It’s Later Than You Think
This week: Rishi wants to make houses more expensive, Sian wants to make London transport cheaper, and I’m very sorry to tell you that we’re all going to die. But there’s a nice map at the end.
Some things I am worrying about this week
Rishi Sunak. Watching some of the more hagiographic coverage of the Chancellor over the past year – the BBC drew him as Superman, for Zog’s sake – has been an unsettling experience. It felt like a lot of people have fallen under some enchantment which, by not qualifying for a penny of the government support which they frantically started throwing about the place when the economy went off a cliff, I somehow managed to escape.
At any rate, Sunak has made some of the worst decisions of any politician I can remember – a policy about supporting restaurants that may well have had a death toll, for example, which is quite some feat. Yet large chunks of the commentariat have begun to talk him up as a future Prime Minister, because he seemed generous during a pandemic, and perhaps because he’s young and nice looking and has clean hands. I don’t want to sound too conspiratorial about this, but... is it possible that there’s a part of our press that’s always on the look out for a way of rebranding an 11-year old Tory government as somehow “new”?
Something Sunak has done that is specifically freaking me out right now is the housing component of today’s Budget. Extending the stamp duty holiday past the end of March was probably inevitable, because suddenly making it several thousand pounds more expensive to buy a house would have all sorts of nasty side effects. But it’s a move that seems likely to result in yet more house price inflation all the same, as money that would previously have gone to the Treasury flows to vendors instead. (More on this in my latest Big Issue column here.)
More worrying still is the decision to offer government guarantees on 95% mortgages. That will enable people with smaller deposits to buy homes. But since 5% of the average house price is still a huge amount of money, there are vast numbers of people for whom it’ll do nothing whatsoever, who the government has entirely ignored. Actually, no: it’ll make things worse, because without increasing housing supply, it’ll just mean more money chasing the same properties, and thus higher prices. Oh, and it means the government is placing an explicit bet on even higher house prices. If prices fall, the taxpayer will take a loss, while more people than ever will be facing negative equity.
As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s James Ball tweeted earlier, the footage of Sunak cheerfully announcing the new 95% mortgages “feels like one of those clips that might be getting replayed in a decade’s time”. I hope he’s wrong. I fear he isn’t.
A hopefully only mildly annoying interlude
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Maps!
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Some things I am delighted by this week
1. This tweet showing that an artificial intelligence – in this case, Google’s Cloud Vision AI – is as confused by the classic rabbit/duck optical illusion as any organic intelligence.
2. This photograph of John Lennon with a Dalek: the two great British villains of the swinging 60s, together at last.
3. The way the London mayoral election – which is DEFINITELY going to happen this time – is starting to hot up. Okay, not “hot up” in the sense of “someone other than Sadiq Khan has a hope of winning”, admittedly – but some actual policy ideas are starting to appear.
This week, the Green candidate Sian Berry criticised the recent hike in the city’s transport fares, and used it as an excuse to talk about her plans to scrap the system of concentric zones in favour of London-wide flat fares. If they got rid of the zones, what would Londoners be snobby about, you ask? All the other stuff we’re snobby about, I guess. Anyway, if you wanted to hear a February 2020 podcast in which I interview Sian while going for a walk, you can do so here.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat candidate Luisa Porritt called for smart road pricing. Tory Shaun Bailey hasn’t said much about transport, but did make clear that his objection to a universal basic income was that people would just spend it on drugs, which is almost certainly within the top dozen stupidest things he’s said this week.
More on the race from the Evening Standard here.
4. Lastly, Edinburgh is planning to pedestrianise George Street, turning the high end New Town shopping street from a sort of car park into a lovely, car-free boulevard. You can see a visualisation of the plans on the city’s website.
The graph of dooooom
A fantastic but deeply frightening graph from Met Office data scientist Neil Kaye went viral on Twitter over the weekend. Here it is now:
Obviously I knew that humanity was pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before. I guess I understood that this problem had been accelerating. But I hadn’t quite realised that something like a fifth of the world’s excess carbon dioxide had been released since the 2010 tuition fee protests.
Nor had I grasped that around 30% of all carbon emissions have happened since the Raconteurs released Steady As She Goes. Not far off 40% have happened since Tony Blair’s second landslide.
Over half of all the carbon emissions that are currently having a potentially existential effect on the climate have been released since 1991, a year in which the highest grossing film was Terminator 2: Judgement Day. This, by my reckoning, means that the first Terminator film was released into a world less than half as doomed as the one we live in now.
Two thirds of all emissions have happened since Margaret Thatcher came to power, and the Knack released My Sharona. Three-quarters have been released into the atmosphere surrounding a planet on which the Beatles have already split up.
This isn’t going to be an environmental newsletter. I want it to be a generally cheery bit of the internet, something you look forward to reading when you’re having a dull day.
But I am genuinely quite freaked out to realise that nine-tenths of every bit of carbon our civilisation has pumped into the atmosphere has been released during the course of a single human lifetime. Our descendants will be dealing with the side effects for a hell of a lot longer than that.
Anyway, let’s end on something happier...
Map of the week
I absolutely adore this map of the Northern Hemisphere’s road network, produced by cartographer Helen McKenzie:
It shows, at a glance, the eastern United States, Europe and East Asia are more populous than the western United States, North Africa or central Asia. It shows that the Levant and coastal Egypt are a lot more populated than the areas just behind them; and that the area around the southern North Sea is a lot more densely populated than areas further south or east. You can see Moscow without even trying. And look at Iceland’s cute little ringroad!
But the thing that strikes me most about this map is what you can’t see: that is, the northern coasts of Canada or Siberia. Scandinavia has roads all over it; even Alaska is kind of visible. But the barely populated frozen interiors of both North America and Eurasia are immediately visible from the lack of infrastructure. Both continents’ west coasts are a lot milder, and thus more populated, than the land further east.
Thanks to Helen for her permission to reproduce the map. If you want to see more of her work, you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. She also has a shop.
Links and housekeeping
1. Some other things I have done this week:
It’s time to talk about how the old and rich can compensate the young and poor for their sacrifice during this pandemic. My New Statesman column.
Why Kingston gives Surrey the London finger, and why there’s a divided house at the Essex border: a piece for OnLondon on some of London’s weirder boundaries.
2. Thanks to everyone – and there were a LOT of you; god what a bunch of nerds – who got in touch to suggest that, on last week’s map of the week, the pink lines I didn’t understand represented third rail electrification. This, as you will obviously know, means that power is delivered via an electrified third rail of the sort my late grandmother spent a lot of time being terrified I might touch for some reason. Thank you all for writing in.
3. I am frankly devastated to see that CityMonitor, the successor website to CityMetric, is to close: editor Sommer Matthis and her excellent team were doing some fantastic stuff. You can read her thread about the news, and about how brilliant her staff are, here.
4. Questions? Comments? Suggested topics? Email me.