Britain’s planning laws are often described as slightly mad, unfit for purpose and antiquated. But this nugget, reported by Phineas Harper in The Guardian and highlighted by John Naughton, is quite delightful:

British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.

The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.

In 2008, about £1 in every £25 spent in a UK supermarket was spent in Lidl or Aldi. Today, it’s closer to £1 in every £5. These discounters have seen enormous growth, driven by a complex web of interacting underlying forces.

What is undeniable is that shoppers have traded choice for value. An average Lidl or Aldi branch carries 7,500 different products compared with 30,000 at your average Tesco or Sainsbury’s. Many people would rather pay less than have more product choice.

The big supermarkets, meanwhile, have tried all sorts of strategies to bridge the gap—attempting to offer full ranges while squeezing costs. It hasn’t really worked, hence their loss of market share.

You can’t have choice and value: they’re mutually exclusive, because choice begets inefficiency and waste.

Sixteen years ago, I wrote:

Gordon Brown has a fascinating plan for the NHS: Increase patient choice, whilst simultaneously driving the cost of healthcare down to deliver better ‘value for money’. The plan is fascinating primarily because its two aims are utterly contradictory.

Yesterday, Wes Streeting told the BBC that he wants to:

make the NHS easier and more convenient to use, to give patients more choice, to get rid of the waste and inefficiency we see in the NHS.

It’s hard to grasp what’s hard to grasp. Choice requires oversupply, which is—by definition—inefficient.

I suspect what Streeting intends to do is allow patients to choose between location and speed, in an effort to spread demand. If you don’t mind travelling a little further, you might get seen quicker. There is a logical efficiency argument to that, and the process already exists in the NHS, but is perhaps under-promoted.

The problem is that it’s bad for the population’s health. Julian Tudor Hart proposed the Inverse Care Law decades ago, describing how the geographical areas of greatest medical need have the poorest supply of medical care. These populations also tend to be the least mobile, and therefore the least able to travel to shortcut the waiting lists.

Therefore, in the name of efficiency, one might well end up filling the available capacity with the most mobile and least needy patients. This might move the needle on the Government’s pledge to cut waiting lists, but it will exacerbate health inequalities.

What I haven’t quite figured out yet is whether this approach is intended to provide political cover for bolder moves to tackle inequalities, or whether this is the only game in town. Either seems plausible. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

There are few things more likely to make my eyes roll than the headline:

Wallace’s response to MasterChef claims was misogynistic, says No 10

The fact that a television presenter has made people feel uncomfortable by acting inappropriately is serious, and ought to be dealt with seriously by his employer and, perhaps, his employer’s commissioner. The fact that early complaints to the BBC appear not to have been adequately acted upon is worthy of investigation. The fact that people face inappropriate behaviour in workplaces across the country and feel powerless to report it is upsetting, and we can only hope that stories like this help to change that narrative.

However… it is slightly absurd that journalists asked for the Prime Minister’s take on an Instagram video made by the television presenter in response to those accusations, and it is truly absurd that the Government responded to them.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests that around 3,000 people became victims of seuxal assualt on the same day that Greg Wallace recorded his unpleasant Instagram rant. Many thousands more will have put up with inappropriate behaviour that they’ve felt powerless to tackle—or, perhaps worse, that they’ve tried to tackle and yet been ignored.

The fact that the No 10 spokesperson didn’t use the opportunity of the question to pivot to talking about the wider issue is a failure of communication.

The fact that the Prime Minister’s attention is evidently distracted by an unpleasant issue outside of his control is a failure of Government.

But… the fact that BBC One has chosen, of all characters, Wallace and Grommit to feature in idents introducing news programmes where another Wallace features heavily is a divine comedic success.

In his Dividing Lines newsletter last week, Tom Hamilton wrote about the absurd and offensive use of war metaphors in political debate.

Here’s Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, perorating.

“This is a Budget of broken promises, and when the dust has finally settled and this lot have gone, as we step over the fallen—the former farmers, the pensioners, the one-time businesspeople, the poor and the vulnerable—there we will find the shattered remains of the working people of this country, betrayed by a party that lied to them, and they will never forget it.”

Believe it or not – your mileage may vary on this, but I found this astonishing – Stride was actually wearing a poppy as he used this metaphor. Paying tribute to our war dead while saying that pensioners losing their winter fuel allowance are basically in the same category as the boys who got machine-gunned at the Somme. I realise that while it is crass it is not intentionally crass, but it is not obvious to me that this is less disrespectful than defacing a war memorial.

As Tom says, ‘it shouldn’t be too much to ask people who use words for a living to think about the meaning of words.’

But politicians aren’t alone in this. If there’s one word that’s likely to elicit an eye-roll in my office at the moment it’s ‘frontline’, which has not only lost it’s war-based metaphorical meaning, but has seemingly lost all meaning altogether.

I don’t normally like to post big chunks of other people’s text without some commentary, but I really don’t know what to add to this. Sometimes, serendipity means that we come across exactly the right paragraph at exactly the moment we need to read it.

Reflecting on the outcome of the US Presidential Election, Oliver Burkeman wrote in his email newsletter:

You really, really, really don’t know when a given event is, or isn’t, for the best. You can’t know what effect present-day events will have in the long run, and it’s to ignore your status as a limited human being to imagine you ever could. As the old Taoist story has it: “We’ll see.” Remember, it’s one of the normal responses to a diagnosis of critical illness—not the only one, but a commonplace one—to conclude that in the end, it was a wonderful gift, thanks to how it led to a focus on what truly mattered. Seismic political defeats can stoke the fires of renewal or transformation, while victories can breed complacency, leading to worse catastrophe. Of course, the point isn’t that good things always emerge from seemingly bad things—you can’t be sure of that, either! It’s that this radical uncertainty is where you’ve always lived, whether you realized it or not, and the only place from which you’ve ever accomplished anything. You don’t need hope. You can move forward in the dark. You just need to do “with conviction the next and most necessary thing” – which is all you’ve ever been able to do anyway. And there’s room for enjoyment in the middle of it all, too. I come back to John Tarrant’s observation that the average medieval person lived with no understanding of when the next plague, famine or war might come along to utterly upend their lives. If they’d waited until the future looked dependably bright before gathering for festivals, or creating art, or strolling under the stars with friends, they’d have been waiting forever. So they didn’t wait. You don’t need to wait, either.

Children who spend time in the care of their Local Authority are more likely to go to prison as adults than they are to go to university. I can’t remember where I first heard that statistic—I guess it was some time in my public health training—but it has remained firmly lodged in my brain, and it hasn’t changed recently.

This week, I learned that there are twice as many people in space as care leavers at Oxford University. I learned that from Matt Taylor, who is himself someone who was in the care system as a child, and who is now studying at Oxford University.

The utterly unnecessary barriers which restrict the choices of the most vulnerable in society still have the power to shock. It’s hard not to think that there would be fewer of them if senior leaders in these organisations were from slightly more diverse backgrounds.

About a month ago, Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic:

I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. The truth is, it’s getting hard to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.

It’s a sentiment that reads differently after the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and yet, at the same time, that result makes it a much more pressing issue. Warzel uses Hurricane Milton to frame his argument, pointing out that people chose to lie in ways that put people in harm’s way, and led to the government officials who were trying to help being harrassed and attacked.

Misinformation is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to the USA. We all know people who credulously believe ever local bullshit rumour posted on Facebook, in the same way that we all know people who believe ever bit of tittle tattle they overhear. We also all know people who peddle that stuff, even if they probably don’t believe it themselves. The rumour mill spins quickly.

We’ve always told people not to believe this stuff. We tell our children to look for reliable sources—what are officials saying? What are journalists saying?

And yet, Warzel observes that television news was peddling lies, and the people who yesterday became the US President- and Vice President-elect also spread falsehoods. The sources we are supposed to be able to trust have proven their unreliability time and again. This is also not a US-only problem: it has been proven that being sacked for lying is no barrier to becoming Prime Minister, and broadcasting lies that put people at risk of death is not a definitive barrier to retaining a UK broadcast licence.

Here in the UK, the Conservatives have just elected a leader who says that she wants to reduce carbon emissions ‘but not in a way that would damage the economy’—as though she believes that an economy can function without a habitable planet for it to sit on.

It feels increasingly like the world is losing its shared sense of reality.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly.

I don’t know how democracy can function in this context—and I don’t know how I’d begin to fix it.

On this morning of all mornings, it feels like I should write something about the elections in the USA. As you might have gathered, though, I write most of these posts in advance, and so have no idea how the vote has shaken out. Depending on how tight the vote turned out to be, perhaps you have no idea what the result is yet either!

But one thing can be said with certainty: whoever takes the oath of office on 20 January, the threat to American democracy will not be resolved.

There’s a tendency in politics for narrow escapes to breed complacency.

The ‘no’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum begat a Tory complacency about referendums which led to a populace voting for Brexit against the Prime Minister’s explicit recommendation.

The resignation of Boris Johnson begat a ‘thank god that’s over’ reaction which did nothing to fix the constitutional problems his period in office exposed. It meant that when his successor was fined for breaking the law in office, eyebrows were barely raised: the standards we expect had been eroded that far, and no attempt was made to repair them.

The electoral defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden begat a complacency about candidate selection. There was much hand-wringing, but no practical action to re-energise either the Republican or Democratic races to truly find the best and the brightest. Lest we forget that the output of the Democratic process was a candidate who failed even to complete the campaign, let alone a term in office.

The resignation of Liz Truss begat a complacency about leader selection in the Conservative Party. This led to the same selection process being repeated this year, resulting in an equally absurd selection of leader. The lesson wasn’t learned.

One of my bugbears in healthcare is that ‘near misses’ are rarely taken as seriously as incidents in which harm occurred. We often miss the opportunity to fix systems before disasters strike. There’s an aphorism among some that ‘a Datix is never investigated like a death is’ (Datix is the error-reporting system in the NHS).

It feels to me like the response of our elected representatives is often based on that same principle. Every time we flirt with constitutional disaster, in the UK or the USA, the response seems to be to shrug and observe that it all worked out in the end.

But unless the underlying problems are fixed, unless the unflashy, unpopular hard miles of constitutional reform are put in, then one day, it won’t all work out in the end. Perhaps that day is today.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Or did Joe Biden say:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

There is an obvious third option:

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters’ – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.

Is the ‘garbage’ the demonisation of Latinos by his support act; his supporters as a group; or the demonisation of Latinos by his supporters as a group?

The context may be offensive and absurd, but there’s something comfortingly twee, normal, and reassuring about a dispute over an apostrophe amid an election of extreme rhetoric.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Before I read this Financial Times article by Bryce Elder, I didn’t know:

• That ‘Trump’ branded watches existed.
• That anyone would try and sell such watches for $100,000, let alone successfully.
• What a “tourbillon” is, “and, though it probably does nothing, people appreciate the extra engineering required.”
• That a 75% gross profit margin on a luxury watch is not unusual.
  

Every day is a school day.