Sunday 31 August 2014

Malnutrition - public health people are lying to us about its incidence

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The Guardian writes this:

Doctors and hospitals are seeing a rise in children suffering from ailments caused by poor diet and the faculty has linked the trend to people's inability to afford quality food. Latest figures show there has been a 19% increase in people hospitalised in England and Wales for malnutrition over the past 12 months but experts say this is only the extreme end.

From this you would conclude, would you not, that there are hordes of starving children with distended stomachs filling up our hospitals? Whether the author did this deliberately is unclear but the truth is that all of that increase in malnutrition relates to the elderly. Every year, for as far as records of malnutrition go back, there are around 200 children admitted to hospital with conditions related to malnutrition.

The main reason - here from 'fullfact' -is this:

People with certain long-term health conditions can’t always retain all the nutrients they need – particularly the elderly, who might also struggle to make the trip to the supermarket. With this in mind, the higher incidence of malnutrition might also reflect broader demographic trends, including the fact that the UK’s population is ageing. The most recent Nutrition Screening Survey showed that those aged 65 plus were more likely to be malnourished than those who were younger. In addition, it may also be that hospitals are now more likely to screen a patient for symptoms of malnourishment.

So the Faculty for Public Health (and Tracey McVeigh in The Guardian) are misleading us about malnutrition because it suits their political agenda. There has been no increase in child malnutrition and the numbers are very small (200 hundred cases in a cohort of nearly 12 million) but we continue to be told that there is a problem. That is, of course, when the Faculty for Public Health isn't telling us that all our children are obese because of "junk food" and fizzy drinks.

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Saturday 30 August 2014

In which I agree a little bit with Owen Jones

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It's OK folks, I've not turned overnight - as if in some Kafka-esque horror - into a socialist. But I think that Owen Jones, Boy Socialist has a point when he talks about the elite and what the Americans would call 'corporate welfare':

Who are the real scroungers? Free-marketeers decry 'big government' yet the City and big business benefit hugely from the state – from bailouts to the billions made from privatisation. Socialism does exist in Britain – but only for the rich

Now our youthful leftie then goes on to spoil his argument a little by missing out on some of the corporate welfare but his points have some merit. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that Owen's criticism of what he calls 'privatisation' also has merits.

The point however relates to a different cause than Owen suggests and the solution lies in less socialism not more socialism. The problem with what Owen calls privatisation is that it is nothing of the sort. Privatisation involves taking a state-owned monopoly and placing it - usually through sale - into an open market environment. We did this with telephones, gas, electricity and water with considerable success (although the state kept its fingers in the pie by fixing all these markets in one way or another - mostly to the benefit of businesses rather than consumers).

Issuing contracts to run trains on a state-owned rail network is not privatisation. Nor is outsourcing the collection of municipal waste or the commissioning of hernia operations. This is just the state opting to buy rather than do itself - for it to be true privatisation you have to change the customer - to have to have a system where consumers make choices in a free (or relatively free) market.

However, to return to Owen Jones, he is wrong when he argues that big business rejects 'statism' but right when he points to the benefits that the grandees of big business get from big government. The switch to a smaller state with more of what we call 'public services' delivered through the market simply doesn't suit those powerful businesses that deliver those public services on contract. Or indeed the equally large businesses that fund those businesses allowing them to compete for large public contracts.

However, the problem here isn't just the fact that public services are outsourced but that the market is, mostly because of regulation and legislation, seriously constrained. Owen points to the big public services contractors like Serco, G4S, Atos and Capita and makes reference to the 'Big Four' accountancy firms. What he describes here is a marketplace constrained by the scale of the contracts and by the specification of those contracts. While the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would partly open this market - and some of the regulations, its main outcome for public services would be opening up EU 'markets' to large US contractors (and vice versa).

The problem is that, so long as people like Owen insist that services are delivered through a planned system rather than a market, the producers - whether state employed management or the managers in private contractors - will fix the system in their own interests rather than in the interests of the consumer. And while there are areas - basic scientific and medical research, for example - where only the state will invest, in areas where a market can operate there will be more investment under capitalism than in a state-directed monopoly.

Owen Jones is right to identify corporate welfare as a problem but completely wrong in offering a 'solution' that merely transfers the self-interest to the managers of state enterprises. If Owen wants real change he needs a system where the self-interest is transferred to the consumer of the service - you and me, the public. And this system - in most circumstances - is called a free market.

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Friday 29 August 2014

Friday Fungus: The Zombie Ant Army

Be afraid! Be very afraid! You know the Threat Level thing? This is Threat Level Zombie Ants!

The research focused on a species from the genus Ophiocordyceps — known as “zombie ant fungi” — which control their ant hosts by inducing a biting behavior. Although these fungi infect many insects, the species that infect ants have evolved a mechanism that induces hosts to die attached by their mandibles to plant material, providing a platform from which the fungus can grow and shoot spores to infect other ants.

This little fungus takes over the ants brains and leads them to a place where the fruiting head can grown and spawn the source for more zombie ants!

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Politics and science...

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"A soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war...But a farmer will pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a plough." Spinoza

There's a tendency for some educated scientific people to consider that you can reduce the process of political decision-making to an exercise in the scientific method. Some sort of 'test' is conducted and the results mandate the policy decision. Most often the 'test' isn't an actual experiment (these are, as those scientists should know, pretty hard to construct in real human populations) but some sort of meta-analysis of smaller tests and analyses. From this process we arrive at statements like 'the science is settled' and 'nearly all scientists agree' despite the scientific truth being a whole lot more nuanced.

A related approach is to assume that a human problem identified by 'science' must require the intervention of the state for its resolution. At this point I can hear some on the left peeling away from the argument but bear with me because this really isn't about left/right or big/small government but about the role and purpose of two different things - science and politics. It would be a rum do if we used politics to determine the outcome of science. Why then do some people not see an equivalent problem in trying to use science to make political decisions?

Scientific and political questions are framed very differently. This is for good reason. A scientist would not, for example, ask "Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes/No". Yet this is an entirely valid question in a political context that will lead to a clear decision. A scientist might ask 'what would Scottish independence mean for X' and then try to construct some sort of test to answer the question. And the findings from that scientific enquiry might well help people answer the political question. But the science does not provide the answer.

The second point about that independence question is that is it absolute - the 'right' answer is that answer securing the most votes. Fifty Per Cent Plus One is enough. For science that isn't enough. Read any piece of good scientific research and you will see caveats - a section perhaps entitled 'limitations' setting out the constraints of the test being conducted and towards the end of the paper a piece on the need for further research. Good scientific research doesn't answer questions so much as turn one question into a myriad of other questions. Such an approach is fantastic if we want to understand the world but worse than useless if we want to decide whether or not Scotland should be independent.

So when a writer - as happens here - singles out one political ideology as peculiarly anti-science this is the result of either a profound ignorance of politics and the political process or else the presentation of a personal ideology as if it were scientific fact. Indeed, we can observe the same from other political perspectives - the adherence of many on the left to the view that GMOs are bad, nuclear power peculiarly dangerous and pesticides destructive is a fine example of how scientific evidence is routinely ignored.

If we are to 'respond' to climate change this does not mean that there must be more government, more regulation and some sort of crusade to stamp out any capitalism bigger than the corner shop or the local agricultural co-op. Those who choose to say 'I don't believe a word of it' also cannot be dismissed because they might just be right.  The problem is (and here's some science) that our ideology - political bias - means that we do one of two things: either we make choices that fit our existing bias or else we select particular findings while ignoring others again to fit a prior bias.

To return to that Scottish independence question again. Were I a 'Yes' supporter seeking evidence to support my case, I would select those studies, tests and experiments that support my contention that Scotland should be independent. I would also ignore the element of choice involved in political decisions. There are costs and benefits to every decision but political or ideological bias leans us towards emphasising only the costs or only the benefits.

To give another example, the argument that alcohol costs the UK £21bn each year is, say public health people, derived from scientific enquiry. It may well be a true figure. But against that figure we have to set an estimate of the benefits society gains from alcohol not just jobs, businesses and exports but the pleasure we get from a glass of wine or a pint of beer.

In the end we have become rather too dependent on scientific enquiry in answering (rather than framing) political questions. And the risk here is that the scientist, once removed from the constraints of experimental investigation, is likely to be just as ideologically biased as the non-scientist. Indeed, what we get too often is a complete misrepresentation of the ideology with which the scientist is disagreeing. To suggest that somehow 'libertarians' balance "individual rights against the rights of others" is a complete misrepresentation both of libertarianism and of the small-government conservsatism that the author was actually criticising.

One of the curiosities about what we might call the 'scepticism movement' is its ideological attachment to a sort of social democratic human engineering view of politics. I compare this to the commonplace view among the centre-right that everything would be fine if only we put businessmen in charge. For the 'sceptics' the solution appears to lie in sort sort of post-democratic technocracy where the task of politics is to implement the 'findings' of the scientific consensus and that politicians should be slaves to the selected and presented evidence. A side effect of this concept in politics is the modern idea of leadership - politicians' task is to 'lead' the reluctant and recalcitrant populace towards to consensus defined by the technocrats' 'science'.

None of this is to dispute the value of science. Rather I want to step back from the fetishising of scientific enquiry as the only worthy decision-making system. Instead of a "science says yes" process called evidence-based policy making, we need to understand that the purpose of the evidence is to inform our decision-making not to do that decision-making for us. And the point and purpose of democracy - lost in translation all too often - is for the people or the representatives of the people to make choices about things that can't be (or aren't) made in the market.

Like everyone else scientists are prejudiced, have irrational attachments to ideological positions and allow personal likes and dislikes to colour their thinking. I take the view - like many of those libertarians - that most of the time decisions are better taken in the marketplace where mutual benefit and added value determine the outcome. But this is an ideological position - one with a great deal of scientific support as it happens - and others will believe differently. As we've seen with the independence debate, scientific enquiry can only inform the choice that people have before them.

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Wednesday 27 August 2014

Quotes of the day...

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"One young person told us that ‘gang rape’ was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham in which she lived."
"...fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene."

"One child who was being prepared to give evidence received a text saying the perpetrator had her younger sister and the choice of what happened next was up to her. She withdrew her statements."

"Within just a few months, Child B and her family were living in fear of their lives. The windows in their house were put in. She and her family received threats that she would be forced into prostitution."

"The social worker’s assessment was that Child C’s mother was not able to accept her growing up. In fact, she was displaying what are now known to be classic indicators of child sexual exploitation from the age of 11. By the age of 13, she was at risk from violent perpetrators, associating with other victims of sexual exploitation, misusing drugs, and at high risk."

 "An initial assessment accurately described the risks to Child D but appeared to blame her for ‘placing herself at risk of sexual exploitation and danger’."

"Notes from the children’s unit files at the time suggest there was a level of chaos surrounding the care of Child E and other children in the unit, with staff powerless as older children in the residential units introduced younger and more vulnerable children like Child E to predatory adult males who were targeting children’s homes."

"Her father provided Risky Business with all the information he had been able to obtain about the details of how and where his daughter had been exploited and abused, and who the perpetrators were...Three months later, the social care manager recorded on the file that Child H had been assessed as at no risk of sexual exploitation, and the case was closed."

"Time and again we read in the files and other documents of children being violently raped, beaten, forced to perform sex acts in taxis and cars when they were being trafficked between towns, and serially abused by large numbers of men. Many children repeatedly self-harmed and some became suicidal. They suffered family breakdown and some became homeless. Several years after they had been abused, a disproportionate number were victims of domestic violence, had developed long-standing drug and alcohol addiction, and had parenting difficulties with their own children, resulting in child protection/children in need interventions. Some suffered post-traumatic stress and other emotional and psychological problems, often undiagnosed and untreated. Some experienced mental health problems."

Most of the men who did this to these young girls are still walking the streets of Rotherham. Or rather crawling along in their cars looking for a new batch of girls to ply with drink and drugs before raping them with their mates. A civilized country?

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A brief note on the Rotherham abuse report...

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There is rightly a lot of sound and fury about a report into the systematic abuse of some 1400 girls and young women by mostly Pakistani men in Rotherham. Indeed, as the author of the report made clear when interviewed, the 1400 figure is a 'conservative estimate'. And the report doesn't pull its punches, at least in setting out the failings of the political and social services leadership and management in Rotherham nor are we dealing with something minor or marginal:

In just over a third of cases, children affected by sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of child protection and neglect. It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

The Report is clear that the problem continues today - that the authorities are more aware seems to be a matter of external pressure rather than a committed attempt by those authorities to face up to a serious problem within their town and, specifically, within one particular community in Rotherham.

My concern is that, while the Rotherham case is especially shocking because of its scale, the nature of the crimes and the manner of the abuse is repeated elsewhere. We have seen similar reports from Keighley, from Preston, from East Lancashire, in Derby, in Oxford and in Luton. All of these cases involve mostly Pakinstani men - primarily in their 20s but also men in their 30s and 40s, married with their own families - targeting vulnerable teenage girls, plying them with alcohol and drugs and taking them to 'parties' where they are raped and abused.

I don't know enough about the Pakistani community to understand how this behaviour has come about - I have Pakistani friends who are as shocked and horrified, perhaps even more so, as I am over these reports and events. There seems almost to a be a form of omerta here, an unwillingness to speak out, to point accusing fingers at the reasons for the problem arising.

However, there is no doubt that that failures identified in the Rotherham Report have made matters worse. It appears - again I don't know whether this is the case elsewhere but I suspect it is - that management within the police and social services were unwilling to respond for fear of being accused of prejudice and racism. Even now, when the scale of Rotherham's problems are made clear, there are people falling over themselves to deny that there is a specific problem within the Pakistani community in that town. This sort of response does not protect the girls and young women involved and does no favours to either 'community cohesion' or the Pakistani communities in the UK.

It's true that the sexual exploitation of girls and young women isn't solely an issue for the Pakistani community- we've seen the extent of Operation Yewtree and other examinations into historic allegations of abuse. And we read of other abuses, often organised abuses. But this form of abuse - targeting girls and young women, plying them with drink and drugs and then sharing the victims round like playthings - has been all too frequent among Pakistani communities. Not just among young men captivated by gangster culture but, just as with other child abuse in the wider community, among otherwise respectable men in their 30s and 40s.

I'm reluctant to call for enquiries - most often they serve either to push the issue into the fog of the future or else to provide a platform for the worst sort of human rights lawyers to make a load of cash. But, given the number of similar cases from right across the country, it would seem worth considering whether an enquiry would help both the professionals dealing with the problem and the Pakistani communities to develop a more effective response to these 'grooming' cases.

In the end though, the real lesson is that those authorities charged with protecting children and young people from abuse are too often simply not up to the job. A combination of that politically-correct fear of racism accusations and the preference of senior management for meetings to discuss strategies has resulted in front line officers who feel unable to act quickly, effectively and robustly when they know abuse is happening.

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Monday 25 August 2014

Food heroes of the day - Ninewells Hospital, Dundee...

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Assorted health fascists and nannying fussbuckets are frothing at the wonderful dish served up at Dundee's Ninewells Hospital:

The pie is crammed with sausage, bacon, black pudding and beans and is topped with a fried egg. It is available from a takeaway counter at the Dundee hospital.

This is a hospital, people are gloomy, ill, depressed and in need of some decent nosh - hence such a fantastic pie. But the nannies  hate it:

Professor Mike Lean, a former government advisor and chair of human nutrition at Glasgow University said it was a "shocking" example of a meal.

"It should never be anywhere near a hospital," he said. "It is laden with fat, salt and without a vegetable in sight. There should be strict guidelines for all food sold in hospitals."

And Tam Fry, the self-appointed obesity expert shouts:

"What we have here is a heart attack on a plate. It should be absolute obligatory for the NHS to have wholesome food whether it is from a takeaway shop within hospitals or on menus."

I don't get it at all - what could be more wholesome that a fry-up in a pie. At least it's not deep fried (yet).

A good view of the pie (and a fine sight it is, if not for the faint-hearted) can be seen here.
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Sunday 24 August 2014

Leave the MPs on holiday...

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"Recall Parliament" goes the cry without really any consideration as to what Parliament is going to do when it arrives back in London. Dragged untimely from holidays, from rare time spent with friends and family away from politics, the MPs will be in a grumpy mood. So when they're presented with a motion that doesn't authorise anything, doesn't extend powers or create new law, it's understandable that the response is a combination of grandstanding and grumpiness.

Yet again the business of our legislature is determined more by what it looks like - "how it plays out in the media" - rather than by whether it is doing anything of any real substance and purpose by holding a debate about the Middle East, ISIS, Gaza or indeed any other topic dominating the headlines.

My preference is for the legislature to meet less often rather than more often - after all the full time presence of MPs in London only encourages them to meet together and, in doing so, manufacture more laws in the interests of MPs and those who lobby MPs rather than the wider public interest. For sure it isn't pitched to us that way. The media savvy woman from the charity or think tank on Radio Four explains how the new rules will protect children or save lives or stop hate crime or prevent some humanitarian disaster. And we - along with the MPs - lap it up.

The matter of whether we bomb terrorists in Syria - or is it Iraq - isn't really any concern of the legislature except in so far as that legislature has a say in appointing the government and votes to allow that government to have the money to buy the bombs and fuel the aircraft. Meeting together to discuss the situation achieves nothing other than for the more pompously self-informed politicians to twang their braces as they intone sombre speeches while others nod as they admire the sagacity of those braces-twangers.

The truth is that not only does recalling parliament not serve any valuable purpose, it is likely to draw the attention of government from the practical task of considering what to do and to focus it instead on the pathetic media circus that would accompany the recalled parliament. Hordes of journalists and pundits who match the MPs blow for blow in their know-all attitude. And battalions of suited think-tankers - from places with names like th Royal United Services Institute or the International Affairs Academy - swarm over the airwaves feeding their undergraduate essays to MPs so as they (the MPs that is) can sound like they have the faintest idea about the situation 'on the ground'.

It's likely too that, given this is the Middle East, there will be protests and representatives of the protestors - often emigres from the places now ridden with war, pillage and rape. The media will add this to the hopper of opinion - it won't point to any solution but it adds a 'human dimension' to the debate and shows, without question, that something must be done. The problem is that it doesn't tell us what that 'something' might be - diplomacy, military aid, bombing raids, troops...we don't know but something.

Soon though the debate - as well as leading to new rules and new powers for the friends of politicians - will begin to be portrayed by the media in terms of what it means for future political events here in the UK. The words are still frowningly concerned with a terrible humanitarian tragedy but the political tactics become a case of getting one over on the other side. Did the Prime Minister take a few hours to spend a little time with his family? Can we criticise the Foreign Minister for failing to meet with some group or other? And the BBC or ITN or Sky person with the Downing Street door behind them will spend five minutes of prime time news explaining what all this might mean for the polls or for next year's general election.

"Recall Parliament" they say - not because it's a good idea (any more than dragging people back off their holidays for no real purpose other than a media story is a good idea) but because it looks like something is being done, like the powers are taking the matter seriously and therefore that, in some magical way, we are getting better government. The reality is Parliament has no role in this, would contribute nothing new or helpful to the debate and would shift the emphasis from an appropriate response to the usual, pathetic media circus.

Leave the MPs on holiday, let the ministers have some time with their family and treat the business of government as if it were the business of government rather than a source of endless media tittle-tattle and gossip.

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Saturday 23 August 2014

Socialism in action...doing what it does best, making poor people poorer

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Venezuela is fast becoming today's example of socialism and of how it starts with excitement about liberty, crushing the Yankee Devil, taming big business and eliminating poverty. And soon turns to control, suppression, rationing and shortage:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced Wednesday that the country will introduce a mandatory fingerprinting system in supermarkets. He asserted that the plan will keep people from buying too much of any single item. 

But, you ask, why would anyone want to buy 'too much of any one item'? When I go to the supermarket, I buy to suit my immediate requirements. Since capitalism has given me a fridge freezer, I'm able to buy good for the whole week but that's it. The reason for buying 'too much of one item' is simple - the buyer anticipates shortage. We see this occasionally when some tabloid newspaper creates a scare over a consumer product's availability. But for government to seek to stop such buying behaviour, shortages have to be the norm.

And this is the case with Venezuela - the country where a smart phone app locating supplies of loo paper was developed. The government, having condemned the businesses making and distributing food and other consumer goods decided that it should intervene - controlling supply, setting prices and generally throwing its weight around in the marketplace. Such activity is justified, the government says, so as to allow the nation's poor to live more dignified lives.

The problem is actually pretty simple - by fixing prices artificially low (to help the poor) Venezuela's government created shortages. Now they've blamed variously the CIA, the political opposition and business in general for the problem using these perceived attacks on the socialist revolution in Venezuela to justify first the introduction of ID systems (described in the Guardian as "a grocery loyalty card with extra muscle") and now the use of fingerprinting to prevent 'hoarding'.

"We are creating a biometric system … to function in all distribution and retail systems, public and private," Maduro said in a televised address on Wednesday. "This will be – like the fingerprint scan we use in our electoral system – a perfect anti-fraud system."

So what's the problem here? Essentially the problem is socialism and its adherents' belief that you can abolish the market. For what Venezuelans are doing is variously: buying cheap stuff in Venezuelan shops and taking it across the border for resale at the price it should have been or else simply reselling it to other Venezuelans. Either that or else not having bread, oil, flour or loo paper because there's none to buy in the shops.

We can laugh a little as we are reminded again that fixing the price and supply of basic goods - especially while indulging in an inflationary splurge of oil money on public infrastructure - really isn't a great way to manage the economy. We can make jokes about the stupidity of socialism and make fun of Venezuela's fans like sweet little Owen Jones. But we should not forget that the current leader of the UK's opposition supports price fixing - for energy prices, for train fares and probably for anything else that gets him the votes of the ignorant.

Socialism is lovely. It's adherents are often caring, sharing folk who want the world to be a better place. But, put into action, socialism results in poverty, unemployment, authoritarian government and shortages of life's essentials. The losers in all this are those without the connections or the wherewithal to survive - the very people that socialism claims to support - the poor. As one Venezuelan put it:

 "The rich people have things all hoarded away, and they pull the strings," said Juan Rodriguez, who waited two hours to enter the government-run Abastos Bicentenario supermarket near downtown Caracas on Monday, then waited three hours more to check out.

The terrible thing is that this man, having spent five hours getting basics at a supermarket, still believes the socialists when they blame the rich. It's good politics but, like those who want to blame immigrants, simply isn't true and those setting out the policies know that it isn't true. The fault here - and every time with socialism - rests with the government.

Every time socialism is tried - and Argentina is now having another go at it - it fails. Yet another generation of people who care about the poor, who hate America and believe business is exploitative will come along, get power and prove again that socialism doesn't work. The saddest thing here is that, as that man in the Caracas supermarket queue points out, the rich seldom lose out under socialism - it's the poor that lose out.

Socialists may often be lovely caring people. But socialism is evil.

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Friday 22 August 2014

Today's public health lies...the Faculty of Public Health on rickets and malnutrition

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The Faculty of Public Health - a sort of training institute for health fascists - is on about rickets:

The Faculty of Public Health said conditions like rickets were becoming more apparent because people could not afford quality food in their diet.

This is of course the same Faculty of Public Health that urges us never to go out in the sunshine without first daubing ourselves in Factor 100 cream. And then we should only go out in the sun for a few fleeting moments or else we will all die a horrible death from skin cancers.

So what is it that causes rickets? Ah, yes! It's a lack of Vitamin D. And where does the Vitamin D come from:

The main sources of vitamin D are: 

Sunlight – your skin produces vitamin D when it is exposed to the sun. We get most of our vitamin D this way
Food – vitamin D is also found in some foods such as oily fish, eggs and fortified breakfast cereals. 

So rickets is caused by lack of a vitamin we get from going out in the sunshine, eating eggs and eating cornflakes. I don't think for a second that either eggs or cornflakes don't feature in the diet of most kids - so it's our obsession with covering children from head to toe to protect them from the sun that's causing the problem not 'food poverty'.  And I also know that the people from the Faculty of Public Health know this - indeed they could discover these fascinating truths from NHS Choices. They prefer instead to lie so as to make a political point.

Their second lie is a more subtle one, it's about malnutrition.

It comes after health figures recently revealed a 19% increase in the number of people admitted to hospital with malnutrition over the past year.

Now there has been a sharp increase in hospital admissions for malnutrition in the UK and this is something that should concern us. But, just like rickets, it really hasn't got very much to do with 'food poverty'. Rather, it is connected to changed diagnosis and to an increasing elderly population:

People with certain long-term health conditions can't always retain all the nutrients they need - particularly the elderly, who might also struggle to make the trip to the supermarket. With this in mind, the higher incidence of malnutrition might also reflect broader demographic trends, including the fact that the UK's population is ageing. The most recent Nutrition Screening Survey showed that those aged 65 plus were more likely to be malnourished than those who were younger. In addition, it may also be that hospitals are now more likely to screen a patient for symptoms of malnourishment.  

This makes a great deal more sense and tells us that perhaps we should be considering how to ensure that single elderly people living in the community are eating properly (and drinking enough fluid - dehydration is a common factor in cold-related deaths in older people). But again, it doesn't fit with the political agenda of the Faculty of Public Health - they want to have us believe that the problem is the result of welfare reform and rising food prices rather than more complex issues relating to an ageing society or the unintended consequence of public health campaigns around skin cancer.

What I get most annoyed about here is that public health professionals know full well what the underlying factors are for the increase in rickets and for the rising incidence of malnutrition but then chose to ignore these factors and make misleading claims - lies - about food poverty and ill-health. It may well be the case that many poorer people are eating a less than healthy diet but the figures on rickets and malnutrition do not tell us this - they have other causes.
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It's poverty not inequality that should concern us...

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Although Fraser Nelson falls foul of some factual errors (when will people stop using mortality statistics to say things like "a boy born in Liverpool is expected to live five years less than one born in Westminster" when it simply isn't true), he does get to the heart of a big challenge - poverty:

As our politicians enjoy summer drinks on Parliament’s terrace, they can hear Big Ben echoing from buildings in a part of the city that badly needs their help. But they will have known this for years, and grown inured to it. Our poverty is hiding in plain sight. 

And can we be clear about something else here - the issue isn't 'inequality' either it is simply and straightforwardly poverty. What we have allowed to happen, first with that pseudo-academic tract, "The Spirit Level" and now with the more substantive and rigorous work from Thomas Piketty is to replace concern about absolute conditions with concern about relative conditions - inequality is more important to policy-makers than poverty. More importantly, one specific and tightly-defined pair of inequalities are more important - income inequality and wealth inequality.

So other inequalities - of provision, of opportunity and of attention - are pushed aside by a torrent of largely purposeless debate about this king pair of inequalities. And the result of this is that the problem becomes systemic rather than personal, a concern of think tanks and sternly proclaimed generalisations rather than a question of what we do for the single mum trapped in a sink estate, the semi-orphan lad roaming the street half the night and the 50 plus bloke who finds no-one wants the skills he spent three decades perfecting. Instead, 'inequality' will be solved by an international wealth tax, more income redistribution, clamping down on big businesses dodging taxes and generally squeezing the rich until blood drips from their pips.

The assumption in all this debate - the premise of "The Spirit Level" - is that if we fix inequality of income and/or wealth (it's not always clear) then, as if by magic, that poverty will disappear. Well I've a message for the inequality campaigners - it really ain't that simple. And instead of fussing about Gini Coefficients and such guffle, we should fuss about developing proposals that really do help get people out of poverty. In the short term we can (and do) redirect money and other resource so, in the main, people do not go without. The problem is that, as the foodbank story shows, this system of redistribution doesn't work very well.

The solution is not to have the poverty in the first place and to do this we must recognise that some people get into such a tangle - "chaotic lifestyles" as the  jargon would have it - that they lose the capacity and ability to escape. And into such tangles of poverty, addiction, crime and ill-health are drawn whole families. Bradford's 'Families First' programme (part of the wider government-supported 'troubled families' programme) has successfully supported over 1000 families getting important changes and a little bit of order - kids attending school regularly, the right medical support and intervention to address addictions. People's lives aren't transformed and this isn't a fairy tale where Eric the Good Witch waves his wand and everything is fine. But from a situation where the only expectation would be grinding poverty, ill-health, the courts and the mortuary slab, we now have for some of the most troubled people some degree of hope.

None of this is about inequality. Making the wealthy less wealthy won't sort out the problems of these families. We should be talking about poverty - whatever Fraser Nelson may say, the fact of living in Southwark doesn't make you live less long than living in Westminster. What make people live less long and the reasons they end up in places with the worst housing and the highest crime is because they are poor.

Fraser Nelson is right when he points to the impact of better schools - the entire purpose of Michael Gove's campaigning leadership - on poor communities. We can be cheered by the incredible performance of places like King Solomon Academy in central London but what we can't afford is to let go the mission to see every school aspire to those standards. It is the best hope for those people living in poverty.

But in the meantime we have to do more about that poverty. Not by taking money from one set of people to spread around another set. Not by making out that the problem is greater than it is so as to make a cheap political point about inequality. Rather it's about actions that reduce poverty. And about stopping those things that make poverty worse - levies that increase the price of fuel, tariffs that make food more expensive, business rates that drive retail out from poor communities and public health policies that demonise the poor's choices.

But first for Conservatives it is time to start talking about poverty. And to start that conversation by saying that it is poverty that should concern us not inequality.

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Wednesday 20 August 2014

...you're never too old (unless you want a new career).

How some employers see the 55-year old job applicant


James Delingpole has been indulging in some middle-aged angst:

...I wanted to muse a little on the career choices I’ve made and on the regrets that now haunt me as a result. Fellow nearly-fiftysomethings — and post-fiftysomethings — will I’m sure understand where I’m coming from. Time is running out and the options are closing by the day.

The funny thing is that there is no obvious reason why James' options - playing high-level sport and ballet dancing aside - need to be closed off. James still has all his faculties and is likely to enjoy his role as 'king of right wing snark' for another 25 years allowing that accident or ill-fate doesn't intervene. Yet our culture tells James that the evenings are closing in and that soon he will need to think about stairlifts, comfortable footwear and elasticated slacks.

The real issue here is one about careers and whether it is possible for someone to change horses once they've passed some arbitrary milestone - 45, 50, 55. It seems that the possibility of doing so diminishes - not because people do not have the capacity, capability or drive to change career post-50 but because society sees this as a slightly odd thing to do. This isn't the same as someone deciding to take redundancy from their mid-ranking professional or managerial position and set up a 'lifestyle busines' carving walking sticks or giving talks about Cretan ruins to cruise passengers. Rather it's about someone deciding to change career - so, in my case, I might opt to retrain as a town planner and call an end to the joys of politics or marketing.

The problems are two-fold - firstly employers don't believe you when you start again at the bottom of the heap and secondly a manager won't want to take on somebody older then they are (this is a visceral remnant of the respect for elders that we were brought up to believe in). That manager rationalises his ageism by saying to himself that the older person wouldn't fit in - "everyone in the office is under 35" our  manager would mumble to himself, "it just wouldn't work". Or else - and worse - the employer might explain away his bias by saying that the older person wouldn't be up-to-speed with modern technology. In my world of marketing all that 'digital' stuff needs young people doesn't it? What would some balding, old-time planner know about 'social media' or 'SEO'?

There is no earthly reason why a twenty-three year old should better understand digital media strategy (or anything else for that matter) than a fifty-three year old. Yet that is precisely what people making employment decisions will do, just as they will dismiss a thirty year career in another field as somehow irrelevant to the appointment decision. Essentially because they don't want to appoint an 'old' person.

We have to stop doing this for some very important reasons. Firstly the government now expects us to work to 67 and it's only a matter of time before we are expected to work to 70. Moreover this expectation is compounded by the pillage visited on private pensions by the greed and selfishness of governments. And secondly, there will be fewer young people available to fill all those jobs (and perhaps - at least in my field of marketing - an appreciation that, if the market consists mostly of older people it might be an idea to employ some older people who might understand better how that market works).

James Delingpole can rely on people like me punching the air with delight at his right-wing polemic but for others there's the prospect that the world doesn't want what they do any more. And if those people want to change and become town planners, marketing folk or digital advertising sales people then perhaps employers need to consider how to make it work. Not just because of that classic piece of lunatic New Labour legislation, the Equalities Act (which makes age a protected characteristic) but because those employers are missing out on some excellent people because they'd rather have a bunch of 25 year old recent graduates to boss about than a more questioning set of folk with twenty or thirty years of fascinating experience to bring to the job at hand.

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Tuesday 19 August 2014

The causes of bad policing...

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Since I'm going to write about rioting I shall start with an important caveat - when everything has been said and done riots are the fault of the rioter. There may be mitigation, perhaps a little explanation but there is never excuse. I remember Bradford's riots - thirteen years ago now but still a pretty vivid memory for many who recall what it was like:

Ilyas was captured on police cameras wearing an Afro-style wig and throwing burning cardboard through a broken window of Manningham Labour Club while 23 people were inside.  The club was burned to the ground after petrol bombs were thrown by a group of Asian youths.

That is the reality of riot as much as is the grievance that set light to the trouble. We should not forget this regardless of how we view the events that follow the riot. And we should remember that not everyone participating in the riot is doing so for reasons of protest - as we know from London's riots there are some who see the opportunity disturbance presents for a little light looting.

However all this doesn't explain or excuse another factor in the cause of protest and in escalating that protest to riot - bad policing. Here's a bit of an illustration in the words of NFL player, David Bass a native of Ferguson, Missouri:

“I was 15 and one of my best friends had just got a car from his mom, a white Lincoln, and he picked up my brother and I to go to The Loop. When we parked there were police behind us, and next thing you know, there are about 10 police cars surrounding us. They’re screaming, ‘Stay in the car! Keep your hands up! Hand over your IDs.’ People are starting to gather to watch. They took 45 minutes searching the car while we sat on the sidewalk."
 
I don't know whether Bass's memories exaggerate but, even if the incident was half as big it is still an unnecessary over-reaction from the police. An over-reaction that presages what has happened in Ferguson over recent days. A response that is all about bad policing and maybe a little bit of racism too.

But why is this? Why do police - whether in Bradford, in London or in a suburb of St Louis - get their actions so wrong? I've observed before that the police act too often as some sort of occupying army rather than the agents of a community protecting that community. Here in Bradford we have huge barracks with small windows looming over poor communities. Not just the buildings but the police vehicles and even the police are bristling with antennae and, when there's a disturbance it almost seems as if there's an excitement in the quasi-military response to riot.

And from what we've seen, the USA has even more of a problem - a police force now armed to the teeth on the back of false fears about terrorism. This militarising of the police - in terms of equipment and operations is what, in part, creates the tension between a poor community and the police whose job is to protect that community. Plus the fact that, regardless of the additional tension that stems from racial difference, those police officers are no from that community. Here in Bradford there are probably no police officers living in West Bowling or on the Allerton estate - like the social workers and community developers the police live elsewhere and visit just to ply their trade.
 
The second cause of bad policing is the tendency to see everything out of the ordinary as a threat to order - whether it's people saying unpleasant things on Twitter, folk gathering to protest some perceived injustice or simply the reaction to a crime or spate of crimes. And since "something must be done" us politicians respond with regulations that give the police more powers - we criminalise harmless possession, define disorder is such a way as to make almost any public action arrestable and we make the definition of 'anti-social behaviour' so wide as to provide the police with the power to make criminal things that even the politicians haven't defined as criminal.
 
As a result of these powers coupled with an aggressive quasi-military approach, we have replaced the idea of policing by consent with a different approach - policing as social control. With each additional power the business of law enforcement becomes less PC Dixon and more Judge Dredd with the police exercising almost arbitrary power underwritten by compliant magistrates and legislation so broadly defined as to remove any ability for peaceful resistance to the orders of a police officer.

In the end society has to respond to riot, looting and violence because decent people expect us to do just that. But we also need to ask whether tear gas, water cannon and armoured vehicles are the best way to respond. For my part I'm not sure they are the right approach since they reflect a macho, testosterone-fuelled response to disorder and merely act to build up resentment, grievance and the seeds of future disorder.
 
We need to return to the idea of policing by consent and rediscover real community policing - not merely as an operational strategy but as the entire purpose of policing. We do not need huge barracks where the brass hats dish out the orders for the day in some sort of war room. Rather we need what we lost - local police based in local police stations, the sort of places with a welcoming blue light over the door and police officers with familiar faces seen every day - more akin to Officer Krupke than to today's flak-jacketed cop with his face hidden in a helmet.

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Sunday 17 August 2014

Demonic possession and the spare bedroom...

Does Mrs McDonald's demon look like this?
This is, without doubt, the best excuse for not paying under-occupancy penalties - that thing people egregiously call the 'bedroom tax':

A woman in Liverpool claims a demon is occupying a bedroom in her apartment. If that’s not scary enough, tax collectors are also haunting her to collect overdue under-occupancy penalties because the room is occupied by a demon, not a tax-paying relative or renter. 

I know this sounds like the plot line to a 'B-movie' version of Poltergeist but this is serious stuff requiring action. And the action is exorcism:

The Liverpool Catholic Archdiocese confirms it has sent a priest to the house on several occasions to perform exorcisms and ceremonies have been carried out at Mrs. McDonald’s church, but to no avail. Meanwhile, McDonald says the demon has assaulted her and left bruises.

The problem is that Mrs McDonald can't move out because she owes rent (apparently she hasn't tried asking the demon for a contribution - there's a deal to be struck there) so she'll carry on cohabiting with this escaped denizen of the chthonic depths. They say possession is nine tenths of the law - what does that make demonic possession?

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Don't say a little prayer - the atheists think it's illegal

Unpublicised the little diner in Winston-Salem, North Carolina gave discounts to people who prayed before eating. The place didn't advertise this fact but in the spirit of evangelism, the owners of Mary's Gourmet Restaurant gave a 15% discount to people who took a moment to "push away the world" before eating.

This discount is no more for two reasons - someone got the discount and told Facebook with the result that there were thousands of likes and shares. It's plain that a discount given because people chose to pray without prompt is very different from an offer - 'if you pray before eating you get 15% off'.

The other reason is far sadder and is that an organisation called the Freedom from Religion Foundation wrote threatening the owners with legal action under the Civil Rights Act.

"As a place of public accommodation, the Civil Rights Act requires the diner to offer goods and services, which we interpret to include discounts, without regard to religion, race, and national origin," says Elizabeth Cavell, a staff attorney at the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

What a sad, soulless piece of snippy legalese. It is action like this that gives atheism and humanism a bad name. Instead of smiling at what was essentially a selfless act by the owners (it clearly wasn't a promotion) we get threats of litigation. And this merely serves to remind me what a sad and crabby old world we live in.

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Saturday 16 August 2014

Racism and the integration of immigrants

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In matters of race, Sweden is one of the most tolerant nations on earth. Yet, for that country's significant immigrant population, the fact that the neighbours don't mind you being a foreigner probably doesn't make up for the poor economic outcomes. In a striking study, Nima Sanadaji looks at how good different places are at integrating immigrants with the concern that:

In particular, low-skilled immigrants from poor countries experience high unemployment and a range of related social problems. Much has been written about the extent of the problem. In many Western European cities, entire communities of migrants are living in social and economic exclusion. The state of poverty is often persists among their children.

We're not here considering whether those immigrants should be here in the first place - that's a very different debate - but how, when they get here (wherever 'here' might be) they get on in economic and social terms. What Sanadaji does is use the World Values Surveys to look at whether the barrier to integration is attitudes (essentially racism) or outcomes. And he concludes that:

...it is difficult to conclusively say what factors that favor integration and what obstacles that stand in the way of integration. It could, for example, be argued that the people in countries such as Sweden are giving politically correct responses. These responses do not necessarily have to translate to the discrimination actually faced by immigrants on a daily basis. At the same time, it is clear that the Anglo-Saxon countries are succeeding in integration. This could be attributed to having English as their main language. It could also be attributed to market-based systems with strong incentives for work and relatively free labor markets. In short, attitudes, at least as reported by the World Value Survey, do not seem to explain the differences in integration. Although all enlightened countries should strive for the tolerant views expressed in countries such as Sweden, this does not guarantee well‑functioning integration.

The lesson here is that, if we focus merely on reducing discrimination, we may still find that those immigrant communities sit outside the mainstream and struggle to integrate, at least economically. Sanadaji's observations about disincentives to work in European welfare systems and the significance of open, flexible labour markets are perhaps as important - put simply incentives and opportunities are critical to the successful integration of new communities. Without these factors, anti-discrimination alone does not work to integrate immigrants.

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Thursday 14 August 2014

Quote of the day: on race and crime

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Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.

This is about the USA and comes from a superb article about the militarisation of the police. Don't think for a second this doesn't apply over here.

And the article? It's written by Rand Paul, a Republican Senator. Which rather kicks out at our stereotypes.

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"It's pretty much Game of Thones..." :SF, fantasy and English literature's Shakespearian creation myth

An entirely gratuitous picture of a dragon

For a very long time I played, along with other former members of Hull University Wargames Society, a postal game based on the Wars of the Roses. These days, I'm guessing that such a game would be conducted via email and social media but back them we only had post and telephone. For the game, each player controlled one noble family (I was, since you are curious, the de la Pole family led by the Duke of Suffolk - 'twas nice to keep the link to Hull) and issued instructions to the man running the game regarding alliances, marriages, battle orders and so forth. In the manner of these things, the game ended - not with a Tudor victory but with a new dynasty under the Bourchier Dukes of Essex.

So when you start reading A Song of Ice and Fire - or set out watching the marvellous TV adaptation, Game of Thrones - it is quickly clear that part of George R R Martin's inspiration came from that tangled and bloody period of history we call the Wars of the Roses. Indeed this is true and Martin has said as much -although he makes clear there's no direct 'character-to-character' correlation merely that the period cried out for reinterpretation.

So it is not a surprise that Dan Hannan finds a connection with Shakespeare in Game of Thrones - indeed that's where the quotation in my headline comes from:

During the interval of one of the performances, I overheard some Americans discussing the play in the bar. “It’s pretty much Game of Thrones,” was one man’s summary. Indeed it is.
 The chaos that comes after a usurpation, the dynastic ambitions, the moral ambiguity, the sudden betrayals, the unexpected turns of plot – all recall the drama of Westeros.

Hannan is describing the second tetralogy of history plays - Richard II, Henry IV (parts one and two), and Henry V - a period that sits right before those Wars of the Roses that inspired Game of Thrones. The problem is that Hannan, in his love for Shakespeare's matchless words, ascribes too great a power to the Bard's works. And falls into the trap that English Literature sets for us all.

What happens is that Shakespeare's characters become part of a creation myth for English Literature - Hannan says:

...he could hardly avoid echoing Shakespeare’s archetypal characters and plots. Shakespeare’s are, so to speak, the true forms. Everything else is a shadow on the cave wall. I realise that that’s a large claim but, if you’re familiar with the plays, you’ll know what I mean.

Shakespeare really isn't about the plots - he borrowed most of them, as we know - or indeed about the characters as characters. What Shakespeare did was put in the mouths of those characters wonderful, insightful, memorable and incisive words. Words that have not just changed our language but have changed the world too.

Like most SF and fantasy writers, Martin has an audience that wants to know everything. An audience that will fill on-line forums, attend conventions, write blogs and sit in serious huddles discussing the uttermost minutiae of Martin's work. And, as a result, Martin has been asked again and again what his influences are - he says stuff like:

Well, I've already named several in this chat. Jack Vance, JRR Tolkien, Maurice Druon... I think the authors who influence you most are probably the authors that you read and love when you're young, and in my case those would include Robert A Heinlein, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber. In historical fiction, Thomas B Costaine, Frank Yerby...I love Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but really I could go on listing names for an hour. There are a lot of great writers out there in all genres that I enjoy and appreciate.

The author who Martin doesn't mention is Shakespeare. And, while Martin has (thanks to a TV adaptation of his series of novels) stepped beyond his genre of fantasy and SF, that is the starting point to understanding his writing. Look at that list above and you'll see the characters that echo in Westeros - Aragorn, Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Liane. These are characters that marry the comic book to ancient legend. Tolkein did not craft his characters from Shakespearian archetypes but from the Kalevala, the poetic and prose Edda and the old legends of England and Wales, from Beowulf and the legend of the Green Knight.

 In the end though, I always think a recommendation tells a lot about where something like Game of Thones starts - here's Martin giving one:

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth. It's not a series in the same sense that mine is. it's four books, largely made up of short stories, and share only a setting with each other, and a character in the case of the middle two; the wonderfully amoral and unscrupulous Kugel the Clever, whose schemes and plots always come back to bite him in the butt. But Vance is the great stylist of sci fi and fantasy, no one writes like him, and The Dying Earth is his finest work. With my friend, I edited a tribute anthology a couple of years ago, when writers wrote stories set in the world of The Dying Earth, including myself, Neil Gaiman, Melissa Shepherd, and on and on...

George R R Martin is a fantasy and SF writer and that is where we must look for the ideas, influences and origins of A Song of Ice and Fire.  Not that Shakespeare isn't important but Martin's nod to the bard isn't about character, plot or even language but is a justification for killing off leading characters!

However, in one important respect Dan Hannan is right. If we can cope with the complexity, depth of character and involvement of Game of Thrones then we can deal with Shakespeare's plays. And if someone's journey takes them from comics through to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett then to A Song of Ice and Fire before their eyes open to Shakespeare - then making the connection that Hannan makes is brilliant. But it's a two way street - people like me who hated English Literature yet read every SF and fantasy book going arrive at Shakespeare by working backwards.

What doesn't do is to suggest that Shakespeare is the acme of literature - as if everything else by comparison is but a pot-boiler, the doodlings of lesser men. When faced with that argument, us fans of fantasy are wont to throw 'On Fairy Stories' at you or to point at the ancient English story-telling tradition that was the basis for what Shakespeare was doing. And then to stomp off muttering - as Tolkien did - that 'English literature ended with Chaucer'.

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Wednesday 13 August 2014

(Dis)owning the news...

****

There was a time when I bought two newspapers every day. In the morning I'd buy the Daily Telegraph in the shop over the road, walk to Kent House station and complete the crossword on the journey to London Bridge (the aim was to get it done before reaching Herne Hill but this seldom happened). On the way home I'd buy the London Evening News and do its three crosswords - the worst of these was the so-called children's crossword.

I write this because, back then, other than the evening news on the TV, that was the sum total of our news consumption. Almost everyone bought one or other of the national papers and in doing so maintained a huge industry of paper boys, paper stalls, newsagents, journalists, advertising executives and sales people. Not to ignore the legendary - or should I say notorious - printers with their closed shops and 'spanish practices'. Living in South London I knew a few printers - my friend in the YCs, Ian was from a whole family of Fleet Street printers (Tory voters every one). They all had private print shops and, when they needed some extra cash, would do a shift or two on the Sundays - whether this actually entailed any work was something I never fully discovered.

Newspapers were big business and they were important. Ownership mattered and those papers could and did set the national agenda, influence the outcome of political debates and make a difference to the way people voted. And the legacy of all this remains - the media is still slightly obsessed with the ups and downs of the newspapers especially that part of the media not owned by Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere.

The most recent manifestation of this obsession is the idea that we can crowdsource the funds to buy one or two of the national titles off Rupert Murdoch:

Hardly surprising, then, to see the groundswell of support for a new campaign, “Let’s Own the News” which launched this week and is inviting pledges from people who like the idea of buying The Times and The Sunday Times from Rupert Murdoch.  Backed by The Young Foundation, Let’s Own the News say that “80% of the national newspapers we read are controlled by 5 families, this is not a free press and it undermines our democracy. Our vote is worth little if a few people control the information we read. ”

So far the campaign has raised a little over £250,000 which probably isn't enough to buy the two titles right now. However,  setting aside the vanity of this project, the truth about news - or rather newspapers - is that ownership is of little relevance. We the people have, in the main, disowned newspapers.

Back in the 1970s sales for daily newspapers were around 16m and for Sunday newspapers around 20m - this is more-or-less one per household (there were about 19m households in the UK in 1975). By way on contrast, in 2000, there were 25m households and sales for daily and Sunday papers stand at around 10m apiece. This suggests that at least half - and probably more - of households did not buy a newspaper at all. This trend continues.

A hard business look at the Times and Sunday Times might suggest that these titles simply aren't viable (or likely to be viable). It makes sense for a large conglomerate to own them - they provide gravitas, have a brand that can be used elsewhere and provide an influential platform for opinion. On their own - without the protection of News Corp or a deep pocketed private trust such as the Guardian's owner - the prospects for creating a sustainable and profitable newspaper business is, to put it mildly, pretty slim.

But that's the business of the folk trying to buy the newspaper. What bugs me slightly is their argument that the change is needed to reduce the concentrated control of the news and hence the news agenda. The argument that the newspapers are owned by only 5 families completely misses the point. The real problem isn't with newspapers but with the organisation that controls nearly 40% of media output in the UK and which has a wholly disproportionate influence over the news agenda.

Changing the ownership of the Times wouldn't make a jot of difference - fewer than a million folk buy the papers and, since they disappeared behind a paywall, they don't get the millions of online visits that the Telegraph, Mail and Guardian enjoy. But reforming the BBC would make a difference. Our news consumption is via the TV, computer and mobile phone and it is here that the change must come. Put simply the case for having a state broadcaster that dominates UK online news and is funded via a poll tax is now almost impossible to justify. Rather than trying (and probably failing) to raise £100m to buy the times, the Young Foundation would serve the cause of a more open news economy much better by campaigning to scrap the licence fee.

As consumers we have disowned newspapers, they are increasingly marginal and it is hard to see a future for them in their traditional role or format. The future of news creation and distribution is online and mobile and right now the BBC is making it hard for choice and independence to succeed in this new news market. If we want to reduce the concentration of media power then the place to start is with the BBC not the Times.

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Monday 11 August 2014

Is the Alcohol Abuse APPG just a front for 'Big Pharma'?

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When the debate over cigarette packaging started the tobacco control lobby was very quick to finger some MPs - like Oliver Colville, for example - who had attended the Chelsea Flower Show on 'big tobacco's' ticket. A fair cop, I'm sure you'll agree.

Well I've another fair cop for you. Yesterday the airwaves were filled with details from a report published by the Alcohol Abuse All-party Parliamentary Group (APPG). This rehashed, courtesy of Alcohol Concern (who provide the secretariat for ths APPG), a lot of previously published proposals from the temperance lobby. This, of course, explains how that lobby was so swift to issue appropriately supportive press releases.

However, underneath all this smiling care and consideration is a link with a Danish pharmaceutical business called Lundbeck. The UK arm of this multinational business funds the work of the Alcohol Abuse APPG. Indeed if you google the connection between Tracey Crouch MP (or for that matter Ian Gilmore, the leading liver surgeon and temperance campaigner) you will find that, time and time again, they appear on a platform funded by Lundbeck or subsidiaries of Lundbeck.

So what is Lundbeck's interest in all this? Quite simply it wants to push its products and is using the MPs and doctors to do just that:

Selincro (nalmefene) was approved at the end of February and is the first new treatment for alcohol dependence in Europe for more than a decade. Lundbeck noted that the drug, a dual-acting opioid system modulator that acts on the brain’s motivational system, will be launched in other countries later this year and in 2014.

Now I'm sure Selincro is a perfectly fine product but it's pretty clear that the public health lobby should not allow itself to be captured in this way by commercial interests.

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Some public health doubletalk...

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Bradford Council (to the best of my knowledge) has no policy of supporting or not supporting a minimum unit price for alcohol. I checked and this is the response to my questioning about this article:

I have looked again at the original press response and I am clear that our response did not suggest that supporting MUP is council policy, only that Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of MUP.

It seems to have passed Public Health Bradford by but, for the past year they have been part of Bradford Council. And the thing about Councils is that policy is made by councillors not by officers. The Director knows this hence the wonderful piece of double talk above.

To save you following the link, this is what the officer told the press:

"Public Health Bradford would support the introduction of alcohol minimum unit pricing to help address alcohol misuse and its associated health problems."

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Sunday 10 August 2014

Labour - the real nasty party...

****

There is no strategy here beyond envy, hatred and some sort of desire for a warped punishment of the "rich":

"In Stalybridge I haven’t seen a house advertised at over £500,000 and we’ve got really nice mansions. There are six, seven, eight-bedroom houses there, and you can buy them…for about £400,000.

“In the North there are people who could be paying more and aren’t.

“I’d also like to look at inheritance tax. Why be scared of it, they’re dead.”

This is the authentic voice of the real nasty party, a party filled with snippy chip-wearers who see other enjoying a modest success and can think only of taxing them, of taking that money away.

This sad belief - that one person being rich is wrong when another is poor - acts only to sustain and reinforce the causes of poverty. It is a reminder that the Labour Party sees tax as a punishment for success not as a means to raise the money government needs to deliver the services we have asked it to deliver.

God forbid these horrible people ever get near government again.

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Nannying fussbucketry - it's enough to drive you to drink!

****

Tracey Crouch MP who is one of parliament's leading health fascists has sent out a 'report' from her All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Abuse. It is - no surprise - a collection of every favoured piece of intervention from the temperance, New Puritan and prohibition campaigns - health warnings on wine bottles, lower drink-driving limits, minimum unit pricing for alcohol, advertising controls and - gleefully jumping on some nonsense from Gary Lineker - sponsorship bans.

The proposals says Tracey are needed because:

“We are experiencing nothing short of a national crisis in the UK because of alcohol – we need to act now to stop it.”

Now we know this is arrant nonsense - alcohol consumption has fallen by around 20% over the past decade and the sharpest falls have been among young people. We already have some of the highest taxes on booze in the world and we invest millions in nannying the hell out of drinkers.

But our Tracey knows better - she waves as £21bn 'cost of alcohol' figure as justification. Yet we also know that this figure - even if it is remotely accurate (which it isn't) - fails to take account of the benefits we get as a society from alcohol. Not just the pleasure a drink brings for most of the population but the wages of over a million people employed making, distributing and serving drinks. Plus the billions our economy gains from the export of drinks - whisky, gin, beer and assorted other drinks are a major export industry for the UK.

Tracey Crouch and her like are po-faced spoilsports, judgemental nannies who use the problems of a few to punish the pleasures of the many. Their proposals would make for a duller, less happy and more controlled society, one where tutting little fascists with clipboards patrol the lives of ordinary folk.

This nannying fussbucketry -it's enough to drive you to drink!

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Saturday 9 August 2014

"Ooh, I've etten some stuff!" - eating out should be fun not part of a calorie-controlled diet!

We eat out more than we used to and this is reflected in the proliferation of eateries, restaurants, takeaways and other businesses serving our desire for social eating. And the nannying fussbuckets have had eating out in their sights for some while.

So far the main target has been the fast food takeaway - the chip shop and all its ethnic and creative variations. In particular the nannies hated the big US chains - McDonalds, Burger King, KFC - with their shiny outlets and smart marketing. So when righteous criticism was levelled at the takeaway the references were to these celebrations of greasy American food.

Today the average person (in the UK at least) eats out between one and two times per week and this demand is met mostly by places that offer relatively cheaper food - pubs, curry restaurants, fish and chips, pizza and so forth. It's hard to find how often people go to more fancy restaurants - for many people the answer is never but for others its a special treat. We used to go to (the now sadly closed) Weavers restaurant in Haworth for birthdays, anniversary and as a pre-Christmas treat.

So when we go to these restaurants - for a special occasion, a treat - we're not going to do this:

"Go for wholegrain or wholemeal breads, protein rich foods like lean meats, chicken, eggs and pulses and plenty of fruit and vegetables.

"Be careful with high fat extras like cheese, bacon, sour cream and mayonnaise on burgers, wraps and salads and avoid larger portion sizes.

"Avoid ordering fried sides and sugar sweetened drinks, as this will quickly increase the calorie content of your meal. If you do fancy a fizzy drink then select a diet version. If your meal does not come with vegetables or salad, order some on the side, or ask to swap a higher fat side such as chips for an undressed side salad or fruit bag instead." 

Instead we've going to pig ourselves a little big, drink a little more than normal - have something that is good for us, something the fussbuckets have forgotten about. It's called a 'good time'.

Our rediscovery of eating as a social activity is fantastic as is the fact that so many more of us can afford to do what my parents couldn't do - take their families out for a meal. But, as with all the ways in which our modern consumer society is so much better than the society of our youth, the nannying fussbuckets want to tell us that somehow it'll all end in tears. For these sad folk - who want us to have a 'fruit bag' (whatever that may be) instead of a bowl of lovely chips - everything is a problem. When we're not destroying our health with our enjoyment of life, we're threatening the planet by emitting carbon or some such scientific mumbo jumbo.

The world's po-faced puritans believe that all this pleasure and enjoyment represents a cost to society. They do not care one jot for the benefit we get from eating out, they simply want to nag us about how we're eating too much when we visit the restaurant:

"The message is that eating fast food or out in restaurants should be the exception not the norm as it can be very bad for you. In addition to the extra calories consumed people also ate more sugar, salt and saturated fats than when they are home-made food."

What this ghastly nanny fails to realise is that this is entirely the point - eating out is an indulgence, a joy and a pleasure. At the end of the meal we want to push back the chair, a big grin on our face, and say; "ooh, I've etten some stuff!" And quite frankly nibbling on a few salad leaves while feeling virtuous simply doesn't cut the mustard.

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Friday 8 August 2014

On minimum pricing for alcohol...what people working with alcoholics say

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Others have taken apart the Southampton University study that prompted all the renewed fuss but suffice it to say that I'm not really surprised at a finding that people who drink a lot spend more on alcohol. However, I am reassured by the response on minimum unit pricing for alcohol here from people who actually work with alcoholics every day - here's Vicki Beere, operations director at Project 6 in Keighley which works with people with drug and alcohol issues and their families:

"I guess it is disproportionate on the poorest people who are dependent on alcohol. Some of the possible consequences are people not being able to afford their level of alcohol use which puts them at risk of withdrawal which can be fatal. It puts them at risk of illness, risk of crime - they may feel the need to commit crime to fund their alcohol use. It also puts them at risk of poor nutrition, people have to make choices between eating and drinking, and poor physical health," says Vicki.

"We welcome the debate but would really like to see rather than increased investment in this - to influence minimum pricing will take a lot of time and money - we would rather see the money diverted into increased treatment and support for people suffering from alcohol issues and an increased profile of the prevention agenda." 

Sadly Bradford Council's officer - seemingly making up policy on the hoof - simply parroted the new puritan line.

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In praise of gentrification...

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When we look at the worst examples of urban decline we see two sorts of thing - the desperate nature of life in such marginal communities and the sense of human spirit, the little glimmers of brilliance that suggest something better may emerge. But the reality of life in the slums - whether it's in East London, Merseyside or Detroit - is not served by pretending that such communities are worth sustaining.

Yet by attacking gentrification this is precisely what we are doing. By arguing that a process of improvement driven by new people arriving in a place is a bad thing we think the place was fine as it was. Let's be clear from the start that by gentrification I don't mean slum clearance and the forcible relocation of a poor community so as to replace them with a more 'suitable' population. Gentrification is a process driven by individual choices made by free consumers not a planned and directed change under the guidance of architects and urban designers.

And wherever we see this process there are voices raised against it - voices made more 'authentic' by being from the 'community' that gentrification dislocates:

Places such as Kingsland Road and Mare Street have become the trendiest places to be, but that has bought unrest of a different sort. The people who live here are not happy.

There are a lot of issues with the social cleansing that is becoming increasingly evident around here.

I try to keep away from the word 'hipster', and call them trendies instead. But it all means the same: gentrification. This means cleaning an area up and saying if you can’t afford to be here then you have to leave.

So says Pauline Pearce the women who famously stood up to rioters from her 'community' as they looted and pillaged their way through Hackney. Now she says those same young people cannot afford to stay in the area because the 'hipsters' (worse still the article is couched by Guardian sub-editors to portray the change racially charged - black versus white - rather than merely rich against poor) are charging £5 for a cappuccino.

What Mrs Pearce is discovering is the reality for a lot of young people. Not just the young people from poor black communities in inner London but young people from the leafy suburbs. Does she really think that a young man or woman brought up in Chislehurst or Cheam can afford to stay there other than by squatting with Mum and Dad? So they move and take with them their hipsterish ways with some - pale and wan - landing up in Hackney. Where they set about making their mark on the place with cafes and restaurants, bars and shops that suit the lifestyle.

And the existing inhabitants - the ones who haven't sold up to enable that hipster immigration - look on wondering what's happening, how (as Mrs Pearce puts it):

It has caused real problems for the youngsters. A lot of them don’t know where they should go now, or where their real communities are. Many of the venues they would have enjoyed in the past have shut down. Instead, we’ve been left with these trendy places that nobody can afford to go to. 

Gentrification changes places. I remember East Dulwich and Peckham from my youth thirty-odd years ago - one a slightly tired, dowdy place, the other somewhere you just didn't visit. So when I read Helen Graves' Food Stories it is with a sense of wonder that these places, once so tatty and dangerous, are now filled with fine eateries and vibrant life. Such is the process of gentrification, a process where people move to the margins of their tolerance in order to afford life in London.

When I left London it was because it had lost its appeal. For sure there was still the West End and a pretty decent nightlife but the choice was living on a train shuttling back and forth to work from Gravesend or Basildon, or finding a pokey flat out east where you needed three locks on the door and daren't go out at night. And the life we glimpse in Pauline Pearce's moan and Helen Graves' celebrations simply didn't exist.

Now London seems to have found its spirit again. Partly this is about migration both from overseas and from elsewhere in the UK. But mostly it's about gentrification - those hipsters, bohemians, trendies and what have you. I see little sparks of this process now escaping from London to places like Salford, Leeds, perhaps even Bradford. And this is a good thing, it is how urban places evolve. It is much better than the soulless, organised new garden cities that the planners would have us living in with their neat lawns, keep off signs and concrete shopping centres.

It's important we accommodate existing communities rather than force them to another place. But their presence should not be a signal to try and prevent the process of change in urban places. Indeed, this change presents opportunities for that community not just for the incoming hipsters and trendies. The change is not a threat but a challenge, gentrification should be a boon not a bone of contention.

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