It is official Department of Health policy that patients who pay for any private treatment whatsoever for a disease, lose all their NHS treatment whatsoever for that disease. This is madness. This is evil. This is killing people. And for what? For nothing.

I was pleased to see that the Conservatives go some way towards fixing this in their new manifesto:

“We understand the pressures the NHS faces, so we will increase health spending in real terms every year. But on its own this will not be enough to deliver the rising standards of care that people expect. We need to allow patients to choose the best care available, giving healthcare providers the incentives they need to drive up quality. So we will give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards, within NHS prices. This includes independent, voluntary and community sector providers.”

The NHS should allow anyone to go private, and pay them the cost of the treatment on the NHS tariff. But top-ups should be allowed. None of this “within NHS prices”. Obviously the NHS shouldn’t pay more than the NHS tariff, but patients should be allowed to pay extra. It would even be a good start if the NHS would pay patients 90% of the NHS tariff. That way, patients would only be willing to pay the extra to go private if they thought they were going to get better treatment and it was worth paying the extra (if indeed private healthcare was more expensive). And in doing so they would save the NHS money. Value is created: everybody wins.

And what’s this “that meets NHS standards” for? Why should the Department of Health employ people to decide whether private hospitals meet NHS standards? This is unnecessary: patients will only go private if they think the treatment is better. It should be up to the patient to decide which hospital they prefer. “In a truly post-bureaucratic age, the Secretary of State for Health should no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed, and nor should local politicians.”

It’s a good start. But we need to go further.

I disagree. I think that the state can be beaten back, as it was in the 1980s in the West and 1990s in the former Soviet bloc. Let’s discuss a few ways this might be done:

1. A Transparent Tax System

People won’t realise the true costs of the State unless it’s less disguised than it now is. We now have Income Tax, National Insurance (another tax on income), Value Added Tax on consumption, Inheritance Tax, Corporation Tax, et cetera ad nauseam. Under Labour, thousands of stealth taxes and fees add to the price of almost everything. The opacity of the tax system makes us forget that the money Government spends is our money, curbing our outrage at waste.

As an interim measure, I would propose replacing most current taxes with a single Income or Consumption tax in a revenue neutral manner. Suddenly, people would see exactly how much of their money goes to the State, and I doubt many of them would be happy about it. I would expect this to lead to demands for the shrinking of the state and falling tax rates – a good thing.

(I would exclude Pigouvian taxes from this rule, since their purpose is beyond raising revenue)

2. Transparent Spending

The second transparency reform I would enact would be to include an itemised spending overview on tax returns. If someone sees that Government is spending £X,000 of their money on a programme, it is likely to provoke debate as to whether that could be done better on one’s own or, even if Government does do it, whether it could be done less wastefully. Just highlighting the cost of the Welfare State to each of us might revive debate as to whether some aspects could be done better by private charity.

It might also be worth requiring Spending bills to be more detailed about how much is appropriated for particular things. A civil servant might approve tens of thousands of pounds on the Potted Plants budget – an accountable Parliament would not. Similarly, the scandal of over-generous public sector pensions should be admitted by including unfunded liabilities in the National Debt.

On that note -

3. Debt Awareness

The National Debt is far too high. Labour plans to cut the deficit – the rate of increase in debt – but hasn’t got a clue how to deal with the capital.

The first thing we need to do is make it clear what this means to taxpayers. It means that, at some point, the Government will have to take thousands of pounds from you to repay creditors, either in tax or by reducing the value of the pound in your pocket. It means that, no matter how prudent you are with your own finances, you are about £20,000  in the red. I would require HMRC to print the total national debt and each person’s share on tax returns.

The next thing I would do is require that Budgets contain a plan to pay off the National Debt, if only in the extremely long term. We expect that indebted households work out how to get back in the black – why not government?

4. Choice

For Schooling, I would strongly advocate a local pilot scheme whereby the State gives a voucher for a certain amount of funding to each pupil who can then spend it at any school he or she chooses. I would expect that state schools would be forced to improve or lose students. It’s Assisted Places on steroids. I would permit selection on any grounds.

For the NHS, I’d advocate something similar – make it a single payer system with independent hospitals paid per procedure/result. Most of the bureaucracy disappears, and there’s finally competition.

That’s all for now. Feel free to comment on my suggestions or add your own ideas.

However, introducing such a policy for the NHS would actually get some people to pay twice and like it. If we gave people the following option, they could take it up if they thought they’d be better off overall. If not, they simply wouldn’t take up the option. Things could only get better or stay the same — they couldn’t get worse.

So here’s a simple, subtle reform that could much improve the NHS: allow people to take some of the cost of their operation and go elsewhere. Say someone needs an operation, and they’re willing to pay some of the cost to have it done faster or better (like paying extra for tooth-coloured fillings instead of amalgam fillings). Let them. Let them take 80% of the cost of their operation, and have it done privately. They’d have to make it up to 100% with their own money, or more if it cost more than on the NHS tariff. (Unlike with education vouchers, there should be no argument against allowing patients to “top-up”.)

No one would be forced to quit the NHS if they didn’t want to. The NHS would have a bigger budget left over per person, so those who stayed would get better treatment. And those who left would also get better treatment (otherwise they wouldn’t leave). Everybody wins.

Those who went elsewhere would effectively be voluntarily paying more tax. They are paying that 20% twice. And what lefty could disapprove of rich people paying more tax?

Committee member, token lefty, debater, hat-wearer, writer and Sharpe-fan, Ben Slingo, dispels some myths surrounding the “Obamacare” fracas.

American healthcare. Oh dear. It’s all rather unedifying, both the system and the squabble about how to make ever so slightly less dysfunctional. Certainly recent evidence suggests that US psychiatric units are shutting their doors to many hundreds of needy cases.

Enjoyable as it would be merely to revel in the hysteria, it might be useful to correct some widespread misconceptions. As ever, there are faults on both sides.

1. It is not true that the American poor are denied all healthcare. The Medicare programme does provide treatment. This treatment, however, is

 a) inferior to that provided by the NHS,

b) confined largely to emergency care, excluding say consultations about worrying symptoms,

c) funded in a hugely inefficient way and

d) destined to bankrupt the system that sustains it ominously soon.

2. It is not true that the American system classically liberal or free-market oriented. Treatment is funded by insurance companies, who are in turn paid mostly by employers, who in turn offer an often very limited choice of insurance packages to their employees. The commercial relationship between patient and hospital is infinitely more tenuous than that between,consumer and supermarket. Since employers provide insurance, many American workers are unwilling to endure the disruption entailed by switching jobs, a reluctance that limits a vital condition of the free market : labour flexibility. Not only this, but precisely because the American system is privately operated many states have imposed very restrictive and expensive regulations on insurance companies and hospitals.

3. It is not true that simply because several doctors and nurses were very courteous to your ailing grandmother the NHS is a healthcare system of unrivalled quality that deserves its own religious cult (which should perhaps forthwith be declared blessed)

4. It is not true that ‘Obamacare’ would impose an NHS-style system in the States. First of all ‘Obamacare’ itself is a fanciful notion as the President has (unwisely) entrusted the plan to the Democrats in Congress. Something vaguely resembling American NHS may appeal to Mr. Obama and other liberal Democrats, but they are not reckless enough to propose it given its
likely reception.

5. It is not true that ‘Obamacare’ would sanction state-funded abortions (though I would imagine that some insurance premia
are already inflated by the cost of abortion). One might also note that tax revenue is most certainly spent on enforcing the death penalty, something equally repugnant to the Holy Apostolic Church.

6. It is not true that the very large discrepancy between levels of health spending in America (16 per cent of GDP) and western Europe (10-12 per cent) is entirely squandered. The very best American care is truly superb and surpasses that available on
the NHS. This care would not necessarily be threatened by ‘Obamacare’, though a government-backed insurance company would damage some of its private competitors.

7. It is not true that ‘Obamacare’ envisages death panels that would exterminate the Palin family. I decline to speculate on
whether this myth has been peddled by pro- or anti-Obama partisans.

-Ben Slingo

Labour’s second ploy has been to spend more money – they have more than doubled the NHS annual budget. Has this worked? Yes and no. Some things have improved, but some things have actually gotten worse. Hardly a good return on the money. The fact that other countries can get much better health outcomes for much less money should indicate that we need fundamental change.

How can we make the NHS more efficient, and therefore get better healthcare?

The Conservative education policy is a good place to start. The model is that while the state should pay for the education of those who need it, there’s no good reason the state should run it. Parents should be able to spend their child’s share of the education budget at whatever school they like, and anyone should be able to set up a private school to compete for profit by offering the best service.

There’s no good reason for the government to run hospitals, either. But the education and healthcare are not identical. Diseases must be diagnosed first. And they vary in treatment cost.

Reform of the NHS should be based on the principles of competion. We must bust open the monopoly of government hospitals, and allow better hospitals to compete on quality for the same funds.

The first step must be to allow private hospitals to join the NHS. We must allow anyone to take their treatment cost to a private hospital. If they can find better treatment elsewhere, that’s good. If they can’t, then they simply won’t take up this option. If they want to “top up” their treatment cost, that’s fine. If the private hospital is cheaper, even better. We’ll only get real quality if we have real choice, and real choice will only come when the patients control the funds.

The NHS tariff is a Khrushchevian attempt to solve the economic calculation problem — it bases prices on those in other countries (“When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have to remain capitalist, so that it can tell us the price of everything.” This is a deeply profound statement). “Personal health accounts” may be a way to solve this, but the problem may not in fact have a solution in a state-funded system.

We must allow anyone to set up a GPs’ practice, and should pay them per patient seen. Introducing a GP’s equivalent of prescription charges would be sensible.

Both these reforms require reform of the planning laws to enable companies to set up new hospitals and surgeries.

The Department of Health could then be abolished.

The next step would be to allow individuals to opt out of the NHS all together, and take their share of the NHS budget to pay for private health insurance.

Insurers could be made by law to provide a minimum standard of care, and it could be made illegal to turn down any customer.

Any other suggestions? Daniel Hannan advocates personal health accounts in “The Plan”. The wonderful Anthony Browne wrote a pamphlet for the Adam Smith Institute suggesting a comprehensive insurance-based reform.

Downing Street has launched a Twitter campaign called “We love the NHS”. Sarah Brown says “We love the NHS — more than words can say”. Andy Burnham says “Over the moon about strong support for NHS — an institution I will defend to my dying day”. Gordon Brown says the “NHS often makes the difference between pain and comfort, despair and hope, life and death. Thanks for always being there”.

Daniel Hannan happened to criticise the NHS on American television recently. Labour have jumped on Hannan’s criticism, painting it as “unpatriotic”. He has even been accused of being a traitor. Labour have reverted to nationalism (the scoundrels). Their criticism has a flavour of anti-Americanism too — as if the only two possibilities are American-style healthcare and British-style healthcare. Gordon Brown is preposterously described as “defending” the NHS from American criticism, as if it somehow needed defending from America.

How absurd this all is. Criticising the NHS is no more unpatriotic than criticising the police. And we shouldn’t “love” government institutions, even if we respect them.

This is dog-whistle politics at its worst. There’s no substance to it — it’s nothing more than loving Big Brother followed by a Two-Minutes’ Hate. However, it’s working. It’s mobilising Labour supporters, and distracting attention from the fact that Labour have no healthcare policies. It’s classic Labour tactics: no arguments; just straw men and emotions. They’re poisoning public debate, when we should be discussing how to improve the NHS (as Hannan has in fact done), not having a competition to see who loves it most.

Labour really are the stupid party.

In today’s issue of The Tablet (the international Catholic weekly Founded 1840 – Britain’s oldest journal bar The Spectator), that publication’s characteristically hysterical Obamamania has been taken beyond all moral acceptability, orthodoxy, or any pretence of Catholic sensibility. This time its about healthcare, or “Obamacare”. I shall elucidate.

On political issues the Catholic Church has always been a bit split; prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) the Church mainly focused on critiquing liberalism, secularism, “Modernism” (a sceptical and anti-authoritarian outlook), socialism, Communism, in the 19th Century democracy itself, sexual liberalism, divorce and all the traditional thorny medical ethical issues – abortion, euthanasia, artificial contraception, etc. However, since Vatican II there has been an increasing focus on social issues, including “social justice”, workers’ rights, the evils of excessive capitalism, and re-focusing economics in such a manner that the human being is seen as the end rather than merely the means of economic activity. Laudable moral intentions, for sure, but often displaying a lack of awareness of how economics really works. How do we MAKE people care about each other? The answer to this is pretty unclear, other than everyone becoming Christians and being charitable towards one another voluntarily.

However, The Tablet chooses to interpret these moral imperatives solely according to a narrow, statist understanding. This is certainly a long way from Pius IX’s 1846 pronouncement that socialism is “a pest”, and reflects an uninformed and naive outlook. Having championed Obama during his election campaign, the (highly unorthodox) editorial of The Tablet  has proudly asserted from on high that “U.S. Bishops must back Obama.” The argument presented is dangerous and wrong – that the Church in America ought to shelve its problems with state-sanctioned abortion (in the Church’s view mass state infanticide) and all the other areas where monolithic healthcare systems, such as the NHS, trample over traditioanl Christian moral values, in order to pursue the “general principle of the common good”. In contrast to this “common good” of public healthcare, the issue of abortion is passed off as a “specifically Catholic issue”, and the editor attacks the Bishops for failing to “put the promotion of social justice above their churchly priorities.” Sorry, one issue, that of the moral imperative to heal the sick, cannot be so warmly lauded as “social justice” while an equally important imperative – not to kill the unborn – is given the mere rhetorical status of “their own churchly priorities”. This is unfair, un-Catholic, cheap and incredibly one-sided, and a Catholic publication ought to know better.

Furthermore, The Tablet presents the Obamacare issue as solely one of a distinction between people either having healthcare or not – it’s either given to them graciously from Their Lord Barack or denied them by greedy capitalists, apparently the “robber barons” of our age. The subtleties of the difficulties of state funding, the inefficiencies and abuses generated by a universal “free-at-the-point-of-use” principle, as weighed against the evil of people not having healthcare, are dealt with using one sweeping, blunt conclusion: the state must provide universal care, so saith the Lord, and the Bishops are obligated to pressure for this. All else, even the rights of the unborn, are secondary.

Even if one accepts that Church teaching on imperatives to heal the sick must translate directly into state-run healthcare (a highly contentious assumption), one must surely accept that this is less clear and more tenuous than Church teaching on abortion, which is thoroughly clear-cut. What’s more, the Church must fight the battle of attitudes: we in the West generally do not see any intrinsic evils in state healthcare, but are morally apathetic about abortion – the Bishops must draw a line in the sand and defend it, because once Obamacare is accepted in principle it is only a small step further to sanction state-funded abortion en masse. Even if you personally agree with abortion, or believe in the right to decide for oneself whether it is acceptable, then surely on the latter principle one must oppose the confiscation of taxpayers’ money to spend by the state on abortion “services” against the will of many of the taxpayers? Opposition to abortion in the US is widespread and many will be outraged to see their money spent in this way. The Bishops are entirely right to focus on this issue and the need to keep abortion out of the state system. This is not a “mistake” and The Tablet, if it makes any claim to retain the name of a Catholic weekly, ought to be ashamed of itself.

For example: The reason living standards are better than they have ever been before is the creation of wealth. What will improve people’s lives most in the future is the creation of more wealth. Inequality doesn’t matter: if someone’s real income doubles over ten years, it just doesn’t matter if someone else’s income quadruples. Except, of course, in the extremely unusual case of the second person’s income quadrupling hindering the growth of the first person’s income. The opposite is much more likely to be the case.

We should also be wary of redistributing wealth, because while it will cause a short-term increase in the incomes of the less-well-off, it will reduce long-term increase.

As Andrew Perraut says,

“if markets are as massively productive as we libertarians believe and compounding returns to growth in the long term are taken into account, you could probably justify no more than very basic safety nets, for fear of distorting the economy and dramatically lowering everyone’s goods in the future.”

So equality may not be a bad thing, but promoting equality is a bad thing for two reasons. Here’s a third: promoting equality kills. The promotion of equality, for no other reason than ideology, is leading directly to many deaths.

I’m talking about the NHS, and the cases of Colette Mills and Linda O’Boyle.

Both were suffering from cancer. The NHS does not have enough money to pay for certain extra drugs. The patients wanted to pay for the extra drugs themselves, but were told that if they did, they would have to pay for their entire treatment: any treatment they were currently receiving for free would be withdrawn. The patients could afford the extra drugs if they continued to receive the treatment they were already getting for free. But they couldn’t afford the whole lot.

The Department of Health said: “Co-payments would risk creating a two-tier health service and be in direct contravention with the principles and values of the NHS.”

Yes, it would. Rather, there is already a two-tier health service in this country. There is the NHS, and there is (better) private healthcare. (It must be better, otherwise people wouldn’t pay for it.) Private healthcare still exists, even though the Labour Party would like to ban it. (They can’t afford to, of course, because patients going private save the NHS money).

Yes, patients paying for extra treatment would promote the private sector. This would be a good thing. It wouldn’t harm anyone who couldn’t afford to. Indeed, it would help the NHS, because even people who don’t go completely private might start increasing the use they make of the private sector, thus saving the NHS money and allowing it to spend it on those who need it more.

The problem is the people who think that inequality is always at someone’s expense. It isn’t, as these cases show.

The “principles and values” of the NHS are clearly stupid, and lead to entirely preventable deaths.

“It wasn’t going to cost them. I was going to pay for it. How can they say this policy is far more important than somebody’s life?”

Will the Conservatives fix this?

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said in a statement that it was “tempting” to allow patients to pay for extra cancer treatments that were not funded by the NHS.

The party has been reluctant to express an opinion on the issue, fearing that it could be portrayed as favouring middle-class patients who can afford to buy themselves extra treatment.

I guess not, then.

Heffer’s solution is that the Conservative Party should not bother seeking these votes, because they will not vote Conservative anyway. Heffer is a critic of Cameron’s rebranding and apparent change of focus of the party, though has recently said he might consider voting Conservative. (He probably will.) He suggests that Cameron should not adopt policies to try to please everyone including these voters, but should focus on their traditional voter base.

In an article since, “Labour is malignant, not incompetent” (Telegraph, 2nd April 2008), he sees this strategy repeated by Labour with immigration. The Lords Economic Affairs Committee report on “The Economic Impact of Immigration” showed quite clearly that net immigration is not beneficial to the country. This has been obvious for years. The figures show that net immigration does not increase GDP more than it increases population, so has no effect on GDP per person and therefore general well-being. Government responses to this resort to obvious double-speak.

Heffer believes, as do I, that the government has known full well that net immigration is not beneficial, but has pursued it because it knows that immigrants tend to vote Labour. It has put electoral success above the country when it knows they are opposites.

Heffer calls for a radical cut in the amount of money spent by the government, which currently spends over £600 billion per year. Government spending has increased by 50% in real terms while Labour have been in power over the last ten years. As Lord Blackwell pointed out in his talk, the amount of stuff the government needs to provide doesn’t increase every year, so government spending should remain constant. Indeed, this means it should reduce as a percentage of GDP. If the government was spending the same as it was ten years ago, we could have abolished income tax.

Heffer demands tax cuts mostly to save money and free the economy to grow, but he echoes the calls of Sean Gabb for tax cuts to cut the funding to the ruling class – those who draw money and status from the state.

Lord Norman Blackwell visited CUCA yesterday, speaking and taking questions in the Union Dining Room, and then over dinner at Strada. Like me, he is very keen on policy: he worked on policy for Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

He started by talking about how radical some old policies seemed at the time, and how he believes others which seem radical now will be considered common sense in the future. For example, the Post Office used to run the telephone network in this country. As one might expect from a monopoly, the service was shoddy and expensive. If you wanted a telephone, you had to be put on a waiting list, and an engineer had to come to your home and fit one into the wall. You could only buy telephones manufactured by the state, which were very expensive.

People thought that the telecommunications couldn’t be provided by private companies. Now that it is, we know that of course they can.

Later, Lord Blackwell himself presented a report to British Telecom trying to convince them that it was safe for people to have telephone sockets, rather than a telephone hard-wired into the wall. Now, the idea that telephone sockets are dangerous is ludicrous. Then, it seemed radical.

Of course, there is an element of natural monopoly in landline telecomms. It does seem there needs to be some involvement by the state. But it should be as small as possible. As Hayek said, the state needs to create a legal framework in which competition can function. This should be designed to encourage as much competition as possible. Just because a market can’t function without the state, that doesn’t mean the sector should be run entirely by the state.

In the UK, British Telecom runs the lines (and even this is changing), but other companies can run calls on top of them. Much like Network Rail running the train tracks, but other companies running the trains. This is much better than BT doing everything, without having to compete and therefore having no incentive to provide a good, cheap product.

The same thing has been done with broadband internet. Can you imagine what our internet would be like if the government still had complete control of telecomms? Atrocious! Things would never have improved so rapidly.

We probably wouldn’t even know what we were missing out on. In Cuba, the state has to stop its subjects from finding out about the standard of living in other countries, so that they don’t know what they’re missing (toasters). What are we missing at the moment that we don’t know we’re missing? We’ll only find back if we stop the state slowing us down.

So telecommunications is one area where those advocating privatisation have been proved right. So are railways. Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute addressed CUCA at the Gin & Tonic party at the beginning of term, and he pointed out that by every objective measure, the railways have been improving since Conservative privatisation – the turning point.

Lord Blackwell suggested that healthcare and education are next to be privatised. People don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know how good things could be.

However, Lord Blackwell didn’t suggest that “privatising” healthcare meant abolishing tax-funded (“free”) healthcare. Abolishing state-run schools doesn’t mean abolishing free education.

He suggested a voucher system. Consider education. The system would require very little change. Instead of being told what school you must go to, you could choose. Instead of only the state being able to set up state-funded schools, anyone could. That’s all.

He suggested not using the word “vouchers”, for two reasons. One, he thought it was as tainted as “privatisation” for many voters. Two, people didn’t know they wanted it, even though they wanted its consequences. If you offer people “choice” in your manifesto, they say “We don’t want a choice of schools. We don’t want to send our child to the next village. We just want to send our child to the local school, and we want it to be good.”

Choice (i.e. competition) doesn’t even need to be exercised to have beneficial effects. You don’t have to take your business from the local pub and drive to the next town. It’s just the fact that you could that means your local pub has to make an effort.

Similarly, if you go to a bad school and a good new one starts up, things won’t just be improved if everyone moves to the good school and the bad school shuts down. In most cases this won’t even be necessary. All that is necessary is that you can move. That is enough to give the old school some incentive to improve.

A similar scheme could be implemented for healthcare.

He suggested rolling out education vouchers in poor areas first. Even though this would mean richer areas wouldn’t get the benefits so quickly, it would demonstrate that the measures were to improve education in poor areas the most. This might help get voters used to them.

“Privatisation” seems radical in the UK at the moment, but it won’t when people see the consequences. We just need to look at the success of the Swedish implementation of vouchers.

People like to claim that there is something special about education and healthcare: that they are “public services” rather than products like any other. This is wrong. They are products like any other. People said the same about telephones.

Lord Blackwell used much libertarian rhetoric, and seemed to consider himself a libertarian. I’m not sure whether I’m a libertarian or not, though I have very strong libertarian sympathies.

I think vouchers are a good idea. But they’re not a libertarian idea. Vouchers roll back the state by allowing the state to pay for, but not run, education and health. They do mean that the state bureaucracy is smaller even if taxes stay the same. But libertarians would not even have taxes to pay for education or healthcare.

It may be that complete abolition of the welfare state is better for the country, especially in the long run. As Andrew Perraut says, “if markets are as massively productive as we libertarians believe and compounding returns to growth in the long term are taken into account, you could probably justify no more than very basic safety nets, for fear of distorting the economy and dramatically lowering everyone’s goods in the future.” But the safety net could include healthcare and education.

In any case, vouchers are better than the current system, and we need them fast.

My commitment to reducing the size of the state is Perraut’s: any taxation reduces economic growth. Some taxation is necessary, but the optimum amount is far lower than it is at present.

Lord Blackwell’s seems to be for a different reason. Statism cows people. It reduces the striving, self-reliant ethic. If people have a problem, it encourages them to expect the state to solve it, rather than solve it themselves. This attitude reduces economic growth because it discourages innovation.

He ended on a quotation that Lady Thatcher looked up while they were working on a speech. It is one of the closing sentences from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”:

“a state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men, no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Postscript.

Afterwards, over dinner, he talked about the historical consequences of global cooling, including the halt of the expansion of the Roman Empire. This would be an excellent way to write an article aiming to change people’s minds about global warming. The scientific evidence that global warming will stop, rather than being catastropic, is clear. We haven’t had any for over ten years. So take this for granted! Treat global cooling as inevitable, and write an article about its historical consequences and how we must prepare to meet them again.