Follas’s love of foraging is evident right from the starter: both are delivered in hearty portions on wooden butcher’s blocks garnished with wild leaves and edible flowers. The brill ceviche is fresh and delicate with a whisper of zest, lacking only a grain or two of salt for my taste. A flash-fried and optimally cooked pigeon breast comes with a chunky compote of dark berries and beetroot. It’s delicious.

Mains are equally generous in size and flavour. A whole baked lemon sole appears on a plate of hubcap dimensions, but still looks elegant. It’s a classic recipe, with a lemon caper-butter sauce, and executed to classic standards. Better still are a pair of Barnsley chops, pink and succulent and complemented with a coarse, crunchy pesto. The head waiter suggests local beers from Bath Ales and Weymouth’s Dorset Brewing Company to pair with the food, and his advice is right on the money.

The common thread through each of the savoury dishes is the taste of every ingredient. Follas doesn’t flummox my palate by throwing the larder at every plate. Good produce and well though-out combinations do all the work. I can only imagine that the baked Dorset mackerel with a tomato and tamarind sauce and the spelt nettle risotto were infused with the same ethos. Desserts, in contrast, are competent but unspectacular. Eton mess is tidily presented in a tower nest, and tastes as it should; a well-built lime tart is a bit short on the lime, and therefore tang. But they are my only real reservation about the food. The Wild Garlic serves up cooking of the highest quality in surroundings designed not to intimidate—there’s highchairs for the kids, well-pitched service, and even a pack of Huggies waiting in the baby-change room. Good portions and fair prices ensure that Follas’s small dining room (just 30 covers or so) is often full, and rightly so. I’m planning to head back again next month.

The Wild Garlic
4 The Square, Beaminster, Dorset DT8 3AS
+44 (0) 1308 861446
Lunch £70 for two inc. drinks

IF (Minority Tory government) –> Tory extremes stymied in short-term –> (Lib–Lab opposition brings government down, takes blame as ‘irresponsible in time of crisis’) OR (Cameron goes for dissolution at time to suit Tories) –> Tory majority within a year –> Full enactment of Tory manifesto

IF (Lib–Con coalition deal) –> (Tory extremes stymied in short-term) AND (Small number of key LibDem priorities enacted in short term) AND [?]

There’s likely to be a whole load of flak flying the LibDems’ way in the coming days, months and years, especially from the “progressive left”. I suggest they accept no criticism that begins without unpicking the puzzle above – one that the election result set them. That [?] might include the implosion of the party. It might also include the large-scale loss of anti-Conservative tactical voters in the North and Scotland, or the gain of anti-Labour tactical voters in the South, or both. But it might just include major changes to the way we elect representatives to both Houses of Parliament. Our major political parties are stuck fighting for the perception of occupying a bland, but pernicious, centre ground. Voting reform (AV is just one essential baby-step) is the only way to unlock the system, to set them all free to properly represent their constituencies.

It reads to me like Clegg has bet the house on electoral reform. His coalition deal, for all its faults, was worth the risk. Maybe.

I wrote a longer, more speculative piece on this before the coalition deal was announced, at Liberal Conspiracy.

More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.

The interface allows you to zoom right in, to examine the books close-up in a way that would be impossible through a display case. To experience their magic and appreciate their craft, wherever you happen to live. The original Lindisfarne Gospels, the Sherborne Missal and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an are now viewable by anyone with access to broadband Internet—most of us, in other words. As well as fulfilling an obvious cultural-historical remit, replication preserves these treasures (digitally at least) forever.

Of course, the job could have been done by the private sector; but the fact that it wasn’t is surely down to the unknown, unmeasured (or unknowable and ummeasurable), and very long-term, monetary returns from such a venture. In fact, there has been commercial interest, from overseas, including from private book collectors and the institutions that guard what’s left of Ancient Egypt. Some project costs will be recouped as a result.

More important still, non-profit entities in the UK have access to the BL’s technology at a price that doesn’t even recover those costs for the Library. Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute was among the first to make use of the technology.

Speaking at Online Information 2008 (#onlineinfo2008) in December, the BL’s Barry Smith trailed a project by Newcastle Public Libraries due to launch in 2009 (“before June”, Anne Waller, Newcastle Collections Project Officer, told me). They’ve chosen 12 texts from the city’s collection that capture the unique cultural, linguistic, and pictorial heritage of the North-East from a variety of perspectives.

NPL will make available to us all the originals of such books as The Howdy and the Upgetting (written c. 1790 in dialect) and Gray’s Chorographia (1649). The Heritage Lottery Fund grant to cover the project, which includes digitization, conservation and the building of a custom website to launch in tandem with Newcastle’s new city library, was £429,000.

Perhaps projects like this have no measurable or commercial value. But they certainly have value; the queues at the Turning the Pages consoles inside the British Library tell you that. And they’re only possible because the Library is run on the basis that it’s for us all, something that crass anti-state “libertarians” usually misunderstand and always under-estimate.

Image courtesy of Steve Cadman’s flickr set.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity.

The opportunities for LP–BBC print cross-promotion are blatant enough. Shiny new Lonely Planet Magazine‘s launch issue featured a story by Stephen Fry, that tied in with his fine …in America book and series. The second issue has David Attenborough in “The land that time forgot“, the Galapagos. I wonder how easy a non-BBC subsidiary would find it to commission a travel feature from either of those two. Unlike, say, Top Gear Magazine, this is a market segment in which the BBC had zero presence until November 2007.

As I predicted in my previous piece, both issues have been light on advertising. In rotten market conditions, Lonely Planet Magazine has an ace up its sleeve: BBC magazines are able to buy market share by taking a hit on profitability, in the short term at least. Strategies like that aren’t so readily available to small commercial players like Wanderlust.

But these advantages are trivial compared to the online expertise that Lonely Planet has bought into. The BBC runs the best news website in the world, at our expense. Three BBC Online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after that 2007 acquisition. The latest marketing wheeze, launched yesterday, is a travel module integrated inside BBC.com that provides access directly and exclusively into Lonely Planet hosted content (via). When it comes to social media, these digital marketeers know where the online travel information market is going:

Users will also be able to click through to the Lonely Planet site to discover a range of content and tools to plan, book and share travel experiences.

The feature is geo-coded, of course, and so only visible to overseas viewers. Oh, and any UK nationals who check BBC.com for the footie results when they’re on holiday. In any case, the idea that growing the worldwide brand power of Lonely Planet could fail to distort the domestic travel information market is naive. The 26m readers of BBC.com are being corralled into Lonely Planet for their travel information, at the expense of other UK-owned and -sited travel portals, among them struggling startups.

The travel guidebook market is worth something like £100m in UK retail book sales alone. Quite where the online market for travel information is going, nobody quite knows. But it’s safe to assume it can only grow. And with the massive, unfair advantage of BBC Online know-how behind it, taxpayers’ help in effect, it’s likely that Lonely Planet will shout so loud that other UK players barely get heard. Innovators with shallower pockets will be trampled or deterred from entering in the first place. Is this really what the BBC is for?

First published here.

Time Out founder Tony Elliott says he fears that the BBC will provide Lonely Planet with “an inexhaustible fund of factual, technical and editorial information and expertise quite beyond the resources of any privately funded organisation such as Time Out”.

Complaints along these lines haven’t gone away. This week Lyn Hughes, publisher of Wanderlust, accused the BBC of deliberately targeting her long-running, independent travel magazine, undercutting ad rates and planning a launch issue of Lonely Planet Magazine to coincide with Wanderlust’s 100th:

I would question why any travel magazine would be launching at this time. Our advertisers are finding it tough. … No other magazine publisher would be launching a travel magazine at this time. They’d be completely daft. … Why is the BBC launching one at the worst possible time? I can only think they’re smug. They don’t need to make money.

She’s right at least on the emboldened point. The predictable consensus at this year’s World Travel Market, which ended yesterday, was that 2009 would be tough for the business. No sane publisher would launch a print travel mag right now. But as its 2007/8 results showed, the BBC can afford to buy increased top-line magazine sales in return for decreased profits. Further, the recently relaunched (and rather lovely) Lonely Planet website is very much a commercial concern, with click-through sales, destination advertising, custom-publishing client solutions and plenty else on offer. They announced plans yesterday to pay amateur travel bloggers for content, from February 2009, on a revenue-sharing basis using Google AdWords. There’s no doubt, surely, that BBC experience in running the world’s best news website has given LP an edge here. (Three BBC online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after the acquisition.) So, expertise gained at our expense is being used to give LP a competitive edge in the domestic market. This is the very essence of distorting that market, and dangerous territory for the BBC. So, who is it that wants to “privatize” the BBC now? Cameron and the Conservatives? Or the BBC itself? Our state-funded monolith has the freedom, via its effective sub-brand Lonely Planet, to also operate as a 100% commercial entity in the UK. Not only can’t that be right; it ultimately can’t be good for the BBC.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

If I lived in Florence, a family return trip of similar length to Livorno (birthplace of the PCI, home of the cacciucco) comes to about €33. From Brussels, a weekend rail trip to Bruges, 90km away, would cost us just over €49. A slightly longer journey in France, from Lyon to Chambery and back, comes to €59.

Such comparisons might seem mundane, trivial even. But it’s in the aggregation of everyday decisions, not position papers or pie-in-the-sky conference speeches, that policy succeeds or fails. In 11 years, New Labour has shown zero interest in affordable rail travel; they think more spying, and more “compliance” is the answer to congestion and pollution. The Tories, bless ‘em, think that more private capital (and less regulation) is the way to go. So far, then, that’s an F all round.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. The guy, later convicted of kidnap and assault, was no Moriarty: he was in custody by nightfall. He was a known local crackhead.

Last month, a 27-year-old bloke had his phone stolen at knifepoint at 6pm in the next street to mine. A couple of days later Jamie Simpson, 33, was murdered for the day’s takings in my local Matalan. It would hardly be surprising if either or both attacks were drug-related.

Local crack addict Keith Beckles was recently jailed for eight years for attacking a Polish immigrant (not for the first time). Who knows how many people die in the drugs import business. And so on.

Now, one can imagine that if we were to hand the supply-chain for curtains, or orange squash, or embossed stationery, over to criminal gangs, trouble would follow. I’m no fan of state regulation, as a rule, but I’m finding it difficult to think of a market more suited to government oversight than narcotics. So there’s police shortages? How many booze dealers publicans are in prison? How many drug dealers was that again? To support continued prohibition isn’t to take a fine moral stand on the best way for young people to live their lives; it’s washing your hands, cowardice, nothing more. And closed minds solve nothing.

Ignoring a policy review from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that the Home Office themselves requested is just the latest evidence-free missile fired in an unwinnable War on Drugs. Of course, I no longer feel ‘betrayed’ when Brown makes policy based on what will sound best in tomorrow’s Mail. Tory press officer Iain Dale asks why left-wing writers don’t hang on Brown’s every word. It’s simple: the left’s future will be built without him; he’s as irrelevant as this classification ‘debate’. He isn’t on the left; he isn’t even Mr Bean: he’s Nero. And he’ll go the same way.

It’s okay for the suburban seethers to tut and moan; to dismiss legalisation as a (pejoratively) ‘liberal’ concern. New Labour aren’t ever far behind with a new initiative (or deception) to hoover up a few of those votes; and the hypocritical Blue Blair is a match for them in that department. But the fact is: prohibition has failed, local policing can’t cope, and never will. Never mind those appeals to liberty that Tories don’t seem quite so keen on anymore.

And, in case Brown hasn’t noticed, it isn’t marginal Middle England that has to live with the fallout. While the political class collectively fiddle, those of us inhabiting inner city Britain get to swallow the consequences. Every day. Thanks for that.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. First stop, Renaissance Florence, for which you’ll need a little background on patronage. You won’t often read that it was the ‘government’ of the city-state that commissioned and paid for such-and-such a painting. If it isn’t a religious order, the name on the contract is usually a Medici. The Medici were the government. They ran the city and taxed as they saw fit; they contracted and extracted, meddled and tinkered, in everything from the design of palazzi to the precise composition of works that appear to us the product of one artist’s genius. It wasn’t unusual for them to insist their kids appeared prominently, or insert their family saints. The grovelling tone of a letter from Fra’ Filippo Lippi to his public–private patron reproduced in this book shows just how much had to be approved, how often the Dead Hand of the client was holding the brush too.

Of course, the great Tuscan artists didn’t work only for the state. Giotto’s triumph was a private job (though he later freeloaded off the people of Naples). Piero Della Francesca did his best work for the Bacci family, but also served as a town councillor; Masaccio for the Carmelites.

Andrea Mantegna, the greatest painter to hail from that flat bit between the Apennines and the Alps, would have found himself even lower down in libertarian esteem. He did more than just cash the odd cheque from Mantua’s ruling Gonzaga dynasty; he worked for them. He was a waged bureaucrat, who according to Evelyn Welch even managed to cadge himself a bit of woodland.

The same pattern is repeated in Northern Europe. From 1512 until his death in 1528, engraver and painter Albrecht Durer made a living scrounging a stipend from the epileptic Emperor Charles V. Instead of going out to find a proper job, he studied Humanism and perspective – as well as Bellini, Leonardo and Mantegna. The waster. Roger Van Der Weyden sponged off the people of Brussels; Burgundian public money supported Van Eyck in Bruges.

But for sheer meddlesome bureaucracy, we need to rewind a couple of centuries and head back to Tuscany. Siena in the 1300s was a civic, republican culture that both nurtured and was nurtured by public art. Almost all funding came from The Nine, elected burghers who ruled the city for one (relatively) enlightened century until the Black Death. Gothic creativity blossomed, in painting and architecture. Forget the Sistine Chapel, Siena’s medieval town hall is the greatest site of public art on the planet – precisely because Simone Martini’s 1315 Maesta and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government was conceived of as public art. Reminders, frescoed on the walls of the council chamber, of the essence of good politics, which for medieval Sienese included justice, trade, concord and cross-dressing dancers in the piazza.

There’s no ducking it: this art wouldn’t exist without state funding. It was paid for by the people of Siena. In any case, at any reasonable estimate of the discount rate, the Sienese have got their money back. Never mind that there’s a world of costs and benefits that we haven’t worked out how to count, yet.

So, where am I going with all this? Here: that there’s a tendency on the ‘free market right’ to think that public choice theory describes the world, rather than just provides a frame in which to sketch bits of it. Say I suggest that the US’s overdependence on private arts funding only produced Regus meeting room pap like abstract expressionism. Or propose the absence of any British art of merit between the Wilton Diptych and JMW Turner for the same reason. Or that it’s the Pre-Raphaelites‘ commitment to art as a public good that makes them the only British movement worth the name. And so on. The world doesn’t work like that. It isn’t that deterministic. Or simplistic: causes and effects, measurable and unmeasurable, public and private, aren’t distinctions that can easily be made when it comes to art. Great art, anyway.

So –

Q1: Is the State’s hand really all that Dead?

Q2: Should we fund the arts?

A: It depends.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

The reason’s simple: whoever changes the signs doesn’t have the incentive to bother. Nobody’s checking every little detail of his job – nobody could. And these little extras – what we used to call public service – aren’t Big Picture stuff. (You could have said the same about clean hospital toilets until a couple of years back.) By turning my postman from a public servant into a rational economic actor, we’ve destroyed the small parts of his job that used to connect him with our lives in all their complexity. Marketization can only put incentives (targets, bonuses, competition) in place for a proportion of what he does, or did. The rest is deemed worthless, history. Or it’s left up to his own integrity, which we still expect him to display in his new daily life being pushed around by capitalists.

Now I’m not saying that I oppose the market running public goods; nor do I know whether this ‘public servant’ ever really existed, or even if s/he did, whether we could re-energize the corpse. But deciding where markets can be successful needs to be an empirical judgement: they appear to be better at running airlines than train networks; better at holiday camps than prisons.

And marketization isn’t a process we should be celebrating. When markets need to take over, it’s a sign of human failure, a necessary second-best option, not something anyone should be proud of, Left or Right. Smith, like Worstall on a good day, teaches us that self-interest can be useful, not admirable.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.