Resilience is a relative quality. There are no units by which it can be measured, but some have more of it than others. The ability to prevent bad things happening, and to mitigate their consequences and speed recovery when they do, is not equitably distributed. (full essay here)

Mrs Thatcher had a minister, Neil Hamilton, responsible for deregulation. Under Labour a similar agenda was pursued by the Better Regulation Task Force. That morphed into the Better Regulation Commission and then into the Better Regulation Advisory Council and, finally, into a whole Department of State in the form of BERR – the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. All these initiatives shared the premise that the ever-growing burden of risk-averse regulation under which the country was labouring not only led to inefficiency and curbed entrepreneurial initiative; it was a threat to civil liberties.

Now a new initiative – “Your Freedom”. The new coalition government aspires to restore civil liberties. It wishes to hear from us: “Which current laws would you like to remove or change because they restrict your civil liberties?”

Here is the proposal that I have submitted – without a cat in Hell’s chance of it being acted upon. (A further difficulty is that I submitted it twice and both times their software took liberties that rendered the submission rather strange. The site does not have a help section and does not allow editing or retraction; another Government IT triumph!)

The Cream Buns Act: one law to sweep away many

Eating too many cream buns is bad for you. There ought to be a law against it?

No!

Why? Because it is an activity that harms only you. Such a law would infringe your civil liberties.

The Cream Buns Act would remove all existing laws and regulations that proscribe behaviour that risks only the health or safety of mentally competent adult risk takers.

All existing, and prospective, legislation and regulation should be subject to the Cream Buns Test: if the behaviour subject to control or restraint is potentially harmful only to the person it is proposed to control or restrain, it should be repealed or withdrawn.

Two nominations for early repeal: the seat belt law and the set of laws criminalizing the sale or use of drugs. They merit priority not only because they pass the Cream Buns Test but, more importantly, because they have criminalized millions and can be shown to have had highly significant adverse consequences. The drug laws have created vast, violent criminal enterprises, and the seat belt laws have made roads more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.

References

Drugs:

• Drug prohibition is not working
• After the War on Drugs: Tools for the debate

• After the War on Drugs – Options for control
• Illegal drugs. The problem is prohibition the solution is control and regulation
• Annual reports
• Illegal drugs. The problem is prohibition the solution is control and regulation (in Mandarin)
• See also the website of  The Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs

Seat belts:

• The Efficacy of Seat Belt Legislation
• The failure of seat belt legislation
• Britain’s seat belt law should be repealed
• http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/letter-to-editor-of-significance.pdf
• Road Safety: the debate goes on, and on
• Plus 17 blogs

The Your Freedom website asks – why is your idea important?

(In the second version on the Your Freedom website this section is excluded – http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/restoring-civil-liberties/the-cream-buns-act-1/idea-view)

The Cream Buns Act would enshrine in legislation an important principle setting out the limits of the authority of the state.

John Stuart Mill thought it was an important principle.  My proposal is highly derivative. Here, in 1859, is his version:

“In the conduct of human beings towards one another, it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, in order that people may know what they have to expect; but in each person’s own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise. Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others; but he, himself, is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.”

(On Liberty, J S Mill, Chapter 4: Of the limits to the authority of society over the individual.)

This question was put ot me by an interesting website – Science and Religion Today . Not my usual stomping ground but, having reassured myself that they were defenders of Darwin, I decided they deserved an answer. Here it is:

The pursuit of resilience involves risk management. The figure below describes the essence of this process. It describes the “risk thermostat” that every one of us employs in the pursuit of resilience.

Propensity in this diagram represents the setting of the thermostat. Propensity leads to risk-taking behavior that leads, by definition, to accidents; to take a risk is to do something that carries with it a probability of an adverse outcome. Through surviving accidents and learning from them or seeing them on TV or being warned by our mothers, we acquire our perception of safety and danger. The model postulates that when propensity and perception get out of balance, we behave in a way that seeks to restore the balance. Why do we take risks? There are rewards, and the model proposes that the magnitude of the reward influences propensity.

Resilience requires command over resources. Flood defenses and earthquake-resistant buildings, accident and emergency services, and post-disaster continuity planning are all luxuries that the poor cannot afford. The single-minded pursuit of accident avoidance at all costs severely constrains the pursuit of the rewards of risk, the creation of the resources that ultimately make resilience affordable. Achieving resilience is a balancing act. Too little caution can lead to disaster; too much can kill the enterprise. In one company I know, the overly enthusiastic health and safety team is referred to as “the sales prevention department.”

“No risk, no reward” may be the mantra of stock market hucksters, but it happens to be true. The elusive trick in an uncertain world lies in getting the balance right.

So, my answer to the question is yes! Resilience is a reward worth taking risks for.

John Adams is an emeritus professor of geography at University College London and the author of the blog Risk in a Hypermobile World.

In your special (21 May) report on denial you speak of “climate deniers”. This is a curious term  (who denies the existence of climate?) that appears to be deployed to smear reputable scientists who react sceptically to the “hockey stick” peddled by Sir John Houghton and  the IPCC.

You (Jim Giles page 42) ride to the defence of Sir John, former chair of the IPCC, who denies ever having said, “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen”. Apparently no one can trace the source of this quotation so you denounce it as a denialist smear.

Here are some things he has said, on a record (Sunday Telegraph interview 10.9.95) from which he has not resiled.

“If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”

And who might be responsible for this disaster? Apparently not just us: “God tries to coax and woo, but he also uses disasters. Human sin may be involved; the effect will be the same.”

And “God does show anger. When He appeared to Elijah there was earthquake wind and fire.”

Perhaps your readers can spot the difference between Sir John Houghton’s non-alarmist scientific take on climate change and that of a Muslim cleric who was recently widely reported (e.g. Iranian cleric: Promiscuity, sin cause earthquakes but God may be holding his fire) to have attributed the risk of earthquakes in Iran to sin – in the form of loose women wearing short skirts.

On 3 June Simon Jenkins published a devastating critique of  the “security industry’s” promotion and exploitation of paranoia to expand its domain. It prompted the letter below, sadly not published. So I submitted it to my blog where it was accepted with alacrity.

Sir,

Simon Jenkins (Not every adult is a paedophile, a terrorist or a mass murderer, 3 June) sets out the impervious, paranoia-generating logic of the security industry: “If an incident occurs, it is reason for spending more on security. If no incident occurs it justifies what is already being spent.”

Perhaps the industry’s greatest achievement thus far in the deployment of this logic is its success in protecting us from bicycle bombs. Anyone who has parked a bicycle near Whitehall or Parliament Square will appreciate the efforts that are being made to protect us from this threat; the police will confiscate it on the grounds that it might be a pipe bomb in disguise.

It has worked. So far no one in Britain has been killed by such a device. But the achievement is global. I have appealed for evidence on various websites, on the Radio 4 Today Programme, and on the BBC World Service. On evidence so far received it appears that no one, anywhere, ever has been killed by such a device. Can one ask for more convincing justification? The inconvenience of thousands of cyclists seems a small price to pay.

In my last blog I noted that Benny Peiser and Sir John Houghton were having an argument in The Observer about something regarding man-made global warming that Sir John might, or might not, have said.

To recap, Peiser had quoted Sir John as saying “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen”. Sir John, in a letter to the Observer (14 Feb), denied ever having said any such thing and demanded an apology. He said

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing about my work as the chair of the first IPCC Scientific Assessment, quotes me as saying: “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen,” thereby attributing to me and the IPCC an attitude of hype and exaggeration. That quote from me is without foundation. I have never said it or written it.

Although it has spread on the Internet, I do not know its origin. In fact I have frequently argued the opposite, namely that those who make such statements are not only wrong but counterproductive. This quote is doing damage not only to me as a responsible scientist but also to the IPCC which in its main conclusions has always worked to avoid exaggeration. I demand from Dr Peiser an apology that he failed to check his sources and a public retraction of the use he made of the fabricated quotation.

Peiser replied the following week (21 Feb) admitting that he could find no evidence that Sir John had spoken these specific words. He offered an apology, of sorts, before plunging the knife further in:

I regret the use of a derivative quotation that has been attributed to Sir John Houghton for many years (“Unless we announce disaster, no one will listen”). A reference to Sir John’s accurate statement would have been more appropriate: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”

Sir John found this non-apology unsatisfactory and complained the following week (28 February) that he had been quoted out of context. He added what he insisted was important context:

I am pleased to accept Dr Peiser’s apology for his use of a false quotation (“unless we announce disaster, no one will listen”) that bolstered his accusation that both I and the IPCC deliberately exaggerated the evidence for human induced climate change and its likely consequences.

The new quote Dr Peiser has found is from an interview in 1995: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.” The first sentence requires the second two sentences to provide the context for the whole quotation. It is wrong to describe the false quotation as derivative from or supported by the quotation from 1995. Their contexts are very different as is what they say. The 1995 quotation describes how attitudes might change in response to disasters after they have actually occurred. It cannot be used to prove that I am alarmist or that I promote exaggeration.

This can best be described as a non-defence against a non-apology. Although Sir John denies ever saying “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen” he clearly believes it. For years he has been brandishing his hockey stick, warning of impending disaster if we don’t mend our ways. Quoting himself from his 1995 interview casts his view of disasters and man-made global warming in an intriguing light. In the same interview he also said.

God tries to coax and woo, but He also uses disasters. Human sin may be involved; the effect will be the same.

And

God does show anger. When He appeared to Elijah there was earthquake wind and fire. Our model is Jesus. He was a man as well as being divine and He certainly showed anger.

Here the disaster he (Sir John) is clearly announcing is the forthcoming punishment that He (capital H) will inflict upon us for our sinful ways. Global warming seems a somewhat arbitrary and indiscriminate punishment for Him to inflict upon us sinners – why does He not choose one or all of the afflictions He had at his disposal when dealing with Job instead? Here the global warming debate enters difficult theological territory. The indiscriminate nature of the punishment Sir John believes He will choose raises the thorny – and, so far as I am aware, unresolved – question of why the innocent and righteous should be made to suffer.

Sir John Houghton thinks so. Former director of the Met Office, former chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and former co-chair of the International Commission on Climate Change he is an influential voice in the global warming debate. He is currently demanding, in a letter to the Observer, an apology from Benny Peiser, a man-made global warming agnostic who, he claims, has put words in his mouth that he has never spoken:

“I demand from Dr Peiser an apology that he failed to check his sources and a public retraction of the use he made of the fabricated quotation.” The particular words complained of are “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen”.

I have no evidence that he has ever spoken, or written, this specific sentence. But on the subject of disasters he has in the past made similar, divinely inspired, comments about disasters and global warming:

·      “God tries to coax and woo, but he also uses disasters. Human sin may be involved; the effect will be the same.”

·      “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”

These quotations are from an interview entitled “Me and my God” in the Sunday Telegraph on 10 September 1995.

Sir John, in this interview, is also quoted as saying: “God does show anger. When he appeared to Elijah there was earthquake wind and fire. Our model is Jesus. He was a man as well as being divine and he certainly showed anger.”

Clearly missing from the  IPCC’s impressive body of expertise is that of theology.

See Is God Green? for an earlier commentary on this subject. For those with online access to Nature, the published version can be found here.

Faithful followers of this website may recollect an earlier blog, “Bicycle bombs: a further enquiry and a new theory”, in which I called attention to the fact that, despite the absence of evidence that anyone-anywhere-ever had been killed by a pipe bomb disguised as a bicycle, Westminster police were impounding bicycles parked near Whitehall and Parliament Square on the grounds that they could be bombs. I ventured to describe this behaviour as paranoid.

Through the wonderful grapevine that is the Internet I have just learned of the case of a person of some eminence falling victim to this policy, – twice – and twice being compensated by the police for her broken lock.[1]

Completely independent of my inquiries into the justification of such a policy, she inquired under the Freedom of Information Act how many bicycle bombs had been discovered in London since 2002.

She ran into the stonewall known to the cognoscenti as an NCND reply. The relevant authorities Neither Confirm Nor Deny anything: they had determined they said “that in all the circumstances of the case the public interest in maintaining the exclusion of the duty to neither confirm nor deny outweighs the public interest in confirming or denying whether the information is held.” Yes. Read it again. It’s (sic).

The reply goes on: if they were “to confirm or deny whether the information is held we consider that it would demonstrate the level of awareness that the police and other bodies have within this specific area, which we consider would not be in the interests of national security because it would alert terrorists as to whether or not their activities have been detected.”

Let’’s pick this apart. I have broadcast appeals on the BBC Today Programme, the BBC World Service, and various websites for evidence about the number of people killed, worldwide, by pipe bombs disguised as bicycles. So far the number returned is zero. So, if there have been some unsuccessful ones intercepted by the police or intelligence services, the terrorists will know about them. It must be conceded that there might have been some, like the Detroit underpants bomb, that simply failed to detonate. But whenever the police discover what they believe is a real bomb the event is highly public. Neighbourhoods are evacuated and cordoned off and the bomb squad sent for. In the case of “suspected” bicycle bombs in Westminster the police simply take them to the police station.

Given that the worldwide success rate for bicycle/underpants bombs is, so far, zero we must conclude that the authorities’ reluctance to disclose the information requested by the above mentioned persecuted eminent person is being withheld for reasons of embarrassment. The authorities have no justification for confiscating bicycles. They are simply paranoid.

They have one further argument:  “to confirm or deny whether the information is held would increase the fear of crime. This in itself is an objective for those committed to facilitating the cause of terrorism.” Duh!?  They publicly treat every bicycle in Westminster as a suspect pipe bomb and then say that to confirm that they know anything about what is going on would make us more fearful.

To disclose what is almost certainly the truth (we can but speculate), that bicycles pose no terrorist threat, and are an environmental and public health boon championed by most other branches of government, would briefly embarrass the Westminster police, but would help to inspire public confidence that the terrorist threat is being confronted with a sense of proportion.

I am grateful for a question posted today by Carsten Jasner in response to an earlier post of mine – Seat belts again. It has prompted another look at the data:

“Very interesting! But when the number of car occupant deaths increases while the number of all road user deaths decreases – how can the number of pedestrians and cyclists [deaths] also increase?”

Figure 1, all road accident deaths, shows that a well-established downward trend was interrupted (by the seat belt law?) and replaced by a slightly rising plateau. After the seat belt law (arrow) total deaths did not fall below the 1983 level until 1991.

Figure 1

For many decades, as car ownership increased in Britain the number of people moving about in cars also increased while the numbers moving about on feet or bicycles, and exposed to the risk of road accidents, fell sharply. Part of the decline in walking and cycling can be explained by the shift to car travel; another part by the fact, that as the volume of metal in motion increased, children were withdrawn from the threat, while vulnerable adults, especially cyclists, withdrew themselves. Figure 2 shows a dramatic decline since 1930 in the ratio of pedestrians and cyclists killed to car occupants killed – from 5.95 in 1935 to 0.47 in 2006.

Figure 2

Figure 3 zooms in on more recent years. Between 1970 and 1982 the ratio dropped from 0.96 to 0.81. In 1983, the first year of the seat belt law, the ratio jumped sharply to 1.00, before resuming its historic downward trend, but it did not drop below 0.81 until 1989. This sharp jump is of course exactly what one would expect in the light of the decrease in car occupant deaths and increase in pedestrian and cycling deaths coinciding with the seat belt law noted earlier. The step change in the trend suggests that each year since 1983 the seat belt law continues to deserve credit for the deaths of vulnerable road users, who but for the law would still be with us.

Figure 3

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“Moral hazard” is a term that dates back to the 1600s. Until recent times its use has been mostly confined to the insurance industry to refer to behaviour that responds to changes in perceived risk.

The industry has noticed that people who have contents insurance are less careful about locking up. It has also noticed that drivers of cars with ABS brakes (superior brakes) did not have fewer accidents – they had different accidents – accidents consistent with high-performance cars, which is what they had become.

Why “moral” hazard? Clearly the insurance industry was disconcerted by behaviour that upset the calculations of its actuaries. Such behaviour had to be wrong – immoral. But such behaviour is universal. Risk management is an exercise that involves striking a balance between the potential rewards and losses of decisions made in the face of uncertainty. A less judgmental term to describe this phenomenon is risk compensation. Legislators and regulators routinely ignore it.

Britain is suffering simultaneously from under-regulation and over-regulation. The deregulation of the financial markets under Margaret Thatcher gave a relatively small number of bankers free rein to contrive incentive structures that paid them fabulous rewards for taking risks with other people’s money. Meanwhile other spheres of activity are being suffocated by an excess of regulation, the most egregious example being the Independent Safeguarding Authority. This new bureaucracy, created as a response to the murder of two young girls in Soham, is charged with vetting an estimated 11.3 million people before they will be permitted to work, or volunteer with, children or vulnerable adults. The vetting involves a Criminal Records Bureau check on all 11.3 million after which “we will decide on a case-by-case basis whether each person is suited to this work”.

Leaving aside the mind-boggling expense and bureaucracy required to perform this feat, its effect is almost certain to be perverse. A CRB check will be seen as an insurance policy; behaviour that might previously have aroused suspicion is now less likely to be questioned because some superior authority has certified the suspect as “safe”.

After the Thatcherite deregulation, under New Labour we have had the Better Regulation Commission, the Better Regulation Executive, the Better Regulation Advisory Council and now BERR – the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. All these attempts at reform have explicitly acknowledged the damage caused by excessive regulation and have been powerless to resist it. Fundamental to this failure is a blindness to risk compensation.

Every perceptible safety measure that does not make the people want to be safer will provoke offsetting behaviour. The effect can be seen wherever one looks – from protective equipment on the sports field, to the settlement of flood plains protected by higher levees, to bailed out banks. It can be found on the road and in the bed – condoms are seat belts for sex concludes one study that invokes risk compensation to explain the failure of both safety measures to deliver the protection they promised.

Which takes me to my final point. The College of Emergency Medicine is leading a campaign to make cycle helmets compulsory. If successful it will result in a significant decline in cycling with a loss of attendant social, environmental and health benefits with no life saving benefit. It will kill off London’s new cycle hire scheme. In support of their campaign they cite the “success” of the seat belt law. But the law has failed and should be repealed. The Parliamentary Advisory Council of Transport Safety resolutely refuses to acknowledge evidence of this failure (click here, here and here). In its blindness to risk compensation and its consequences it risks helping to create a new, genuine, moral hazard.

PS    The Manifesto Club campaigns against the hyperregulation of everyday life. It has a refreshing website - http://www.manifestoclub.com/.