into the origins of this
and discovered that it “appears to originate from an influential
piece of academic research carried out in 2000 . . . by Professor
Iain Begg, now of the London School of Economics”.
When
Channel 4 News took the trouble to speak to Begg, it discovered that
“while [he] stands by his research, he takes great exception to
headlines that suggest that millions of Britons would be thrown on
the dole if Britain left the single market . . . According to the
people who did the research, talk of mass redundancies [after an EU
exit] is just scaremongering.”
Begg
himself added that if anyone tried “completely objectively” to
work out the pros and cons of Brexit, “you would probably find that
the economic plus or minus is very small”. This is backed up by
Wolfgang Münchau, for many years the FT’s European economics
columnist. He observes: “There may be reasons why the UK may wish
to remain a member of the EU. But whatever they are, they are not
economic.”
But
if you really want to understand why Brexit is more an economic
opportunity than a deathly curse, it’s necessary to read Myth and
Paradox of the Single Market, by Michael Burrage, published last
month by Civitas.
Burrage,
a former lecturer at the London School of Economics specialising in
comparative analysis of industrial enterprise, has, by the most
direct statistical means, refuted some of the cherished Whitehall
assumptions underlying the debate about British membership of the EU.
Using
publicly available official trade figures, he reveals that whereas,
in the years of Britain’s membership of the Common Market, 1973-93,
our exports to the rest of the organisation’s members increased by
much more than those of leading non-members (such as the USA, Canada
and Australia), since the inauguration of the single market in 1993,
those countries’ exports to the EU have grown more rapidly than
ours.
Indeed,
by 2011, for the first time since 1972, the value of US goods
exported to the EU exceeded that of UK goods. This destroys the
absurd argument that it is necessary to be part of the single market
to sell profitably into it — or that an exporting country must
agree to an open border for EU citizens.
I
asked Burrage why it is that mature English-speaking democracies
outside the single market such as America, Canada and Australia have
seen their exports to it grow at a faster rate than the UK has, with
our supposedly privileged position inside, while that was not the
case during the Common Market era.
His
best guess was that this paradox is attributable to the work of the
World Trade Organisation in bringing down tariffs worldwide. During
the Common Market years, tariffs walls were high, so non-members of
the community were at a significant disadvantage when selling to it.
But now that the EU’s average weighted tariff on goods from outside
the single market is 3%-4%, it is almost insignificant compared with,
for example, standard currency fluctuations. This might help explain
why US exports of bourbon to the EU have during the past 22 years
grown by more than 10 times the rate achieved by scotch whisky firms,
despite all the alleged advantages of being within the single market.
Of
course, the UK post Brexit could also negotiate bespoke free-trade
deals, not just with the EU but with other countries — something we
are forbidden to do as an EU member.
On
Friday’s Today programme, the former EU trade commissioner Lord
Mandelson sneered: “We would be free to negotiate, but who’s
going to want to negotiate with us?”— an echo of his earlier
claim that “India would laugh in our faces if Britain tried to
negotiate a free-trade agreement outside Europe. They would walk away
and leave us whistling in the wind.” As Burrage observes, “He
declined to explain why India did not leave Singapore or Chile
‘whistling in the wind’.”
Mandelson’s
mocking the significance of the world’s fifth-largest economy —
this country — is all part of Project Fear: it is casting
unwarranted doubt on the capability and attractions of Britain’s
businesses and workforces. What should cause national shame is that
the most assiduous practitioners of this message are Britain’s own
prime minister and chancellor.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk