The first study of its kind.

Analysis of 37 studies finds largest health benefits come from replacing processed meat, with 20% reduction in type 2 diabetes

Replacing meat and dairy with whole grains, beans, nuts and olive oil may significantly reduce cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, according to a major review into the impact of diet on health.

Researchers in Germany analysed 37 published studies to assess the benefits of switching from red and processed meat, poultry, fish, eggs and dairy products to plant-based foods such as beans, nuts, whole grains, oils, fruit and vegetables.

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Vegetarian and vegan diets are generally associated with better status on various medical factors linked to cardiovascular health and cancer risk, as well as lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and death, according to a new review of 49 previously published papers.

I am a Republican[*].

On the occasion of the horrifically expensive and pointless coronation of King Charles III I want to state clearly: I want to live in a nation governed with the consent of the people, rather than by the divine right of kings.

We got through seventy-plus years under the reign of Elizabeth II without too much controversy over her role. Credit where credit's due: she managed the duties of head of state with dignity and diligence for decades on end, even if a lot of skeletons were forcibly locked in closets (consider what NDA Prince Andrew's victim much have been required to pay in return for a royal cash pay-out, or what acts of parliament were modified or never brought forward because the monarch didn't want to see them). And even if she and her family came out considerably richer at the end of her reign, even accounting for inflation.

(One thing I'll say about the House of Windsor: they don't engage in vulgar looting of the British state on the same scale as, say, the Putin family in Russia. But the Windsors have reason to be confident they'll be around for generations. A burglar doesn't need to hurry if the police are there to guard their back.)

However.

Elizabeth Windsor is dead. Her successor is a snobbish, reactionary seventy-six year old multi-billionaire. He's so divorced from the ordinary lived experience of his subjects that he reportedly can't even dress himself.

I didn't vote for him.

Nobody did. Nobody does. Nobody ever will, because this is not a democracy.

There is no democratic accountability in monarchy. As a system of government, in undiluted form it most resembles a hereditary dictatorship — current poster-child: Kim Jong-Il. The form we have in the UK is not undiluted: Parliament asserted its supremacy with extreme prejudice in 1649, and again in 1688, and ever since then the British monarchy has been a constitutional, rather than an absolute one — a situation that leaves odd constitutional echoes, such as the fact that we have a Royal Navy but we a British Army (loyal to Parliament, and not under royal command).

For the Americans reading this blog, let me provide a metaphor: let us postulate the existence in the antebellum Deep South of benevolent, morally righteous slaveowners who did not flog or rape or oppress their slaves. (I know, I know ... it's a thought experiment, okay?) Would that be enough to exculpate the institution of slavery? I'm pretty sure the answer lies somewhere been "no!" and "hell, no!" Slavery is an inherently oppressive institution because it deprives a class of victims of their most basic right to autonomy. The failure of a [hypothetical] individual slave-owner to be corrupted does not invalidate the corrupt nature of the system.

Similarly, the existence of benevolent, incorruptible, morally righteous monarchs who do not tyrannise their subjects citizens does not redeem the institution of monarchy.

Both slavery and monarchy are affronts to the principle that all people are equal in law. They may differ in detail of degree or circumstance — after all, is anyone seriously comparing King Charles to Kim Jong-Il, or Henry VIII? — but the very existence of the institution is, in and of itself, dehumanizing.

Now we are being treated to the sight of a billionaire scion of a hereditary dictatorship being feted with a £50M party and national holiday to celebrate his unelected ascent to the highest office in the land. It is, of course, a religious ceremony—the religion in question being a state-mandated Christian church of which maybe 10% of the population are adherents to any extent—but hey, pay no attention to us apostates. This is happening in the middle of a ghastly polycrisis, with inflation running in double digits, the Bank of England advising people to "accept that you are poorer" as a result of the government's ghastly mishandling of brexit and the post-COVID economy, a government actively trying to suppress voter groups who don't support them and refusing to track numbers of those turned away at the polls, jailing political dissidents, ignoring their obligations under international law on refugees ... in the middle of this mess our quasi-fascist government is trying to distract us with an appeal to tradition! pomp! ceremony! dignity! and the usual tired bullshit the right roll out whenever they don't have a coherent plan for fixing the damage.

And I just want to say: not in my name.

The system is morally bankrupt and it's past time to tear it down.

[*] I use "Republican" to mean "supporter of a republican form of government"; I despise the USA's Republican Party and everything they stand for this century.

John Rentoul has been mocked for claiming that "the Twitter consensus is that the magic money tree should pay to upgrade our sewage system". Such mockery is right; people think that water company owners should foot the bill. But John is dead right to alert us to the fact that, often, there are indeed no magic money trees.

His argument applies to privatizations. There is often no magic money tree that makes things more affordable in the private than public sector - as we see in water companies plans to make customers pay the costs of investing in the sewage system. 

But that's just one example of a general pattern. The public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives, which New Labour greatly expanded, kept public debt off the books by promising companies who built schools and hospitals big cashflows for many years. But these proved more expensive for tax-payers than ordinary government borrowing would have been, which was why Philip Hammond scrapped them in 2018.

The idea that there was a magic money tree the state could shake to finance schools and hospitals has been refuted. And there was, at bottom, a simple reason for this. Governments can borrow more cheaply than the private sector. Shifting debt from the public to the private sector thus increases borrowing costs. And given that companies are less able to bear high debt than governments - because they can't print their own money or raise tax - it also increases financial fragility, as we saw with the collapse of Carillion.

Another example of what I mean are pensions. It's sometimes said that the pensions triple lock is unaffordable. It's not. If it stays in place, state spending on pensioner benefits will rise from 5.9% of GDP now to just under 8% in 2057-8. This is much less than many European governments - such as in Germany, France Austria or Italy - spend on pensions today.

What's more to my point, though, is that if we don't provide for an income in our old age via the state will we have to do so privately. And it's here that there's no magic money tree. Private pension fund managers charge big fees which compound hugely over time, and they entail big investment risk and longevity risk - risks which the state is better able to carry.

Health care is another example of what I mean. Long NHS waiting lists are forcing people to go private. What people save in taxes by not funding the NHS is thus, for many, offset by paying for private care. Austerity - back door privatization - therefore does not always save money; it merely shifts the cost from the healthy to the ill. Again, there's no magic money tree.

The same applies to talk of reforming the NHS. Of course, the NHS is inefficient, but that's just another way of saying it is a large organization. But the same things that cause it to be inefficient - lack of management skill, vested interests, whatever - also make reform so damned hard. The last major efforts at reforming the system - the introduction of internal markets and Lansley's reforms - were so ineffective they were subsequently reversed. The idea that reform is a magic money tree which can substitute for increased spending is optimistic.

"There's no magic money tree" is usually used as an argument against extra state spending. But it can just as often - and sometimes with more justification - be an argument against privatization.

Now, there are two objections to this. One is that the Treasury's short-termism and failure to see that balance sheets have two sides puts a block upon public sector investment. Privatization gets round this and so is in effect a money tree, a way of releasing investment. This is why Blair and Brown greatly increased private finance initiatives. It's also why privatization began in earnest in 1984: Thatcher sold off BT to prevent big investment in the phone network from showing up in the government borrowing data.

We must not, however, mistake bureaucratic convention and groupthink for economic reality. The reality is that governments can borrow more cheaply than the private sector, and so escaping the maw of the Treasury adds to borrowing costs.

A second objection is that privatization might increase efficiency and so cut costs. But this only works if monopoly is replaced by competition. Which often hasn't been the case. Water charges are 4.3 times as high as they were when the industry was privatized, whilst electricity prices are 5.7 times as high: consumer prices generally are 2.3 times as high. There's little sign here of competition driving down prices.

My point here is simple. What stops us doing good things are lacks of real resources - of capital, labour, technology, materials and managerial skill. It is only if we can create or mobilize these that we can have more or better schools, hospitals, utilities or whatever. If you have a plan for doing this - and maybe some of Labour's proposals to reform the NHS do - then you have an intelligent policy. Otherwise, you are just wibbling about magic money trees. And this is as true of some rightists as of leftists.

For decades, the Tories have perfected the psychological trick of displacing their own negative traits and failures on to their enemies

The Tories and their entourage, buoyed by four general election wins in a row but looking ever more nervously towards the next one, have found a new way to dodge blame for Britain’s ailing state: pretending they’re not in power.

“Why is the left in the driving seat of government after 13 years of Tory rule,” the journalist Charles Moore asked in the Daily Telegraph last month. A recent cover essay of the Spectator struck a similar note, claiming a “new woke elite” is now “destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society”. Pieces in the Sun, Mail and the Times raised the same alarm. The diagnosis is clear: don’t be fooled by the Conservatives’ long residence in No 10 – a cabal of middle-class liberals, out of step with the public and covertly led by Gary Lineker, is really ruling Britain.

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