Benign Neglect

Through my work, I've read, listened to or skimmed through at speed a large number of business books and self-improvement guides. Whether they are citing Eastern spirituality, referencing fashionable management sages or quoting Yogi Berra to prove they have a sense of humour, there is a unifying thread: a belief in activism. Reform yourself, reform your management style, reform your company. Apparently the key to success in human affairs is relentless action. What they never propose is a forgotten approach to life’s challenges: benign neglect.

Yet if flares, shoulder pads and leggings can rise from the dead, we could give enlightened neglect a whirl. Our struggling Coalition government might benefit from this old-fashioned, indifferent approach to statecraft; it would most likely save money too. So why in certain cases, is the right course to do less and care less?

The law of unintended consequences

Our governments pass a lot of laws, what they rarely do is ask themselves the counterfactual: could this legislation make things worse? Like most of us, ministers and civil servants fall into the fallacy of thinking that a positive intention guarantees a positive outcome. When you believe that wanting to do good automatically results in you doing good, you run the risk of massive overconfidence and confusing beliefs with real world outcomes. As husbands buying gifts for their wives on Valentine's Day will attest, thinking and hoping she might like the lingerie you selected is just that...wishful thinking. 

I will offer a simple case study to illustrate this issue: bats. Bats are protected by a host of laws. It is a criminal offence to “intentionally disturb a group of bats in its nest” or to damage or destroy a bat roosting place (even if bats are not roosting there at the time). Stern stuff. You might imagine that these draconian protections are helping the little flappers to flourish; sadly most bat species remain on the endangered list.

Thanks to these comprehensive legal protections, bats become a problem if you are, for example, a property developer looking to renovate or demolish an old building. Should you find bats or even just an empty bat nest, all activity should cease. An ecological consultant must provide an assessment before you can proceed with your venture.

You may have borrowed £100,000s to develop the site, with construction workers on the payroll and everything has to grind to a halt because of a bat nest. It could be weeks or months before work could resume, by which time you might have gone bankrupt when your cash runs out and the bank recalls the loan. 

This assumes you comply with the law and notify the authorities. Or… maybe… just maybe…you could destroy the nest and the bats, when no one is looking. There are likely to be a few more Fliedermaus im Himmel.

So the legislation to protect bats almost certainly makes them more likely to be harmed than before; a little bit of neglect might have done better by the bats than concerned and dedicated action.

Concentrated Benefits, Dispersed Costs

The main function of government is to take money from certain groups of people and organisations and give these funds to others. Often these sets overlap, so the government will take tax off the low paid only to give them funds back via housing benefit. Unfortunately, like an eccentric relative, who gives one grandson £1,000 in cash each Christmas and the other a £1 Boots Token that expired in1992, government often does not distribute its largesse with any discernible logic. Governments and ministers do not set out to be wasteful or perverse, but they are hamstrung by a defining feature of politics: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.

I am going to use a fictional example to demonstrate the point, as you may already consider me a bat murder advocate and I don’t want to lose you entirely. Imagine pressure group existed, called G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. whose catchy acronym stands for “Ginger People Called Alice Who are Left-Handed Deserve Free Taxis”. They know the name needs work, but they are very effective at lobbying government. The Minister for Transport is persuaded by their clever PR campaign to pass legislation, mandating that all left handed women called Alice with ginger hair were entitled to a free taxi service to wherever they want in perpetuity. By pure coincidence the minister’s daughter was a leftie red-head, whose first name rhymes malice.

Whatever the minister’s motives, he gets the bill passed. There are heated debates about whether phonetic spellings of Alys as opposed to Alice are valid for the travel subsidy or strawberry blond counts as red hair. But following a government inquiry, legislation tightened up all loopholes and all Alices (phonetic or otherwise) with red hair (not strawberry blond) who were left-handed (or ambidextrous) are delighted to receive free taxis.

The cost to the British state is a mere £500 million a year, even though some Alices insist on driving back and forth from Scotland just because they can. Regular, non-Alice taxpayers like you and I might grumble about the unfairness of this taxi subsidy, yet it only costs us each an additional £16 a year in tax. In other words, one cab-ride less for ourselves, which is hard to get enraged about.

Then a new Transport of Minister comes into post and she is appalled by this daft and partisan subsidy, especially when her predecessor’s child was a beneficiary. She moves to cut the free taxis and all hell breaks loose.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. (remember that catchy name) mobilise their lobbying resources once more. There are tearful, emotional protests outside the Department for Transport by red-heads distraught at these cuts to much need services. Newspapers run articles by a left-handed writer, first name Alice,  who can no longer afford to visit her ailing grandmother now her taxi service is under threat. The colour picture by her column shows lustrous red locks. Our poor minister doesn’t know what hit her;  turns out it was eggs hurled by furious Alices.

So after she’s been hit with the fifth egg in one day by a screaming Alice and facing investigation by the Commission for Racial Enquiry about possible ginger bigotry, the minister backs down and leaves the subsidised travel service as it is.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. claims victory; the rest of us moan about politicians being spineless and then continue trawling through the Mail Online crack bar.

Now if the Minister of Transport had practiced a little bit of benign neglect when lobbied by G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T, we would not be saddled with another spending commitment that is impossible to remove.

Imperfect Knowledge

The third reason why benign neglect should be a legitimate policy response is in that in many instances, ministers and civil servants base their policy responses on studies or data sets that are for too inconclusive or contradictory to justify such faith. Let's go back to the real world now; relax no bats are harmed in the following paragraphs. 

In the early 1980s, government dietary advice changed, telling us that saturated fat was dangerous. The secret to healthy living was apparently cutting out fat, counting calories and eating five portions a day of fruit and vegetables (of which up to 3 could be fruit juice). Now given that adults today eat 600 calories less on average than they did in the 1980s, children do roughly the same amount of exercise and many of us followed this advice, often guzzling several smoothies a day, you might wonder why the obesity rate is 40% and climbing.

It turns out that much of the diet advice of the last thirty years has been worse than useless, it has been actively harmful. Fat was never the villain, if it were you would have to explain how the Innuit make to old age on a diet of 80% seal blubber or for indeed how any of us made it through the ice age.

This blog is too limited to go into great detail, but suffice to say sugar is the cause of the obesity epidemic and its most toxic form is fructose. When fructose is delivered in a liquid, fibre-free form such as a fruit smoothie, it is worse for you than a can of Coke and has much the same effect on your liver as a shot of whiskey (unless you’ve just done intensive exercise and are glycogen depleted). 

Without getting too melodramatic, if benign neglect had been applied to the dietary advice in the early 1980s, we would all be a lot thinner, happier and healthier than we currently are. When you consider too that benign neglect of the processed food lobby might have prevented high fructose corn syrup being introduced into everything in packets, doing nothing at all would have saved lives.

There you go, there powerful and compelling arguments why doing nothing is sometimes a noble and virtuous course of action.Vive la indifference!

Now if only we could persuade our politicians to take longer holidays, who knows how quickly things might improve.

TV vs Film

I will blame the infrequency of my blogs in recent months on work commitments. By work, I do not mean the vulgar necessity of exchanging one's waking hours for money (if only there were a way to trade slumber time for cash...hey, I can but dream). In this instance, ‘work’ refers to my gruelling schedule of watching quality scripted television series. There simply are not enough hours in the day, even if you try watching two series at once. And yes it can be done: large screen for your main series, iPad for the secondary. Result: headaches, eyestrain and a fusion between plots where in my mind, ‘Breaking Bad’ elided with ‘Borgen’ to create a compelling, if confusing, narrative of a female chemistry teacher balancing the demands of Danish coalition politics and large scale methamphetamine production.

So why am I telling you about my TV viewing habits? What has struck me in the last year is how many superb TV series I've seen and how few decent feature films. This leads to a more general puzzle: why are modern films so bad and contemporary TV series so good? And tellingly, I doubt anyone would disagree with the premise of that question unless they worked for a major film studio promoting their summer bilgebuster.

Now maybe you are a huge fan of the Iron Man franchise and believe that these movies, based on a children's comic in which a billionaire playboy puts on a special suit that allows him to fly and fire lasers from his hands, represents the peak of dramatic achievement. Or perhaps you really believe the decision to make three films of The Hobbit was an artistic choice. If you do, seek professional help. No, stay with me and I'll see if I can persuade you of the errors of your ways.

Tempting though it is to start reeling off a long list of superb TV series, followed by a string of underwhelming films, this does not get to the heart of the disparity between these two genres. For simplicity's sake, let's focus on American films and TV, which are both commercial enterprises. Bringing the BBC into a debate about media in any form becomes a separate article or even a book; no one really knows why the BBC does what it does, including its senior management. Pondering its machinations is much like debating the weather in the UK, a never-ending yet ultimately pointless exercise. So for sanity's sake, we’ll stay in the U.S.A.

There are three powerful drivers, I would say, for the surge in standards in scripted, long form TV and the corresponding collapse in feature film quality, which started up to twenty years ago and intensified in the past decade:

1. CGI (computer generated imagery)

A modern blockbuster film is usually saturated with CGI from start to finish, whereas even the most effects-heavy TV series such as ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or ‘Game of Thrones’ have a high percentage of scenes without any significant CGI. Blockbuster film-makers can conjure any number of monsters, robots, explosions, catastrophes and variations of digital mayhem into existence to excite and terrify audiences. But like addicts who need increasing doses of the same fix, audiences are less and less impressed, so film-makers pile more CGI on top of more CGI until films are nothing but extended effects sequences, interspersed with irrelevant padding. Characters, dialogue and even plot are filler before the shooting and explosions, the equivalent of the air-conditioning engineer in an adult movie arriving at the blonde starlet’s house to explain he must service her equipment.

Even the most high budget HBO series cannot pursue the same strategy, so CGI is used for specific sequences that can't be done with props, prosthetics or actors. The effects are at the service of the story, whereas in many films, the CGI is the story. A modern 3D cinema experience is closer to a theme-park ride than actually watching a film.

Unfortunately for the cinema-goer who isn't a thirteen year old boy obsessed with watching robots and superheroes throwing things at one another and blowing up buildings, film-makers have forgotten Hitchcock's lesson in ‘Psycho’. There is nothing scarier than a young woman trapped in a house with a madman with a knife. Or they could watch Spielgberg's ‘Duel’ to remember that you can create a thrilling sequence with one car and one truck, no computers.

There are of course exceptions. ‘Skyfall’ was in many ways a traditional film, with the final showdown being a back-to-basics confrontation that had Dame Judy firing a pistol. The only weak part of an otherwise brilliant film was, in my opinion, the silly underground sequence where Bond was attacked by a CGI tube train. That cursed CGI again. Nonetheless, one ‘Skyfall’ does not make a summer of quality film-making.

2. Long termism and short termism

Both TV networks and film studios are, when you strip away the fluff, businesses that must turn a profit regularly to survive. So why do the same business imperatives produce such differing content and why has the balance in quality shifted so sharply away from film to scripted TV?

I do not believe any movie producer or studio head deliberately sets out to make bad films; it is more that a quality script or brilliant story makes less difference to the financial success of a blockbuster than ever before. Mark Kermode goes into this phenomenon in detail in his excellent book, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex’. Big films rarely fail financially as they are released simultaneously, with a huge marketing blitz. Even if they are dire, there’s no chance for word of mouth to spread. And with Hollywood making more of its money overseas, sophisticated films may actually do worse than basic, Michael Bay bilge. Think McDonalds film-making. Think of the merchandising. Within six months to a year, it’s all over, no matter how long it took to make. That’s a short-term financial fix.

TV series, conversely, have to play the long game. Their makers can live with low audience figures and weak box set sales if they believe the series will build its audience over time. Both ‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Wire’ were slow burners, that could have been axed part way, yet the end results are not only creative triumphs but in the end, good for business. When you are locked into runs of ten or twenty-two episodes, word of mouth is crucial. Programme makers need good reviews and positive feedback. They have to look after their audiences and they have to repeat the trick with every episode.

This difference in life-cycle, where a scripted series may last in some cases for eight to ten years, means quality is essential in TV. In films it’s an optional extra.

3. The HBO mindset

Lack of CGI and an eye for box set sales do not tell the whole story. HBO has changed television and now many other networks have followed its lead. They started making programmes that would never be broadcast on any TV network, whether private or public and it all started with a series called ‘Oz.’

As an insomniac TV addict in the days before iPlayer and hard disk recorders, I trawled a lot of late night television. There were always hidden gems lurking in the schedule from midnight onwards, whether it was a weird Czech art house film with lots of nudity or a 1970s sci-fi classic, and I could add another film to my VHS collection. What I rarely did was record TV programmes, apart from the likes of ‘GBH’; there simply weren’t as many great shows around apart from that now-dying breed, the funny UK sitcom.

Then one evening, I watched an episode of ‘Oz’, shown on C4 in the middle of the night, and was stunned by what played out on screen. Set in a high security prison, ‘Oz’ went for the jugular and never let go. Its characters included neo-Nazi gang leaders, mobsters, drug dealers, a drunk driver who had killed a child and prison warders playing God. A conventional broadcast series might have avoided topics like racial violence and sex in prison, including male rape; in ‘Oz’ there were no limits. To cap it all, the action was narrated by a paralysed black actor in the role of the Shakespearean chorus. This was HBO’s first foray into long form scripted TV and I had never seen anything like it.

After ‘Oz’ came ‘The Sopranos’ and much more. Where HBO trail-blazed, other networks followed with show concepts that would have been unthinkable before. HBO’s model as a subscription service meant it did not need to worry about the outrage a show such as ‘Oz’ would have prompted on a normal network. Nor would the BBC or even C4 have dared make anything so extreme; there would be questions in Parliament about their public charters. At last, programme-makers could break free of chilling effect of the 'moral majority', who never were the majority and whose morals did not extend to respecting other people's right to make up their own minds. Witness the absurd media circus following Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye' special on chid abuse, where politicians and commentators lined up to denounce something they had not watched. 

This outpouring of creativity unleashed by the HBO approach has reversed the old calculus, instead of fearing complexity, taboo subjects, morally ambiguous characters and challenging plotlines, TV has embraced them. Major film studios, however, continue to run scared of any form of risk taking, including original screenplays. Nearly all big budget releases are either adaptations of comics, best-selling novels or reboots of existing film franchises, that were themselves based on comics e.g. Batman, Spiderman and now Superman. Most big budget films present a narrow, socially regressive world view which right wing shock jocks could happily endorse: women need protection by strong men, billionaire philanthropists are better  than state spending, the government is conspiring against its citizens and society's saviours are freedom fighters not bound by legal conventions. For a supposedly liberal place, the subtext of most films reads like the manifesto for the militia movement. 

When Stephen Soderbergh tried to finance a film about Liberace, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon attached to the project, he was told the project was 'too gay' for mainstream audiences. HBO then produced it as a TV movie, which is now on general release in cinemas. This is the perfect embodiment of the HBO mindset: creative risk-taking is actually better business than playing it safe. 

So I suppose we should all be grateful that we do live in a Golden Age of TV, whilst searching in vain for a film that isn’t targeted at teenagers with ADD.

Pensioner Politics

So it has finally happened, Ian Duncan-Smith's Quest to for the Holy Grail of Reduced Welfare Spending culminated last week with a plea for wealthy pensioners to consider giving back their benefits. And IDS had a similar level of success as the Python's King Arthur when he stood outside the French castle and asked nicely if he could come inside to have a look at their grail. Whether Britain's well-off pensioners will fire a barrage of farmyard animals at him remains to be seen. Judging by the fury even this modest proposal provoked, he might want to keep one eye on the sky for incoming cows.

Defending the current situation where pensioners, regardless of income or wealth, receive a range of benefits whilst every other part of the welfare budget faces cuts is a tough challenge. Peter Hain, the shadow spokesperson, valiantly rose to the task in recent weeks with an argument that can be summarised thus: cutting any payments is difficult, the total spend in these categories is only £4 billion so why bother when set against a welfare bill close to £200 billion and a deficit of £125 billion. A superficially convincing argument, until you realise it is in effect a mandate for limitless spending in perpetuity.

Harriet Harman says today that Labour would review these benefits; whereas David Cameron has pledged them until 2016. All sides of the political debate, are playing pensioner politics and it does not bode well for this country's long term prospects. Unless you are to the left of Tony Benn which few save Ken Loach and Fidel Castro are, most people of any persuasion accept that Britain's state spending needs to be reined back. Furious arguments rage whether cuts should happen now or later; yet few seriously dispute the need to bring spending in line with income at some point.

If you were a rational, wise person acting in the national interest i.e. not a modern politician, then on reviewing the government's spending, you would conclude that the best area to make savings would be the largest category total, namely welfare (c. £190 billion). And continuing this absurd fantasy, imagine this rational person ignored the clamour of politics and delved deeper into that massive number only to find that half goes on state pensions.

This sage person discovers many of those in receipt of the basic state pension have significant private income and personal wealth. These wealthy pensioners are the ones IDS wants to their additional benefits. They won't hand anything back of course. In fairness, I wouldn't either unless forced to do so. When it comes the cash transfers from the individual to the state, the only reliable method is compulsion with the threat of prison. I can think of a 1,000 things I would rather do with the money government takes off me in tax. But you can't leave these things to individual’s discretion to pay (unless you are a very high net worth person and then you tell HMRC what to do).

Pensioners and their payments are the political third-rail, to touch them is death; the old are vocal and they vote unlike the young who prefer Twitter and abstaining. The grey lobby explains the hard man of welfare reform resorting to shaking his collection tin. His mistake was doing this himself, a far more effective campaign would include a picture of an abandoned Scotty dog or a lame donkey. 

Removing these additional benefits for the well-off would set a positive precedent for welfare spending. Instead of hosing down the country with money, we might consider targeting the cash to those most in need. Sadly, given the venom provoked by IDS's meek request for common sense, it seems pensioner politics wins over reason every time. 

Property Prices

The English saying goes 'What's that got to do with price of fish?', which is strange as you'll almost never hear Brits discuss the relative prices of freshly landed mackerel, sea bass or Atlantic salmon. Yet you will hear them debate in forensic detail how much a three bedroom house went for in the next street which wasn't even that nice and the garden was much smaller than the others. In fact, there appears to be an unwritten, binding law in the UK that states when a social gathering of three or more people lasts longer than twenty minutes, the price of housing must be discussed by the group.

True, the mania has abated somewhat since the worst excesses of the property boom, when the TV schedules were filled with programmes suggesting that an easy way to get rich was to quit your job and spend six months renovating a house to then sell at an inflated mark-up to gullible buyers. Apparently, all you had to do add value to any home was put in plastic-looking wood veneer floors, paint everything beige and furnish each room in darker shades of mushroom and fawn. Prospective homebuyers in 2006 all dreamt of living in a home decorated in the style of a Best Western conference suite.

Beigeland

Of course what the programme never showed you was the couple who did not quit their jobs, bought an identical property, did absolutely nothing to it and then sold it six months later for 5% more than the original purchase price, which is what anyone can do in a rising market.

We're now into the fourth year of recession, yet the fixation with property remains strong, which is odd when you consider the following three factors.

1. Who benefits from high prices?

There's one only group of people who benefit from high property prices: those who already own property in a high price area and have little or no mortgage. At the extreme end of the spectrum, The Duke of Westminster and other major land owners get wealthier every year without lifting a finger. But property owners are not all billionaire Dukes; there are plenty of rich retirees with final salary pension schemes, who hit the jackpot by purchasing a house thirty years ago and watching its value treble in real terms.

Kerching!!!!

This unearned windfall gives these gold-plated oldies plenty of free to time in between golf, cruises and visits to their holiday homes, to complain about the state of modern Britain, lecture the rest of the population about the virtues of thrift and sink some of their cash surplus into buy-to-let flats to soak their fellow citizens.

2. Less homes are being built

You would think if the property market worked in any way efficiently, that the chronic undersupply of housing in the South East might lead to... I don't know... more houses? In fact the rate of new build is at its lowest ever, because developers realise that the market prices have far outstripped the average earner's ability to pay for them.

Let's take an example: Upper Holloway, hardly a glamorous neighbourhood, the average price of a four bedroom house is £865,000. So if you were a couple with children looking to buy that house, you would need £86,000 as deposit and a joint income of £250,000 (assuming you didn't already have equity). That's three times the London average, it puts you in the top 1% of earners and your reward for your stellar pay packet, is a house in...Upper Holloway. I'll repeat that for emphasis: UPPER....HOLLOWAY. I'm not singling out that area as being particularly shabby: if you are a fan of fried chicken outlets, Irish pubs filled with elderly alcoholics and plumbing merchants, then the N19 postcode is a veritable idyll.

Street drinkers' choice

If you want somewhere classier, for example Kentish Town (trust me it is in comparison to the Holloway Road), then your house will set you back a further £300,000. Even then you are still in what estate agents like to call 'an upcoming area', which means you are more likely to see Special Brew being drunk at ten in the morning than in a genuinely posh area, such as Barnes.

As far as I can tell London property prices have decoupled from all local economic factors; now the only new homes worth building are luxury flats aimed at the super-rich. And in the midst of the housing shortage, many of these properties stay empty for much of the year. Walk down a ultra-rich ghetto such as Hamilton Terrace, in St John's Wood, nobody's home, ever. Apart from the maid, but she's Filippino and they've confiscated her passport.

3. Prices are supposed to fall during a recession

There is normally one upside in a recession:  house prices, commercial rents and residential rents come down, which eases the pressure on people's disposable income. But in London, prices stay in the stratosphere and then people wonder why the economy is failing to respond, even after £375 billion of quantitive easing (that may of course have made things worse). Many are paying 50% of their net income in rent.

Imagine if the apocalypse came to pass and prices came down by say 20%. A lot of paper wealth disappears; plenty more real economic activity becomes possible. Renters have more money to purchase boutique London gin cocktails served by mixologists in secret bars, complicated hair cuts, skinny trousers or whatever it is young people fritter their wages on these days.  Homebuyers wouldn't have to load themselves with crazy amounts of debt and might have something left over each month to spend on nights out rather than stare at their beige walls and vases filled with twigs, wondering if all the sacrifices were really worth it. (Answer probably not).

   Overvalued property prices suck money from the young and give to the old, they extract wealth from those in employment and give it those who do not need to work: retirees, landlords and investors. They are making us poorer, not richer and the recession goes on...and on...and on....

Processed Foods

Right now in fair-trade, environmentally aware cafes located in the bohemian yet affordable parts of Britain (i.e. Dalston), vegans and vegetarians are looking at one another over their breakfasts of tofu and lentils with smug smiles, nodding and saying 'I told you so'. (Their glow of righteousness still not powerful enough to offset their pallid complexions, thanks to chronic anaemia.)

Yes, meat eaters of Britain, if you chose to eat budget mince in a packet meal over the last few years, there's a good chance you have ingested horse. And probably not quality horse; more likely exhausted, old Romanian road-kill horse sprinkled with bute, a potentially toxic equine medicine.

I admit that conceding a point to vegetarians hurts like stubbing your toe on the bathroom radiator. To any vegetarians who are offended, I understand not eating animals with faces e.g. cows, pigs and Piers Morgan. That makes some sort of sense. No one has satisfactorily explained to me why mussels or clams are off limits (unless you are militant about the plant/animal classification divide). Seriously, a mussel has rights? Oysters have feelings do they? What about the microscopic organisms that crawl all over your body and you senselessly slaughter every day with detergent...I digress. This blog is not the place to discuss the rights of whelks; back to ground up horsies.

Each day the scandal grows,  spreading from Romania to abbatoirs in Wales that store carcasses in skips. The usual nonsense will be trotted out (excuse bad horse pun): more regulation, more government oversight or blaming the EU. There may be some truth in all of this. Yet hearing the food industry bleat that it is the government's fault for not forcing them to check their own products reminds me of the bankers squealing that they cannot be responsible for cheating their customers or mis-selling junk products. It was all the government's fault for not passing laws to stop them.

What a strange concept of business it is where Tesco, Findus and Waitrose need the threat of legal sanctions to test their own meat products from time to time, you know, just to check that the beef mince is actually beef mince. Their managers should have watched more urban narco dramas like The Wire. When buying products that can be easily adulterated, always check the purity first. Any Baltimore street dealer could have schooled them right.

In every crisis, politicians, commentators and lobbyists always insist that we must learn lessons. Usually we do. Unfortunately nine times out of ten, the lesson is the same:  more laws, more regulation, more oversight. Maybe that's the answer or maybe the government has enough to do and spends enough of our income as it is. Let's say we introduce these stringent rules making it clear that when you label a product 'beef lasagne' it must be 100% beef, rather than lucky dip meat; it will not change the fundamentals of the food industry or British eating habits.

The unpalatable truth is that British consumers expect to pay rock-bottom prices for processed foods which they can slap in the microwave or oven, whilst watching TV. The fact that they all taste worse than the most basic home-cooked meal and cost per portion at least twice the price is no deterrent. Apparently we are all too busy on our iPads, X-boxes and PDAs to venture into the kitchen to do any actual cooking. So let's all unite in our shock and outrage at the evil food industry, whilst expecting that meat should be as cheap as vegetables.

You do get what you pay for in this world. And if you pay next to nothing, expect to eat such delights as de-sinewed flesh and random animals.