Monday 30 June 2014

On the evolution of misogyny...

****

When we see Muslim women clothed from head to toe, we assume that this has something to do with the religion itself rather than a particularly misogynistic interpretation of the religion that reflects more on male attitudes to women than it does on man's relationship with god. Indeed, when we see devout Muslim women who aren't shrouded from head to toe, we can see that there is more to this than simply the strictures of a given faith.

Here is a quotation attributed to a 17th century English sailor:

"The men that are married are given much to jealousy, and will not permit any stranger to come where their wives are, much less to see them, but will keep them out of sight as much as they possibly can...all their women, both married and unmarried, go with a black veil over their heads and reaching down to their legs, all being covered except their eyes."

The sailor wasn't visiting a Muslim country but the very Roman Catholic country of Portugal and the covering of women was cultural rather than religious - the practice was common across all faiths, indeed the quotation was put in the context of how Jewish migrants from Lisbon to Amsterdam were seen by the more 'enlightened' Dutch.

My point in making this observation is to make clear that it is perfectly possible to oppose the practice of requiring women to be fully covered without being 'Islamaphobic' since this practice was widespread in Catholic Europe almost into living memory. Indeed, I remember elderly Spanish and Italian women attending my church wearing a mantissa, the last vestiges of the shrouding of women in Roman Catholicism.

But the separation of women from public life (in the broadest sense of the word) is more than just the requirement that they are covered in public. The book the above quotation is taken from - a life of Spinoza - goes on to describe the attitude of Portuguese Jews and Catholics to the education of women:

"Dom Francisco of Lisbon held that for women 'the best book is the cushion and the embroidering-frame', and Rabbi Eliezer warned that 'who teaches the Torah teaches her nonsense', implying that she could make nothing of its wisdom."

This is the problem that is, I fear, covered up by our debating the veil - it is often a reflection of misogyny rather than a reflection of belief. Nor is this to suggest that our western world is free from people who believe women to be essentially inferior - you only need hear the typical middle-aged petrolhead talking about women drivers to know this - but to observe that misogyny evolves. This evolution has taken us from a world where men considered literacy to be an affront to female modesty to one where a school headteacher responds to female dress (or, it seems, 'undress') in this manner:

More than 250 girls were taken out of lessons at a secondary school because their skirts were too short and the headmaster wants to prepare them for the “world of work”.

Teachers at Ryde Academy on the Isle of Wight either sent home the girls, aged between 11 and 18, or took them out of their classrooms to be placed in an isolated hall. 

Two important facts here demand our attention - firstly that girls are being prepared for 'the world of work' rather than a role as wife and mother. And secondly that we are still uncomfortable as a society with women exposing too much leg. I would add, in this school's defence, that they sent home boys for wearing the wrong shoes (and I hope required them to button their shirt and tie their tie correctly).

In concluding we need to return to Spinoza who was a philosopher obsessed with the idea of reason. Yet, Spinoza's view of women was still partly trapped in the culture he was born into - as, Margaret Gullan-Whur, this biographer observes:

"...we find, starting around 1661-2 and hardening over the course of his lifetime, negative pronouncements on their wimpering, partiality, foolish pity, superstition, inconstancy, deceptiveness, weakness and mental inferiority."

At times the response to perceived misogyny seems excessive, as if the accuser is seeking out something sexist in everything, but we should not consider that this means misogyny isn't real and that people are not right to challenge what they see as reflecting misogyny. But I think we need to make a distinction between the bloke at the bar who says women shouldn't be allowed to drive and people with religious or secular authority who would deny women a place at the table, a public voice and, worst of all, an education. I'm not sure seekers after misogyny always do make this distinction which, I fear, does little for women denied a school, a voice or a choice.

....

Quote of the day - how to be a successful troll!

****

Those Breitbart London folk are a curate's egg - too much UKIP apologia interspersed with the occassional flash of genuis. Often from James Delingpole - like this:

At one point, a man with a beard came up to confront me. He accused me - no really - of being in the pay of Big Oil, assured me - again, no really - that 97 per cent of the world's scientists believe in "climate change" and said that people like me had no business being at Glastonbury festival.

I told him he was a fascist.

Wonderful!

....

Sunday 29 June 2014

Why do authorities fear public gatherings so much?

****

We were in Dent. It's lovely place and you should visit - winding cobbled streets, at least three drinking places and it's own brewery in a farm a mile or so up the road. Dent also has an annual beer and music festival, which (as chance would have it) was on this weekend.

So having wandered around the village, paid a brief visit to the festival and generally chilled after our exertions (we'd been for a pleasant walk along the valley), Kathryn and I call into one of the pubs for a drink and a sit. Up to the bar to order a couple of drinks. And to our surprise they're served to us in plastic 'glasses'.

Now I'm absolutely certain that Dent isn't part of some bizarre plastic loving cult. Indeed, I'm pretty certain that the use of plastic glasses is either a requirement of the festival's licence or else the result of many meetings and stern advice from Cumbria's constabulary. Because, as we know, folk festivals in the Cumbrian countryside are places of terror and violence - without these stipulations the festival-goers will resort to glassing eachother in the manner associated with the rougher parts of, say, Glasgow.

It seems to me that these controls - like many others prescribed in the interests of 'safety' - are rather indicative of authority's fear of public gatherings. To give another example, to hold the Cullingworth Gala now requires a licence costing £11 from the Council. It seems that authority cannot countenance any gathering of people taking place without their stamp of approval and the application of a set of pointless controls such as serving beer in plastic skiffs.

The idea that places and spaces in places like Dent and Cullingworth are for people's leisure and pleasure has been replaced with a desire from the police and local council to control, direct and, if not done properly, ban any activity. And especially any activity that might involve drinking, dancing, singing or the playing of musical instruments. Doubly so if the audience might include 'young people'. We are to be treated as infants given a set of instructions on good behaviour by the police and council jobsworths.

For sure, most of the time this isn't a problem - we can put up with booze in plastic glasses - but there is a point at which the costs imposed by officialdom start to put an end to gatherings. Dangerous gatherings like street parties and, but for a last minute intervention, Bradford's annual Boy Scout parade and service are ended because their organisers give up on jumping through hoops and paying out more money on the latest piece of over-the-top crowd management imposed by some bloke from the council.

The police and council fear that these events foment disorder, that all these people gathering together will encourage criminals and that, in some respects, gatherings are merely formalised anti-social behaviour. The authorities would much rather we sat quietly sipping something alcohol free from our plastic skiff - or better still that these inconvenient, even dangerous, events didn't happen in the first place. It's not a vain attempt to silence political dissent but rather an organised endeavour intended to limit and control our pleasure - most often in the supposed interests of 'safer communities' or 'public health'.

....

Saturday 28 June 2014

Himalayan viagra - an odd story of libido, caterpillars and mushrooms

****

This is the tale of Ophiocordyceps sinesis or, if you're more poetic, the Mysterious Caterpillar Mushroom or even, as the Chinese name it - Winter Worm, Summer Grass:

It preys specifically on the larvae of several species of ghost moths in the Thitarodes genus. Spores infect the larvae while they live underground before pupating. The spores germinate and mycelium grows, killing and mummifying the larva/caterpillar. Eventually a fruiting body grows from the mummified larva and pops above ground, reminiscent of something from an awesome science fiction movie. 

So there you have it - a weird mushroom that grows from out of a dead caterpillar's head. And the Chinese can't get enough of it because it is believed to do great things for the immune system and (hence the Himalayan viagra tag) treat erectile dysfunction. And, not surprisingly, the result is that this wonderful little ecosystem is threatened by overharvesting:

“There is a similar trend in other Himalayan countries, such as China, India and Bhutan,” says Liu Xingzhong, a mycologist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microbiology in Beijing. On the Tibetan plateau, for instance, the fungus harvest per unit area has dropped by 10 to 30 percent compared with three decades ago....

In one respect, this problem is a reflection of how the myths of libido are so rapacious. This little mushroom may not be as grand as a rhino or as magnificent as a tiger but its decline is for the same reason - the sex drive of Chinese men. But, just as with those great wild mammals, the heart of the problem is the tragedy of the commons - up on the Tibetan plateau no-one owns the places where the caterpillars and their mycological hosts do their thing. And the result is overharvesting and fights over 'territory'. As collectively-owned places, Chinese national parks provide no incentive to limit either the amounts harvested or the numbers of harvesters.
 
....


Friday 27 June 2014

Friday Fungus - the mushroom house


A snip at $799,900 you can have:

This rare and premier art icon  home is such an amazing opportunity for the most discriminating buyer!  Commonly referred to as the “Mushroom House”, the architect James H. Johnson actually fashioned this unique dwelling after a stem of Queen Anne’s Lace.  The home’s distinctive retro-modern “pod” design earned it a designation as a Town of Perinton Landmark in 1989!  Additionally, nature is all around you….being adjacent to Powder Mill Park with a beautiful stream and waterfall! 

It is a pretty spectacular property.

....

On what makes for successful cities...

****

Aaron Renn reviewing research by the Manhattan Institute:

Among the commonalities they did see, they noted that successful cities tended to have higher educational attainment; a higher professional, scientific, and technical job share; more large corporate headquarters, and less dependency on government spending in an era of state and local fiscal retrenchment. Laggards suffered disproportionately from over-dependency on housing construction.

A familiar list of reasons - we hear often of the importance of 'STEM' jobs, high order skills and corporate HQs. The bit that we aren't reminded of often enough is that high levels of dependence on government spending holds back regional economic development. This isn't just about benefits or the relocation of government jobs to depressed areas but encompasses other parts of popular regional development strategies such as university-led schemes of research funding.

The challenge here is for government - local or national - to develop strategies that promote regional development without its spending squeezing out private-sector growth. This is especially noticeable when we look at how middle-income jobs are distributed - in the big northern cities a far higher proportion of these jobs are public sector workers (teachers, social workers, local government officers and so forth). If the route to a decent living is seen to be via the public sector then people will choose that route.

Finally that point about housing construction speaks for itself.

....

On the power of the media...

****

We are reminded by Alex Massie:

Speaking of which, we might, when considering over-mighty media moguls remember that Murdoch is not the main player in the British media landscape. That honour belongs to the BBC. Nearly six times as many Britons watch BBC1 than read The Sun. The BBC’s website has more readers than any Murdoch title. And across all platforms, online, on television and on radio, the BBC does more to shape and mould public attitudes than any other media enterprise. This is so even if it also often takes its lead from the newspapers.

This is a central - and important - point in an excellent article on the lynch mob chasing Rupert Murdoch.

....

Thursday 26 June 2014

Regeneration, garden cities and why Jane Jacobs didn't like Ebenezer Howard

****

Anne Power, Professor of Social Policy at the LSE isn't a fan of our renewed enthusiasm for 'Garden Cities' - indeed she was quite scathing in an interview with 'Inside Housing':

Garden cities are environmentally damaging, expensive and slow to build, said Professor Anne Power...talking about the government’s plans for a new generation of the developments.

So where does this take us? I'm not convinced by Professor Power's argument on either speed, cost or environmental risk but her view is important since it comes from someone who has spent a lot of time worrying about the problems of cities.

But there's another view - for me a better, more liberal and more exciting view - that of Jane Jacobs. I've always loved the way in which planners and regeneration boffins claim Ms Jacobs for one of them - when the very opposite is true. This means that planners go on about people-led and evolving city systems while completely ignoring anything that looks remotely untidy or outside municipal control.

Anyway, here's what Jane Jacobs though of Ebenezer Howard, the guru of 'garden cities' and godfather of town planning:

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge."

And we see this reflected in the self-righteousness of 'transition' towns, in the obsession with the local multiplier (have NEF actually conducted any real tests on their model or is mine still the only one) and in a focus on anything other than tilling the soil of enterprise.

So much that is written about community regeneration either mistakes the activities of the relatively wealthy residents of poorer places for regeneration or else implants a set of values that were best left behind when the Woodstock generation left that muddy field and headed into the real world.

I was at an interesting session on the next round of LEADER funding (EU funding directed to the rural economy, farm diversification and rural business productivity). It was striking - and depressing - to see the argument presented that we'd have to focus on economic growth (you know, jobs and businesses) because that was what DEFRA wanted. The implication - and this is clear in so much community regeneration - was that a better economy with more jobs, more income and more wealth was somehow not what regeneration is about. So much better to open up a new cycle path, run awareness-raising on climate action or plant herbs in street verges.

The problem we have is that our "plan-led" system has competing objectives - it wants reduce carbon emissions, it urges us to be healthier, it wishes to plan out crime and it wants to promote biodiversity. And, wonderful though these things may be, they all require a compromise - we cannot meet the idea for all of them. Something has to give.

And the first thing to give is economic growth, jobs and business. The very act of planning - or requiring someone to seek permission to do something with their property is a drag on the economy. But when we want that decision - to build a home, to open a business, to extend a factory - to also contribute to combating climate change, preventing obesity and providing homes for bats, we have problem.

...

Wednesday 25 June 2014

Thou shall not suffer a witch to live - even when she's innocent


The acquittal of Rebekah Brooks:

Mrs Brooks was found not guilty of four charges including conspiring to hack phones, making corrupt payments to public officials and conspiring with others to conceal evidence from police.

This is the last sentence of a hatchet job on Rebekah Brooks in the Daily Mail. A litany of Rebekah's sins and failings (the greatest being that she rose to success in Rupert Murdoch's evil empire) that begins with that classic of the tabloid genre:

Rebekah, the world class schmoozer who bewitched three Prime Ministers... and Rupert Murdoch.

Mrs Brooks didn't rise to success because she was talented, capable, delivered what worked and sold newspapers. No, she succeeded because she used her witchy woman wiles to control the men around her and her glamour ensnared three prime ministers. The Mail - which had clearly prepared the article well ahead of the verdict in Mrs Brooks' trial (a verdict the paper, I suspect, was disappointed about) - even found someone who was at primary school with her to pass comment. As if the bitchiness of a ten-year-old's "best friend" is a guide to the grown up woman's character.

And before you get the idea that this is merely your typical Daily Mail sexism - here's a man writing in the Guardian:

She is brilliant with men, charming, tactile, very nearly seductive. One man who dealt with her often – a man who is happily married and 20 years her senior – recalls with some embarrassment that “whenever we spoke, she left me thinking that, well, if things had been a little bit different [a sigh] perhaps we would have been together”.

You see folks - Rebekah got to be the boss because she was sexy and flirtatious, nothing to do with whether or not she was actually good at her job.  To bemused journalists Mrs Brooks is unexplainable - the working-class origins, the unashamed sexiness, the frightening red hair - she must be a witch casting her enchantments on the men around her, manipulating them up to her tower and offering them the world. Before moving on to the next, and more powerful, person.

The failure to kill the witch this time (and we know how much the left love to apply the word witch to successful women) clearly disappoints many who were already building the great fire on which the evil enchantress was to be burned. Even the Telegraph was disappointed that the 'Wicked Witch' turned out not to be so wicked after all.

Whatever we think of the Murdoch empire, the manner in which Mrs Brooks is described is appalling. We don't see her pained as a successful, high-achieving woman but as a manipulative and exploitative witch - someone with a dark side whose rise to fame came from enchantment rather than from being good at the jobs she was given.

So these journalists, commentators and knowing media folk cannot suffer a witch to live - innocent or not. Especially when she works for Rupert Murdoch.

Me, I like witches.

....

Tuesday 24 June 2014

Health fascism on speed - the BMA votes to ban cigarettes (but not for everyone)

****

When you were at school, you remember the swottish, science sorts who did all their homework, attended the extra revision classes and got top marks in everything? You know the ones who went on to medical school? Turns out they're pretty dumb after all - at least going by the latest utterly bonkers piece of health fascism proposed by the British Medical Association:

Delegates at the British Medical Association (BMA) annual conference voted in favour of a motion to prohibit smoking to anyone born after 2000.

Now the sharp-witted amongst you will have noted that this is a monumentally stupid idea. After all those people born in the 21st century aren't yet of an age to buy and consume tobacco products. Yet we are reminded that most smokers (nearly all of them I reckon) start smoking before they reach the age when they're actually allowed to smoke. And this means that they're getting cigarettes illicitly - either by the time-honoured method of lifting them from Mum's packet, buying them using false ID, asking someone to buy them for you or purchasing them from the bloke in the van who doesn't care about age, ID or much else.

Do these ever-so-clever doctors really think that anything will change? Except that smoking will become even more hidden and illicit than it is at the moment. From a product subject to quality control, regulation and licensing we will have moved to a product sold surreptitiously to young people in dark alleys - or else simply passed on by grandpa, mum and assorted aunts.

This is health fascism on speed - a sort of frantic, desperate, headline-grabbing proposal designed to give the impression of action rather than actually respond to the question (why do young people start smoking). And as Ian Dunt points out, this policy isn't about children at all:

...this policy, which is targeted at adults by definition, is being defended on the basis of what it would do to help children - the one group who would find themselves outside its remit.

But at least the lobby is finally daring to state its objective: the criminalisation of smoking. From now on, the debate is not about public health. It is about the rights of the individual against the frenzied paternalism of those who would interfere in other people's lives.

Everyone who smokes knows the risks. The health message has been banged into children almost from the day they walked into school - smoking kills you. That some people decide to smoke regardless of this risk says something about people but is a reminder that we all have choice in our lives. And if we choose - for hedonistic reasons - to do something dangerous that is, in the end, entirely our business.

Yet again we are reminded that the debate isn't about health but about control, about prohibition about other people deciding they know better how we should live our lives. This is the agenda of nannying fussbucketry, the manifesto of health fascism.

....

Monday 23 June 2014

Perhaps we should stop trying to create communities - mixed or otherwise.

****

I live in a mixed community. Socially, in terms of income and, to a degree, ethnically. But the real magic about the place is that it wasn't 'created', there wasn't a great masterplan that would mean Cullingworth had a variety of housing - flats, terraces, semi-detached and detached, old and new, large and small. Nor was there a grand plan to make sure that the village had about 20% of its stock available for social rent. Yet somehow we've managed to have that mixed community that makes Cullingworth such a fine place.

So it does rather concern me that the solution to some communities - whether Belgravia or Easterhouse - not being 'mixed' is to chain up the wrecking ball and knock stuff down. It's as if we're channelling some petulant child troubled by the failed sandcastle - kicking out at our failures. So, as Peter Matthew's describes:

An area of predominantly social housing is demolished, replaced with a mixed-tenure community, with a net reduction in the numbers of social housing units and an increase in rents. These developments intend to, and do, push the poor and marginalised out of our cities.

We have done this time and time again. Even Cullingworth wasn't immune to slum clearance - back in the 1960s the then Bingley Urban District Council bought up the back-to-backs in the village (paying an average of £43 pounds - no I haven't missed off any noughts - for each house) and flattened them. For a few residents there were new council houses in the village but for most the new Woodhouse Estate at Keighley beckoned.

I make this observation to provide a context for the assertion that knocking stuff down and starting again probably isn't the right solution - however despairing we may be at the prospects for residents of Holme Wood or Bracken Bank (these great peripheral estates has such appealing names). Nor are we served by the common assertion that somehow the depressing dreich of the council estate is responsible for the failings of that estate's residents.

Indeed, just as health inequality is caused by the mobility of the healthy and wealthy, places of multiple deprivation come about because they are the only places where the poor and ill can afford to live. And we know that, at the first opportunity, those poor and ill folk will up sticks and head for a nicer place - indeed the most ambitious will leave before they cease being poor and ill in the expectation that another place, however tough, will provide the opportunity for escape.

This is why people from the other side of the earth will crowd into unsanitary, damp and dangerous accommodation in Bethnal Green - the prospects are better than in Sylhet or Timisoara. And why young people from Barnsley and Huyton head to London, prepared to pay through the nose for a shoe box and have a job. The problem is that, once these places start to work, the authorities decide they must act - and acting means enforcement, slum clearance, regeneration.

Nor - however cute the argument might be - is there a case for turning the approach upside down and:

...demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing...

This suffers from the same problem as slum clearance except instead of kicking at our failed sandcastle we run over and trample on some other kid's spectacular sand version of Versaille. Such demolition utterly fails because - like slum clearance - it doesn't really face up to the problem but rather neatly sidelines that problem. We get action for the sake of action, a sort of Gentilean approach to regeneration rather than asking why it is that we residualise social housing and marginalise the residents of social housing. Or for that matter why it costs £650,000 to buy a 3-bed terrace in Hackney.

The truth - or at least the beginning of truth - is to remember where I started: mixed communities should be places of the willing rather than creations of the planner. Indeed, more often than not, our planning disrupts that process of community building. Indeed, as Jane Jacobs remarked about that godfather of the planned community, Ebenezer Howard:

As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Every day I see examples of planners disrupting people's innovation because it fails to fit their rules - from little examples like not allowing people to keep goats in Detroit or getting a couple to demolish their rather beautiful woodland home, to the grand plans that make land too dear and too precious for the growth of wonderful communities.

So to return to Cullingworth. There's an application from Barratt Homes to build 233 houses on the edge of the village. It's a brownfield site, it's not in the green belt and Cullingworth's a nice place to live. The development will happen - all we really want as a village is for the developer to build us a new village hall. We'll cope with a classic estate development because the remaining 1200 homes are so diverse and we're watching to see what happens to other sites in the village - some homes for rent maybe, a few more apartments and some smaller houses for younger couples.

But in other places - already cursed by planners - we'll see 'urban extensions' into the green belt that consist of vast swathes of suburban sameness, the very opposite of the mixed community we want to create. And this, like so much else about Britain's housing (from poor space standards to the price of housing land) can be laid firmly at the door of our planning system. Even the much maligned housebuilding companies exist in their current form because of the manner in which land markets are skewed by the, often bizarre, decisions of planners.

In the end regeneration isn't about knocking stuff down. Cullingworth wasn't created by demolition and rebuild (the land the back-to-backs occupied prior to their demolition remains largely - the existing and ageing village hall aside - open land) but rather by the interaction of its residents, by the fact that there's a chance for most of staying here and by the initiative of businesses and individuals. Perhaps - and there are many places like Cullingworth - we should restart our search for community by looking at these villages and learning about how they stay mixed.

....


Sunday 22 June 2014

Free Speech

****


I've said before that my politics is simply defined - free speech, free enterprise, free trade. And today free speech has become compromised by fear of offence, by the blandishments of a collective idea of 'equality' and by the likes of Hacked off who seem to want a selective free speech. I would add to this loss - and too few mention this - the misplaced view that commercial speech is somehow different from any other kind of speech and therefore can be banned.

So this statement really matters to me:

...free speech is not a value in the politicians’ sense. It is not quantitatively commensurate with ‘protection’ or ‘tolerance’; it is not capable of being part-exchanged with other so-called values. Properly speaking, free speech is not really a thing to be distributed, calibrated and balanced by the state at all. It is simply not the state’s to divide. Rather, it is a fundamental freedom, a lived liberty, that allows individuals the space to think and speak for themselves, without external compulsion. The point about free speech is that it is speech free from external compulsion; the state’s role in free speech is to guarantee its own absence, not assert its presence as some sort of values accountant, totting up the worth of each idea, and balancing the intellectual books.

I am also reminded that, in Bradford, the Labour Party rejected free speech because it would have meant rejecting the false use of 'Islamaphobia' to close down criticism of Islam. Left wing politicians in Bradford turned their backs on liberty and chose instead a world where politicians, bureaucrats and bullies can decide what you and I are allowed to say.

You too can do a little bit - it's just an online petition and will probably change nothing. But you will have set your mark down in support of liberty. It's online here.  You're in good company - Joe Jackson's there!

....

The Labour Party: Patronising working people since 1900

****

Chuka Umunna, a Labour Party frontbencher is continuing the champagne socialist tradition of patronising ordinary people. In this case ordinary people who (wrongly in my view - they should vote Conservative) chose to vote for UKIP:

UKIP voters are disconnected because many cannot send and receive emails, use search engines or browse the Internet, Labour’s shadow business secretary has suggested.

Chuka Umunna said that ‘a lot’ of people who voted for the party in its European elections victory were not computer literate and did not have basic online skills.

He promised that a Labour government would be ‘absolutely focused’ on connecting people who have been alienated from the wider economy.

Judging by my blog comments, email in-box and Twitter feed, UKIP folk seem only too well acquainted with the joys of the online world!

Essentially Chuka, in his £1000 suit, is telling the proles that they're too thick to understand. But then his party has been doing this for 114 years so far.

....

Of course the NHS is out-of-control. It has been out-of-control for decades...

****

Of course the NHS is out of control. We really shouldn't be surprised to hear this from a minister - indeed it's perhaps the first honest thing we've heard about the NHS in my lifetime. Except, of course, that's not really what the minister meant - what she meant was that the service was out of her control.

A Tory health minister was at the centre of controversy after she was secretly recorded saying that the government could no longer exert much day-to-day control over the increasingly stretched NHS.

Read that carefully - the words used are "day-to-day control". In other words, the reforms to the system introduced under this government have finally (or at least in front of 'private' party meetings) ended the pretence that government ministers and officials in Whitehall "run" the NHS. As the defensive response from a government spokesman put it - doctors are in charge of the NHS.

Now I've a little insight into the NHS as a member of a health and wellbeing board. This doesn't make me an expert (partly because the NHS uses a language that is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English') merely that I have a little knowledge. The reality out there is that there is no effective 'control' anywhere in the NHS - at least not in the management sense of control. My amazement is that an endless search for strategy has replaced any sense of actually doing stuff.

Now health and wellbeing boards are that very thing - 'high level', 'strategic', 'focused on partnership' - that frustrates us normal folk when confronted with public sector management. The NHS likes to call this 'leadership', presumably invoking some sort of sympathetic magic that says if you call something 'leadership' often enough it will become leadership. The reality is that this high level strategic partnership approach to NHS leadership is more akin to a nebulous, ill-focused exercise in projecting managerial self-interest as strategy (and this is without commenting on the use of misleading statistics on public health and health inequality as the basis for planning - mostly because they fit the ideology of NHS management).

At the mish-mash of meetings where we consider vast swathes of documentation all written in that almost comprehensible NHS language, we have been told about a thing called 'the funding gap'. This is a chthonic darkness looming over health services in Bradford - the £364 million bogieman of the care economy. And we discuss this 'gap' as if it is real rather than constructed from a combination of speculation, guesswork and spatulamancy.

So because everyone present knows that the bogieman is probably a little old man from Kansas rather than Godzilla, the aim is to direct any changes away from each person's particular interest. The truth about that 'funding gap' is that it is almost entirely founded on the idea that healthcare cost inflation will exceed general inflation, that demand will rise and that the NHS will not improve its productivity or efficiency. This is pathologised by the setting off of pseudo-panic - 'if nothing is done now then the NHS will be in crisis' or 'the funding gap presents the biggest leadership challenge since the foundation of the NHS'.

Really? Over the life time of the NHS its inflation rate has always exceeded the general inflation rate, demand has always risen and any advances in efficiency have been resisted by unions or swamped by managerial mission creep. The current crisis is the same crisis as before except for one thing - we're assuming that the magic money tree won't provide meaning that the service really does have to think about its productivity. And faced with this fact the 'leadership' is like the proverbial bunny facing the pick-up truck, completely frozen, unable to act.

This inability to act is because the NHS is uncontrollable - even out-of-control. Take the review of hospital provision in London and consider how Labour used it to run a series of egregious campaigns during an election. Why would any politician do anything but resist any change at all to health services knowing that proposing - or even agreeing to consider - such changes will result in an unpleasant, personal attack from the other side. We talk about putting doctors in charge, huge investment in 'leadership development' is made and the chairs are reorganised into a nice new pattern.

But we're not going to make the changes needed to get a more efficient health service because too many people inside the service are banking on political pressure working. These people - at the front of the crowd are the trade unions but there are others like the risible 'National Health Action Party' lined up alongside - see defending the health system's inefficiency as some sort of holy mission. And because these campaigners can press that 'Our NHS' button, get people to say 'the NHS saved my life and nothing should change', the result is sclerosis - the arteries of the system are clogged with years of indulgence.

The NHS is out-of-control because - so far as I can see - it has no leadership brave enough or strong enough (indeed with the authority needed) to face down the vested interests of unions, assorted medical colleges and NHS management. So the service will sputter on - most of the time, in most places doing an OK job and certainly saving lives every day.  And the funding gap will get lost in the running of internal deficits, in salami slicing of non-essential activity and in skimping on investment.

So yes, the NHS is out-of-control.

....

Friday 20 June 2014

On the radicalisation of youth...

****

I look back to this:

Between 1936 and 1939 over 35,000 men and women, from over 50 countries, left their homes to volunteer for the Republican forces. More than 2,300 of these came from Britain, Ireland and the commonwealth, of whom over 500 were killed (see below). Perhaps 80% were members of the Communist Party, or the Young Communist League, though volunteers with an alternative political background or who were active in the trade union movement were also accepted. 

Young men inspired by a passionate belief left their homes and families to go and fight a civil war in another country. They were fighting for a cause they saw as liberating - the fight against fascism was the justification given by Jack Jones but remember that the liberation these men were fighting for wasn't the liberation of western democracy but the liberation of Stalinist communism.

So tell me dear reader what the difference is between Jack Jones, Laurie Lee and Ernest Hemingway and those young men from Birmingham, Bradford or Slough fighting for was they believe in Syria and Iraq? Except that we won't be erecting monuments to their memory in the squares of Glasgow, Reading or San Francisco.

I don't think the young men of today heading to the middle east to fight are right. But then I don't think those who went to Spain hoping to impose Stalinist oppression there were right either.

....

Wednesday 18 June 2014

Bradford Council: Restricting fast food operators through planning won't reduce obesity, is probably illegal and is open to challenge


****

There are proposals in Bradford to introduce restrictions through the planning system on fast food outlets. Below is a report I prepared for Councillors in Medway on the issue. It applies in Bradford too - the policy is probably illegal as it is unsupported by evidence, will not contribute to reducing levels of obesity and is open to challenge by Inspectors and through the courts.





Planning and fast food outlets
Simon Cooke MSc March 2014

There have been calls for the use of planning policy as a tool in public health chiefly in contributing to reducing levels of obesity especially in children. There are fifteen local authorities with ‘supplementary planning policies’ that touch on obesity and food retail, ten of these specifically relating to hot food takeaways. 

Generally these policies focus on ‘exclusion zones’, typically 400m around schools, community centres and leisure facilities. There have been a lot of decisions to refuse where the reasons for refusal include being within such an exclusion zone.

However, while some of these refusals have been successfully defended at appeal, none have cited the exclusion zone as the only consideration in upholding refusal. There is, therefore, no robust planning evidence that these policies are either purposeful or defensible at appeal.
The grounds for introducing policies of this sort are twofold:


  • 1.    A view that, with local authorities taking the lead role in public health, planning policies need to contribute to broad public health strategy
  • 2.    That there is a specific link between what are called ‘obesogenic’ environments, such as the presence of fast food clusters near schools, and rising levels of childhood obesity


It is hard to take issue with the first of these objectives. However, planning policy should be purposeful i.e. it should be able to demonstrate that removing someone’s right to develop will achieve the purpose of the policy. In the case of hot food takeaways near to schools, we therefore need to show a clear link between the concentration of such outlets and childhood obesity. If such a clear link doesn’t exist then the policy does not meet its purpose.

We can see this by looking at comparable policies aimed at promoting all-population outcomes especially in encouraging the reduction of carbon emissions as part of a strategy to combat climate change. In every case where these policies exist there is a specific and measurable benefit – by requiring changes to build quality we can show an exact reduction in carbon emissions. Whatever our view on the value of such requirements, it is clear that the policy meets its purpose of reducing emissions.

Therefore, in looking at using planning policy to reduce levels of childhood obesity, we need to answer two questions:


  • 1.    Is there a good enough evidence base demonstrating a link between the proximity of hot food takeaways to schools and levels of obesity?
  • 2.    How will we measure the impact of the policy on levels of obesity in children?


As a presentation by Medway planners to the Town and Country Planning Association noted:

Evidence base is contested:

‘The use of SPDs by local authorities has not as yet been evaluated and the impact on obesity and other health issues remains unknown.’ Takeaway Toolkit (2012)

‘The literature review overall is entirely unclear and not firm enough to base ANY planning policy changes on.’ [Andrew Lainton, planning commentator]


There is a mixed evidence base with research conducted in the UK, the USA and in multi-national studies. Some find ‘moderate’ links between takeaways and obesity while others find little or no link.

“Exposure to takeaway food outlets in home, work, and commuting environments combined was associated with marginally higher consumption of takeaway food, greater body mass index, and greater odds of obesity.”  Burgoine et al, British Medical Journal 2014

“The obesity epidemic exists among those without significant consumption of or availability to takeaway foods. In a setting of easy availability of food, the obesity epidemic relates strongly to reduced physical activity, but not to consumption of takeaway food.” Simmons et al Int J Obes (Lond). 2005 

Within a population of urban low-income preschoolers, overweight was not associated with proximity to playgrounds and fast food restaurants or with the level of neighborhood crime.” Burdette & Whitaker, Preventative medicine, Vol 38 Issue 1 2004

These results indicate a correlational relationship between both the number of residents per fast food restaurant and the square miles per fast food restaurants with state-level obesity prevalence.” Maddock,  Am J Health Promot. 2004 Nov-Dec;19(2):137-43.

As these studies show the evidence of a link between concentrations of hot food takeaways and obesity is very weak (indeed you could argue it is non-existent).

Perhaps the most striking study from New York not only showed no link between fast food consumption and obesity but actually showed a negative correlation!

When the researchers weighed these children they found something rather interesting. Here are the average body mass index (BMI) figures for each group by frequency of visits to fast food outlets. Bear in mind that a 'healthy weight is 18.5 to 25:

Weekly visits        BMI

Every day:            17.8

4-6 times:              18.3

2-3 times:              19.6

Once:                    20.3

Less than once:     21.4

It seems to me that planners are taking a big risk if they introduce policies that prevent a business from operating purely on the grounds that the presence of that business will contribute to higher levels of childhood obesity.

So the evidence, such as it is, suggests that at best the ready availability of hot food takeaways has a marginal impact on adult obesity (Burgoine et al and Maddock) but that most studies looking at local impact find no correlation between concentrations of takeaways and obesity.

Even if we accept a link (which would be playing fast and loose with the evidence) we still need to be able to show how the planning policy will achieve its purpose – lower levels of obesity amongst children. Most specifically lower levels of obesity among children affected by the decision – those attending the school or other facility within an exclusion zone where a planning permission for a hot food takeaway is refused.

I do not see that there is any way of making this measurement without expensive and intrusive programmes of weighing and measuring children in the relevant school. Moreover the policy cannot affect existing hot food takeaways – unless there are locations where there are no such takeaways within a proposed exclusion zone.

The result of such a policy would likely be that some people would be unable to open a takeaway in their property (with the potential for a negative impact on the economy) but that there would be no measureable or indeed noticeable reduction in childhood obesity.

If we are concerned about child obesity, our focus should be on the factors that contribute to the problem. Here from a French study:

The results show that parental overweight and birth overweight are closely related to the child's obesity at five years of age ... The environmental factors which contribute to child obesity are: southern European origin of the mother, snacks, excessive television viewing and, more importantly, short sleep duration .... A logistic regression model, after taking parental overweight into account, shows that the relationship between obesity and short sleep duration persists independently of television viewing.  Locard et al, International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders : Journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity


·         Birth weight;
·         Obesity in one or both parents;
·         More than eight hours spent watching TV a week at the age of three;
·         A short amount of sleep - less than 10.5 hours a night at the age of three;
·         Size in early life - measured at eight and 18 months;
·         Rapid weight gain in the first year of life;
·         Rapid catch-up growth between birth and two years of age;
·         Early development of body fatness in pre-school years - before the age at which body fat should be increasing (at the age of 5-6).

What is not present in any of these studies is any support for the idea that an ‘obesogenic’ environment outside the home is a contributor to raised levels of childhood obesity. There is evidence that shows a link between poverty and obesity – this reflects the relative cheapness of energy dense food and especially processed carbohydrates. A related link is between levels of physical exercise and obesity and we know that children from poor families get less physical exercise.

In conclusion, I think that these policies are:


  • 1.    Probably illegal in that they are unsupported by the evidence
  • 2.    Do not contribute to reducing obesity in children
  • 3.    Leave the Authority exposed to challenge by Inspectors and the Courts


.....

How talk of inequality skews our debate about poverty.

****

Through the medium of Twitter, I was directed to this article about 'poverty' - or rather it was about income inequality:

Using figures from the OECD Better Life Index, the report shows that average UK household incomes of $53,785, which makes up the wealthiest 20 percent in the UK, ranked third in EU countries, lagging behind Germany and France.

But that is where the economic similarities between the UK and the EU come to a screeching halt.

The OECD estimates the average income of the bottom 20 percent of UK households at just $9,530, which is significantly lower than the poorest 20 percent in France ($12,653), Germany ($13,381), Belgium ($12,350), the Netherlands ($11,274) and Denmark ($12,183).

The problem here is a simple one. The figures used are figures prior to taxes and benefits - it's true that the bottom 20% of UK earners take home something around the figure quoted (the UK figure in sterling is £5,400). But when taxes and other benefits are accounted for the figure becomes a more acceptable £15,400. This is still just a quarter of the average income for the top 20% of earners (after tax and benefits) which is some £57,300 but suggests that, yet again, the obsession with focusing on inequality glosses over the debate about poverty. It may still be that case that after taxes and benefits the UK's lowest earners still lag behind those of other European countries but the real lesson of the figures is that for most people in that bottom earning bracket the system is working - at least in terms of them getting close to what the Joseph Rowntree Trust folk see as the minimum income needed for a civilised life.

What this number doesn't tell us is how many people are in dire poverty - without the means to provide the absolute basics of food, clothing and shelter. We get a little glimpse of this world from people like the Trussell Trust who support food banks and we know most of the dire need is temporary rather than structural. Nevertheless, we should begin to ask whether the tendency to present ever larger numbers of people "living in poverty" prevents us responding to the central challenge of making a system that doesn't fail and doesn't create real material deprivation.

We also get this fruitless debate about inequality with one set of figures showing inequality has declined and other showing it to have risen. And the focus on inequality leads to an emphasis on taxing the rich rather than on seeking to end poverty. There is lots of shouty accusation about tax dodging and fingers pointed at big businesses but none of this even starts to answer the 'why are some people poor' question. Nor do we look at the decisions of government that make poverty worse - the green levies on energy production, the high taxes on petrol that make food more expensive, the regulation of childcare that raises its costs beyond normal affordability, the planning regulations that make housing expensive and the obscene tax on jobs that is national insurance.

My point in all this isn't to suggest an end to progressive taxation or to reject a degree of redistribution, rather it is to say that the evil in all this is poverty not the fact that one person has more stuff than another person. And if we want to eliminate poverty, we should focus on poverty and on removing the barriers - regulatory, tax, social and economic - that prevent people escaping from real poverty. Inequality isn't one of those barriers and our anti-poverty work needs to start with this fact.

....