Dead whale-watching in Iceland

People now prefer to watch whales instead of eating them. But I ate whalemeat a long time ago, and the only whales I have ever seen were dead ones being hacked to pieces in Iceland. This all happened in 1966, when I spent a summer in Reykjavik as a trainee placed by AIESEC - an international organisation which arranges what would now be called ‘internships’ for economics students.

I flew out of Birmingham Airport (then called ‘Elmdon Airport’) on the day of the World Cup Final. The passengers crowded round a transistor radio in the departure lounge to hear the match. I spent the first week staying with an Icelandic family, where I ate quite a lot of fish. After that, I moved to lodgings with some other AISEC trainees in a house with a young landlady. I was based in a firm called ‘Kassagerdin’, which made boxes (mainly for fish) as well as printing all sorts of materials. I began working in the office, working on a complex accounting machine. But later, I had a far  better time on the workshop floor as a member of a three-man team operating a large machine which cut and printed cardboard boxes. The two other workers were the teenage son of the firm’s owner and a teacher working over the summer school break.

The AISEC committee in Iceland did an excellent job, and the group of trainees went on various trips to see the vast volcanic landscape of Thingvellir, the Arbaer Folk Museum, the waterfall Gullfoss, the Great Geysir, and Hveragerdi (where we saw bananas grown in greenhouses heated by hot thermal springs). I took a few days off on holiday to hitch-hike around the coast to Akureyri and from there to the Lake Myvatn. I was given lifts by many friendly and interesting Icelandic people. These included the driver of an articulated oil tanker. At one point on the journey, he turned off the road, and drove the truck along a track through the twisted rocks of a lava field until we came to a half-built bungalow. He unloaded some long planks he had stored along the side of the trailer, placed them next to the bungalow, and then returned to the main road. He was building this house himself, he explained, for his retirement. Later that day, I checked into a hotel in the village of Blonduos. I slept in the hotel annexe, built on the edge of a beach of black sand facing the Arctic Ocean.

Before all this, however, I paused in my journey at Hvalfjordur, just North of Reykjavik. In 1966, the road would around the head of the fjord - the location of a whaling station. From my memory, this comprised a jetty, a slipway and a large shed. The jetty had originally been built by the US Navy, and several Icelandic spectators pointed to the ‘secret American submarine base’ around the coast. Eventually, a small whaling boat approached the jetty with (I think) two whale carcasses slung on each side. The first carcass was winched to the slipway, and as it rose on the slope a mass of blood swelled out into the sea. Some young men, stripped to waist, climbed on the body of the whale and began hacking it to pieces with large long cleavers. In a short time, there was just bones, meat and entrails. There was also the smell - a smell so strong I remember it now almost 50 years later.

Also 50 years later, the Hvalur Whaling Company still operates in the same location, still catching fin whales and bringing them to a whale-abattoir in a fjord named after whales.

Five things they didn’t tell you about the 2015 British General Election

1. This is the second-most unpopular elected government since the beginning of universal suffrage. The Conservative Party won 331 seats in the House of Commons (51% of the 650 seats in the House) from only 36.8% of the vote. This is the second-lowest winning percentage since universal suffrage began at the General Election of 1929. Only Labour's 'victory' in 2005 with just over 35% of the vote is comparable. The other winner in 2015 from our grossly undemocratic election system was the SNP. This has 56 seats from only 4.7% of the vote. Compare that with UKIP, which won one seat from 12.6% of voters.

2. Scotland will have less influence in the UK than at any time since the Act of Union.
The claim by the SNP that they will give Scotland a voice at Westminster is a familiar combination of deceit and self-delusion. Scots have played an important part in all UK governments since the Act of Union. This rose to a peak in the most recent Labour Government, in which Scotsmen were, at various times, Prime Minister, Chancellor the Exchequer, Defence Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Secretary of State for Health. However, membership of a senior post in government, with few exceptions, requires membership of the House of Commons. Since the SNP has all but three of the Members of Parliament who represent Scotland, this will effectively eliminate the Scots from both Government and Opposition front benches. 

3. Rupert Murdoch will be rewarded. One of the fascinating features of the election campaign was the co-ordinated campaign by the Conservatives and the SNP to build up the SNP threat to the Labour Party. Each time David Cameron claimed that a minority Labour government would be controlled by the SNP, an SNP leader would state a new demand they would make of such a government. Both the Conservatives and the SNP received the enthusiastic support of, respectively, the English and Scottish editions of The Sun on the instructions of its American owner Rupert Murdoch. Both parties have invested a big efforts in wooing this evil old man, and he will expect a reward for his support. This will probably be approval for a takeover bid for Sky and the breakup of the BBC.

4. The Labour Party has popular policies but failed politically. The various policies announced by the Labour Party during the campaign (such as ending the tax-avoidance status of non-domiciles, controlling rents, restricting the use of zero-hours contracts and preventing further privatisation of the NHS) all proved to have majority support in the public opinion polls. But the Labour leadership failed to promote these policies over the lifetime of the preceding Parliament, and they therefore had limited impact at the election. Most important of all, the Labour Party failed to effectively challenge the claim that it had ‘bankrupted’ the UK economy by massively increasing the National Debt. The increase in this debt was a result of having to borrow money to avoid the bankruptcy of three of the world’s largest banks, as well as various building societies and smaller banks in 2008. None of the political parties had anticipated the recklessness of the management of so many financial institutions, and all would have acted in the same way as Gordon Brown’s Labour Government to protect the savings of British citizens. But the impression was given of panic and incompetence, rather like Black Wednesday in 1992, when the Conservative Government was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Labour failed to defend its actions in 2008, and has failed to do so since. This is a primary political failure, in the sense of being unable to make a case and persuade people to accept it.

5. In two years time, the Conservative Party will fall apart. A referendum will be held on membership of the European Union in 2017 after a supposed renegotiation of the terms of British membership. The Government has never stated what changes it aims to achieve, and any significant changes would in any case require the revision of the various inter-governmental treaties that determine the structure and functioning of the EU. Treaty-revision requires unanimous consent of all the countries in the EU, which is unlikely to be forthcoming since new treaties in some countries require formal constitutional change and/or a referendum . We can therefore assume that any renegotiation will be mainly cosmetic and unlikely to appease the majority of the Conservative Party which opposes membership of the Union. The following 2017 referendum campaign will in consequence involve rival sets of Conservative political leaders on opposite sides bitterly denouncing each other. This will be interesting to observe.

The horrors of planning No. 2: 'Housing Need'

You do not have to be exposed to the English planning system for long to realise that it exists primarily to designate acceptable sites for new housing. In my own area of South Worcestershire, the three district councils have prepared a draft local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ or ‘SWDP’), the bulk of which comprises long lists of potential housing sites in individual towns and villages, together with various justifications for their inclusion.

The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable. 

But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.

This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.

However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.

All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.

What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of  course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.

One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.

To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.

See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'