Peter Jackson column

Jun 8 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

A serbian recently torched his own car when he learned the size of the payment to reclaim it after it had been towed away for illegal parking.

According to a witness, he calmly went over to the car, removed a few things, then opened the bonnet and set the engine on fire. Once it was well alight, he got back on his bike and rode off.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a restaurant critic and columnist on a national newspaper has proposed curing the problem of obesity by taxing overweight people.

Giles Coren's scheme is to express the square root of an individual's Body Mass Index as a percentage. This would then be multiplied by that same individual's annual tax liability to arrive at a surcharge, which would be imposed to encourage people to lose weight.

Both these reports express a basic human truth - namely that people are heavily influenced by the threat of having to pay money.

Price, whether a result of tax, a fine or the operation of the laws of supply and demand, makes human behaviour as predictable as that of Pavlov's dog. So, as the South of England suffers a drought - which, while if not of biblical proportions, is certainly a nuisance - it is proposed that water meters be introduced.

It is argued that if people had to pay for the amount of water they used, in the same way as they did with gas or electricity, they would not clean their teeth with the tap running any more than they would light a gas fire to heat an empty room.

I think it's hard to argue with that and it is probably the way forward, along with persuading the water companies not to waste three times the volume of Windermere every year through leaking pipes.

But it won't apply up here in the North, where we have plenty of water. And this could do more to close the North/South divide than any Government initiative.

Industry uses oceans of water every year in every process from brewing to manufacturing and if it has to pay for every drop it consumes in the South, then there is a clear incentive to move North.

The irresistible compulsion of price could begin to move in our favour.