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Spending more on public schools doesn’t increase students’ academic performance. Fill in the blank.

The British Medical Association (BAM) has been slamming one of our nation’s favourite pastimes in its new publication “Under the Influence”. It has claimed that as over 1/3 of adults regularly exceed the government’s alcohol consumption guidelines “the rising cost [of drinking] – socially, economically and to our health services – really is unacceptable”.

The BMA believe that “reducing alcohol-related harm in the UK requires a comprehensive strategy that….seeks to remove or mitigate the unhealthy and unhelpful influences on behaviour”. In essence, that UK citizens should be regulated in what they are exposed to, in order to condition their own thinking and desires. Their solution is a blanket ban on the advertisement of alcohol. The BMA claims that alcohol advertising attempts to cast drinking as an essential activity, particularly drawing attention to the sponsorship of music festivals and premiership football by big brands. However, as the Portman Group patiently explained, evidence suggests that advertising encourages brand switching and loyalty, not the abuse of alcohol.

The BMA not only want to control what can be shown to us, but to meddle in market mechanisms, through the instigation of a minimum price for alcohol. Their report states that ASBOs should “not be slapped on the vomiting teenagers, they should be slapped on the irresponsible marketers” – suggesting that companies should be held responsible for the actions of the consumer. Another authoritarian suggestion of theirs is to limit the density of on and off-licensed premises within an area. If people already have enough places in which to drink, then a proposed business will fail. If they do not, why should an entrepreneur be denied a place in the market?

The UK has been a nation of drinkers for thousands of years. No association (or government) should hope to change a society’s habits by telling them what they should and should not do and by restricting an adult’s exposure to a ‘harmful substance’ (just look at the failed ‘war on drugs’). Real social change can only come about when individuals themselves adopt a new attitude to drinking. The best way for this to occur is through the unbiased education about the costs and dangers of alcohol, which people can choose to weigh up against the satisfaction they derive from drinking a pint (or six.)

Let’s just hope that those in Parliament haven’t had enough subsidised pints to think that the BMA’s measure might work too.

The government’s response to the financial crisis has been a shambles. It has coddled “British” firms (such as Indian-owned Jaguar) with tax-payers’ money and restricted foreign lending of some of Britain’s biggest banks (whose UK clients work around the world). It trumpeted the G20 meeting in London, where leaders committed themselves not to indulge in protectionism, and have gone away and broken this promise, most notably through government-driven Buy Local “stimulus” packages triggered by Barack Obama’s “Buy American.”

These moves illustrate how trade policy is so out of touch with the reality of 21st Century commerce.

A generation ago, the factory floor was bound by four walls and usually by national borders too. Today, a product might be designed by a team in Bristol and Bangalore, have raw materials from South Africa, Peru and Thailand, and then be assembled in Slovakia or Taiwan, from where it will then be shipped around the world. This has been made possible by dramatic reductions in trade and investment barriers, and revolutionary changes in communications and transport, which have unleashed a truly global division of labour, specialisation and exchange that would have astounded the great Adam Smith – and certainly reaffirms his insights.

Trade can no longer be characterised as a competition between national producers – or “Us” versus “Them”. Instead, it is now a competition between collaborations of some of “our” producers and some of “theirs” – to our mutual benefit.

Take the iPod. It begins life in Apple’s design lab in California. Components from Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan are then assembled in China, before the finished product is shipped around the world. The biggest winner from each iPod sold is Apple because they add the most value through design and marketing. The Chinese, who manufacture almost everything, actually add the least value.

This new commercial reality demands policies that welcome imports and foreign investment and that minimise regulations or administrative obstacles – all based on misconceptions about some vague or ill-defined “national interest.”

The only stimulus package that will work is removing trade barriers.

Alec van Gelder is Network Director at International Policy Network. To read IPN’s latest report by Dan Ikenson, No Longer Us versus Them, click here.

This week the FTSE 100 index of London’s blue-chip share prices soared through the 5,000 barrier. I don’t know what these people in the City are on, but I’d like some. Perhaps they’re all cheered by the ‘Recession Over!’ headlines in the newspapers, since the latest economic figures suggest a very slight positive growth after over a year of severe falls. And of course, companies are reporting better figures these days.

There are two sorts of market analysts, those who look at the big picture, and those who look at companies themselves. The latter tend to be more optimistic, more gung-ho for the companies they track. That’s natural. But company figures only look better today because their reports over the last year have been disastrous. Their descent may be slowing, but they’re still in much worse shape than they were. It looks OK because they’ve already fired everyone so don’t have big wage bills to pay. They still have customers because they’re running down their stockpiles of unsold stuff. But you can’t operate like that for ever.

Nor is the big picture rosy. I don’t trust growth figures, which comapre two sets of already-unreliable aggregates. Sure, £175bn of new ‘quantitative easing’ cash has got to do something to boost things. But it may be a doubly false boost. First, it’s fine to print money if the problem is a shortage of it. But stubbornly high inflation figures suggest that there’s still plenty still out there, helping to bid up prices. Second, what the Bank of England is doing is simply buy up government debt in exchange for this new cash. But that makes the government look like a much better risk than it really is. Sooner or later, the Bank will have to rein in again. And then the true shakiness of the government’s finances will be obvious. Which ain’t gonna help the stockmarket at all.

A government-commissioned report just released shows how five senior executives earned almost £42m in pay and pensions from carmaker MG Rover before its eventual collapse in 2005. The ‘Phoenix Four’ of John Towers, Nick Stephenson, Peter Beale and John Edwards bought the company from BMW for £10 in 2000.

MG Rover, originally part of the Leyland ran into trouble in the 1970s, and survived only on cash injections from the government. British Aerospace, a privatized planemaker, took it over but sold the ailing business on to BMW in 1994. Five years later, BMW realised it had bought a pup – losing £600m in a single year – and pulled the plug. There was much pressure on the government to bail it out and ‘protect British jobs’, but no deal. So the four managers stumped up £10, saying they could turn it around.

They did indeed cut its losses, but the company still collapsed, in April 2005. The withdrawal of a £100m bridging loan promised by Tony Blair’s government did not exactly help. Meanwhile, the Four had paid themselves £9m each, and another £5.7m went to the Chief Executive, Kevin Howe. There were accusations that the executives asset-stripped the company to line their own pockets, rather than investing in it to save all those British jobs – 6,300 of them, plus many more in firms making components and supplying services to MG Rover.

While the executive team might have acted over-optimistically and even immorally, their actions (as owners of the company) don’t exactly seem illegal. But the government has used all its power and spin, and taxpayers’ money, to conceal its own shabby role in the whole affair and pass all the blame on to the executives. A lot of public money had gone into MG Rover, and governments were to say the least a bit careless in what then happened to the company – putting the fear of job-cut headlines ahead of its long-term soundness. MG Rover went bad just before the 2005 General Election, after all, which is why ministers went so headless-chicken about saving it. When it failed, they commissioned an investigation by accountants and lawyers which conveniently kicked the whole issue into the long grass, and avoid Freedom of Information requests, until well after the election. And how. Four years later, £16.3m of taxpayers’ cash, and an 850-page report that naturally says nice things about the government that commissioned it. But then, do you think they would have published it, if it had criticised them?

Columbia University, reporting smaller investment losses than some of its Ivy League peers, said its endowment over the last year declined in value by 21%.

General Motors has rescinded temporary pay cuts for salaried staff that were instituted in May as the auto maker faced bankruptcy.

Major market indexes were mostly lower in recent trading after hitting the best levels of the year Thursday, though transport stocks were a bright spot.