The public aren't so keen on nannying fussbucketry after all!

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A little glimmer of hope. A small break in the dark New Puritan clouds. It seems that the British public - or a large proportion of it - aren't so very keen on nanny:

There is little support for nannying.  Asked if Government should provide advice on what foods to eat and how much to drink, 48 per cent disagree and only 22 per cent agree.

I'm guess that the fussbuckets will carry on - after all they know so much better. Shame then that that British public rather doubts that they do:

Asked if politicians and civil servants are well-equipped to make personal decisions on their behalf, nearly two out of three Britons (65 per cent) disagree, versus only 9 per cent who agree.

Perhaps, in the light of these findings the Church of Public Health will back off a little especially given that the good old British public things their latest wheeze, plain packs for fags, won't work and is an imposition.

Just a quarter of people in the UK (28 per cent) think that selling cigarettes in plain packaging would discourage younger people from taking up smoking, the stance that health organisations are currently taking to push the law in this territory. Only 25 per cent of smokers agree that plain packs would put children off trying cigarettes.

And all the evidence suggests that the British public have got it right.

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It's not good that three out of ten people aren't satisfied with their local council is it?

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This level of customer dissatisfaction in the private sector would lead to the sacking or directors, headline sin the business pages and angry words all round. And the survey reveals the public's low opinions of their council:

Opinions regarding council efficiency have also seen an improvement, rising to 52% satisfaction since June last year. 

The report here seems almost celebratory - nearly half the public think councils are inefficient! And there's more:

The survey found a 6% drop in the number of Britons content with the work done to keep residents informed of council services since 2010, a figure which now lies at 54%.

Similarly, the LG Insight Populus poll found that 45% of residents believe their council take account of public opinion during the decision making process, a figure that has fallen by 2% since 2010. 

So there you go council folks - much of the public think you're doing a pretty poor job. Yet no-one is castigating councils - calling for resignations, restructures of abolition - for being considered so ineffective.

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Well that's probably because people are healthy...

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The nannying fussbuckets really don't get it, do they?

Research from employee engagement company ORC International has revealed that just 17% of smokers concede that they may be unhealthy or very unhealthy as a result.


The poll of more than 1,000 working-age Britons found that just 12% considered themselves to be unhealthy or very unhealthy, despite the fact that nearly a quarter regularly smoked and 41% drank on a regular basis.

All this may be true but the simple fact of smoking and drinking does not make you ill. At worst, what it does in increase your risks of being ill. For some conditions - lung cancer for smokers, for example - the risk is considerable. But despite this most smokers don't get lung cancer.

But then it seems ORC International (is their Chief Executive called Saruman by any chance?) have a product to flog:

ORC has also developed a new "Healthy Workplace" survey tool, which is due to be launched this month. It is designed to enable organisations to gather insights into the state of wellbeing in their workplace and to implement wellbeing programmes.

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Some tips on geodemographics for Shelter...

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Back in the days before the PC became ubiquitous, in a time when direct marketing was direct marketing, a new science arrived. It was called geodemographics and we (by which I mean planners in direct marketing agencies) were smitten, deeply smitten. This was the Eldorado of targeted marketing, the Shangri la of response advertising, the holy grail of direct mail. And we played with it – we created mailing lists by ‘profiling’ the electoral register, we segmented and targeted the big agglomerations of address data on the files of big finance and retail businesses and we linked the base geodemographics, the idea that ‘birds of a feather flock together’, to other information collected about customers.

And we learned a couple of important lessons really quickly (mostly through the principle of ‘test and learn’ that direct marketers, uniquely among the marketing breeds, apply to all their work):

1. Geodemographics, for all its wonderfulness is a pretty blunt targeting tool – yes it improves on the random selection from the population but only very slightly. Only where the profile indicated that a given place, typically a postcode area, was at least five times more likely to contain people with a given behaviour did we consider it worthy of selection. And that was for a door drop not for expensive direct mail – for that we needed ten times at least.
2.  For some products and services there simply wasn’t much evidence – beyond confirming existing income-based differences – of a significant variation from par to mean that the ACORN, MOSAIC or Superprofiles analysis. Too often I tore open with rising excitement the envelope containing the profile for a client only to see a flat profile of mostly academic value. To make things work for the client we turned back to old fashioned techniques – using known responders, previous customers and incentivised two-stage campaigns to get new buyers.

So I smile when I see the latest super clever system – using ACORN, MOSAIC or some other geodemographic profiling system as a tool for marketing, communications or even ‘activism’. And the smile is a little wan since these approaches are misleading (to say the least) and of little real value. Here’s an example from housing charity, Shelter:

The Shelter Housing Insights for Communities resource is a must-have for anyone involved in community consultation on housing development. Built using ACORN and extensive bespoke national surveys on housing attitudes, this resource is a unique insight into the housing views and aspirations of local communities; providing advice on cost-effective and targeted consultation.

Using this system you can pop in a postcode and it will tell you whether the local folk are (or maybe aren’t) NIMBYs or BANANAs. Or at least you can at the “ward level” – a level that, in Bradford, is about as much use for getting any understanding as the proverbial chocolate fireguard. I can get a postcode assessment – mine is 3I33 (comfortably off settled suburbia, middle income couples) – but have to track back into Shelter's national assessment to make any sense at all of the information.

And then we learn the bleedin’ obvious – people who live in poor housing especially in cities are supportive of new housing development whereas folk living in suburbia (and especially the wealthier bits of that suburbia) are more likely to oppose housing development. Well knock me over with a feather, that’s some insight!

Here in Cullingworth – which is shaded a deep red for ‘we don’t like housing development’ – the truth is more nuanced and won’t be helped by the patronising ‘communications planning’ that Shelter propose.  What we don’t want – and will die in a ditch to stop – is the sort of massive development that will change the entire nature of the place. But the development of a few houses here or there we can live with – yes we want sensitivity, we don’t like fine old houses being knocked down to make way for ‘ticky-tacky’ houses and we’d like the developer to pay attention to traffic issues and road safety.

Yet Shelter – armed with their geodemographics and an opinion survey – want to cast us as unbending NIMBYs. Not only are they wrong, they are misleading developers and undermining the real efforts of councils, planners and local communities to meet housing needs without destroying the nature of a place. Plus of course – as we found out 20 years ago – geodemographics, even supplemented with other data, is a pretty blunt instrument for marketing. A lesson Shelter (who probably didn’t talk to any direct marketers in creating their whizzo system) still needs to learn.

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Nationalism, immigration and national recovery - a dark thought

A Poster from the US National Recovery Administration of 1933

 

In my meanderings round Bradford, in thousands of conversations with folk from every conceivable ethnic, economic and political background, I have often heard non-white people bemoaning new immigration. After all like the white working class, our Black and Asian workers feel threatened by the influx of new people. And – just as white people worry about the impact of new cultures, so do established Asian and Black communities!

And the racism! Some of the racist people I know are Pakistanis – some comments about Bengalis, Chinese, Arabs and Jews cause even a hardened old hand like me to wince. This isn’t to do down my Asian friends and acquaintances but to point out that they live in the same city as the white folk and that the pressures of that urban life produce a related set of prejudices, assumptions and biases to that we are familiar with from white racists.

Now Searchlight, the anti-racism group have conducted a survey looking at attitudes to immigration, race and ethnicity. And here’s one of the findings:

According to the survey, 39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that "immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country".

Stop and think a little. Is what we are seeing the “deracination” of immigration as an issue? Or are these opinions a reflection of racism becoming a more complicated than our current depiction of “white prejudice”? I don’t know but is reminds us again of the challenges we face in managing the competing needs of the economy, community and individual families.

Understandably, the left-wing opponents of nationalism find political concerns in the polling – not surprising given this finding:

 ...48% of the population would consider supporting a new anti-immigration party committed to challenging Islamic extremism, and would support policies to make it statutory for all public buildings to fly the flag of St George or the Union flag.

I guess that these people would also be susceptible to protectionism, to tougher punishments for criminals, to less tolerance of bad behaviour and to a host of intrusive measures aimed at creating that stable, predictable, mildly hierarchical society beloved of Fabians. This is why we must watch with care the debate inside the Labour Party – the ascendancy of beer-bellied, rough-talking union masters may just, if connected to the agenda of immigration control, nationalism and protectionism, create a terrible government. A government badging itself one of "national recovery" and employing all the techniques of modern media to enforce compliance - far more effectively that with America's NRA in the 1930s.

"Perhaps the most famous case was Jacob Maged, the fourty-nine year-old immigrant dry cleaner who spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging thirty-five cents to press a suit, when the NRA had insisted that all loyal Americans must charge at least fourty cents"

...one that would destroy the great good that has come from 50 years of free trade and free enterprise and squash any real hope of recovery.

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