May 28, 2009
Posted in Drugs, Politics, Society at 10:41 pm by Paul Sagar
I’ve written before about my belief that the existing prohibition on drugs is not working, albeit in a narrowly focused way.
One of the reasons I don’t think it’s working is that, at present, there is no honest discourse on drugs. Now, that isn’t a necessary feature of prohibition: we could have prohibition as well as a grown-up, mature conversation about drugs that admits there are pros as well as cons to drug use. But at present we don’t have such a discourse.
For example, I have in front of me a leaflet entitled “The Truth About DRUGS”, with the tagline “Say No to Drugs, Say Yes to Life”. It appears to be funded, ultimately, by an organisation called Foundation for a Drug-Free World, which is apparently based in Los Angeles, of all places. Apparently it is part of an “international…drug prevention programme to educate young people on the truth about drugs.”
So, in its own words, this publication purports to educate the young on the truth about drugs.
It fails. Miserably.
For a start, take the section entitled “Why do people take drugs?” Apparently people take drugs:
- to fit in
- to escape or relax
- they are bored
- it makes them seem grown up
- to rebel
- to experiment
- because they want to change something about their lives
- because they think drugs are a solution
It’s probably true that people take drugs for all those reasons. But there’s another, rather important one. People take drugs – brace yourself – because…they have a good time when they take drugs!
They don’t die, they don’t kill anyone, they don’t hurt or maim themselves, they don’t jump out of windows, they don’t lose their jobs etc etc. What they do have is a good time. Later, they go to bed. The next day they wake up and, although they might feel rough (you know, like having a hangover), they carry on with their lives as normal, functioning members of society.
It is not “educating” the youth to leave out the main reason people take drugs: that it’s fun, it’s nice, and the world doesn’t end.
Yes, some people’s lives are destroyed by drugs. It would be ludicrous to say otherwise. But it’s also ludicrous to pretend that most people who take drugs have their lives ruined. They just don’t.
And remember, some people’s lives are destroyed by alcohol (which is legal, depsite being unambiguously more harmful than cannabis). Yet not everybody who drinks beer becomes an alcoholic. Likewise, not everybody who smokes a spliff becomes a heroin addict, stealing handbags to fuel their life-destroying habit. Which of course brings us to the fact that not all drugs are the same.
Furthermore, many aspects of this pamphlet are ludicrously sensationalist. For example, there’s a quote from “Ann”:
“Ecstasy made me crazy. One day I bit glass, just like I would have bitten an apple. I had to have my mouth full of pieces of glass to realise what was happening to me”
Anybody who has ever taken ecstasy, or been around people who have taken ecstasy, will know that to present this as a typical experience is farcical. People under the influence of ecstasy want to hug everyone and declare how much they love them. Eating glass is just about the last thing they are likely to do. This raises the question of whether this quote by “Ann” is perhaps completely made up – which I suspect it is.
It would be nice to think that this leaflet is an extreme case, funded by American nutters. But it’s not. I remember exactly this sort of dishonesty being taught to me as gospel truth in secondary school (though at that point I already knew, from personal experience, I was being fed lies).
At present, the prohibition on illegal drugs goes hand in hand with a widespread dishonesty about drugs and the people who use them. I don’t think it has to be that way. I believe prohibition is compatible with mature, honest debate and information. But I also believe that mature and honest debate and information about drugs will lead most people to realise that prohibition isn’t working. Why? Because it denies mature responsible adults the free choice of what they want to do with their bodies, puts vasts amounts of money into the hands of violent criminals, criminalises entire sections of societies and wastes money on a war that can never be won at the expense of worthier causes like hospitals and schools.
Which raises a final question: to what extent do the people producing systematic dishonesty about drugs – and I include here the tabloid media – want to prevent a mature and honest debate, precisely because they think it will lead to the end of prohibition? How significant is that, and what does it tell us about their attitude to letting people make decisions based on truthful information?
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May 27, 2009
Posted in History, Media, Politics, Society at 11:02 am by Paul Sagar
Yesterday, David Cameron published an article in The Grauniad claiming that if (when?) elected he will instigate “sweeping” reforms.
Anyone who actually reads what Cameron proposes and knows anything at all about politics will spot his piece for what it is: vacuous, hollow and opportunistic. Writing in today’s Grauniad, Simon Jenkins summarises much of Cameron’s bluster accordingly:
His [Cameron's] bon-bons yesterday included a curb on the prime minister’s power to call elections (unbelievable), free Commons votes on committee stages of bills (unbelievable), and an end to prime ministers taking “major decisions” without recourse to parliament (meaningless). The Tory leader also wants to give local councils powers to do things they can already do, such as save post offices, but will not allow them the necessary means, an uncapped rate.
I would also add that Cameron’s out-of-hand dismissal of any form of PR should sound alarm bells. Firstly, Cameron appears willing to treat all PR alike; as though a closed party list system – which vests huge amounts of power in party officials and is undoubtedly worse than First Past the Post – is equivalent to Single Transferable Vote (which I’m in favour of). This is either ignorant or dishonest on his behalf. Neither is appealing in a potential future leader.
Secondly, it gives the lie to Cameron’s claim to be the reform candidate. If he really wants to shake up Westminster, then he could do worse than to overhaul an electoral system that vests power in a few voters in a few marginal constituencies, and effectively disenfranchises a majority of the electorate whilst denying small parties fair representation. Of course, Cameron doesn’t want to do that, because the present system gave his party 70 years of power in the last century, and is set to reward him with a staggering majority at the next election.
Which is all very instructive. Cameron is interested in reform insofar as it makes him look good and wins him plaudits. Genuine reform that might take a bite out of the Tory apple is dismissed out of hand. Cameron is not the reform candidate, he is the opportunistic candidate.
What makes this all-the-more depressing is that he is getting away with it. Jenkins optimistically writes:
In Britain, students are taught that tradition and the probity of the ruling class are sufficient guard against elective dictatorship. It is no longer enough. That is why I believe that only a written constitution will free us from reliance on the wishy-washy, easy-to-discard pledges of leaders such as Blair, Brown and Cameron. The game is up. Their word is not to be trusted. Liberty from overpowering government must become compulsory.
But the point about Cameron is that the game is not up; people still trust his word. To the politically-initiated, his reforms are obviously vacuous. Yet most people are not well-versed in the workings of Westminster. Cameron’s article and speeches on reform are not meant for informed politicos: they are meant for the man in the street.
And the thing is, it works. Last night a friend of mine, who is highly intelligent and informed, said the following:
I know that Cameron’s making it up, and I know that he isn’t genuine. But when I’m not thinking about what he says and I’m just watching half-watching him on the telly, my unthinking response is ‘yeah, he seems like a pretty good guy’
Cameron is more like Tony Blair with every passing day (and he thereby fulfills the hopes of a Tory Party that picked him hoping he was precisely that). The substance of what Cameron says isn’t what defines him, it’s his ability to put people at ease, to make them think ‘yeah, he seems like a pretty good guy’.
As yet, we still have no idea what the Conservatives’ actual policies are on pretty much anything that matters. Cameron’s proposed ”reforms” are vacuous and opportunistic. Yet polls show he is almost certainly going to be the next Prime Minister.
From 1997-2007 we had a Premier who put people at ease, but ultimately did not know why he was in power. The results included a disastrous illegal war, the widening of social and economic inequality, and the foundations for an economic collapse of era-defining proportions. Can we afford to repeat such an experiment? Well, that’s what we’re heading for.
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May 25, 2009
Posted in BNP, Media at 10:18 am by Paul Sagar
EDIT: Just going through old search terms again, and can’t believe I missed the following:
animal sex
sex
thighboot magazines
How many hits must you have to scroll through on Google after searching “sex” to get here? And as for “animal sex”, how on earth does a search for that come up with my blog? Ditto for ”thighboot magazines”, whatever those are.
——–
WordPress has a nifty little tool which allows you to see what terms people have put into search engines in order to find your blog. Over the last couple of months this blog has been getting increasing amounts of traffic, and doubtless some of it is due to search engine results. So here’s a selection of the terms used to find my ramblings.
There’s loads of “David Tenant”, “Robert Peston” and “Bad Conscience”, which you’d expect, but then there’s:
bad consiounse
and also
i have a bad conscience
which was presumably the search of somebody looking for atonement. Or there’s simply:
www.badconscience.wordpress.com
which raises the question of why bother to use a search engine at all?
There are some searches that seem plain weird:
eggs 7 cents profit
until one remembers the previous post about Catch 22, in which case it doesn’t seem weird at all. Then again, there’s:
how much can you sell tomatoes for
which frankly I don’t have the answer to and don’t believe this blog ever will.
My ravings about estate agents seem to have led a few people here:
renting agents bastards
why are all estate agents bastards?
Why indeed? But then, one does have to worry about some of the people out there:
why do we have to give the estate agent £500 no returnable deposit?
Well, I think it’s probably a case of if you have to ask, you’ll never know.
Then there’s the search terms which are slightly worrying, including:
vote for the bnp
why is police brutality bad?
and perhaps best of all:
are schizophrenic people right?
Then there’s the plain weird:
moobs surgery in Glasgow
rendered bald
i spend all income on beer elasticity of
as well as the astoundingly ignorant:
dies hiv die in soap and water?
Finally, however, there’s my favourite. I still have absolutely no idea what this search term referred to, or how it go somebody to my blog. But it did:
sex address for fuking at sagar mp
I will give a prize to the person who comes up with the best interpretation of what that means. Answers in comments.
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May 24, 2009
Posted in BNP, Education, Media, Other blogs, Politics, Society at 12:08 pm by Paul Sagar
A lot of talk is being given over to whether the present MP’s expenses scandal can act as the stimulus to electoral reform, moving us away from a First Past the Post (FPTP) system to Proportional Representation (PR). For what it’s worth, I think it’s unlikely to happen. The nature of political scandals is that they are on the front pages for a couple of weeks (though this one is bigger than most, now into its third week), and then events move on. Politicians hunker down and wait for the storm to pass, making whatever reforms are required to keep the house from blowing down – but going no further than that.
I predict that neither the Tories nor Labour have enough of a vested interest in switching to PR to actually do it. The Lib Dems – who have the vested interest – won’t be able to make it happen. The expenses scandal will pass, and things will revert to normal.
Which isn’t to say I think it’s a good thing. I don’t. FPTP is outmoded, undemocratic and past its sell-by-date. Our democracy vests power in a few thousand swing votes in 1/3 of constituencies. Most votes are therefore made irrelevant (because cast in safe seats), and 2/3 of MPs effectively have jobs for life, which encourages complacency (and possibly, corruption). Reforming the electoral system could also have another advantage, though one normally (and in my view, mistakenly) presented as a disadvantage: reducing the constituency-MP link.
Let me be clear about this. MPs have too much constituency work to deal with at present. They are expected to sort out people’s plumbing , gripes with neighbours, the amount of dog poo on the local playing fields and so on – whilst also expected to oversee and scrutinise complex national legislation, usually hundreds of miles from their elected base. The result is that they can’t do the latter properly, whilst the former needs to be re-localised.
Constituency work should be taken care of by elected councillors or possibly by creating new positions of elected local mayors whose job it is to sort out local issues. By switching to PR, we could re-design the system so as MPs retain a link to constituencies (thus working as representatives) without being burdened by mountains of constituency case-work they are not suited to dealing with.
I had thoughts such as these in mind when I wrote to the Observer complaining of Henry Porter describing Parliamentary recess as a “holiday”. Parliamentary recess is not a holiday – and Henry Porter knows it. But he wanted to score cheap points rather than raise serious issues, which was a shame, because he normally writes sensible things.
On the subject of PR, it is worth quickly addressing a very bad argument typically raised against it: that “extreme parties” will be elected. Take this from today’s Observer:
Electoral reform could make it easier to remove MPs who have transgressed, although its detractors argue that it risks benefiting the BNP, Ukip and other fringe parties.
This “argument” is one I remember rote-learning at A-Level, in order to spew it back unthinkingly in the exam as a reason against switching to PR.
It’s a terrible “argument”.
If we believe that national legislatures and executives should be composed of elected representatives, then it’s ludicrous to claim that some systems of elected representation are unacceptable because they will lead to people electing “extreme” representatives. It’s all or nothing: either you think people should be governed by representatives they choose themselves, or you don’t.
Note that it’s also highly insulting and paternalistic to say PR would be bad because it would lead to “extreme” parties being rewarded. It’s to tell voters that they cannot be trusted because they might use their votes to elect parties that the existing political elites (who make the rules) don’t like – hence the system is being purposefully structured to control and counter people’s electoral decisions. That’s something I find deeply troubling.
It is also worth noting that with regard to extreme parties, FPTP promotes an unhealthy laziness. Take, for example, those who oppose the hate and bile of extreme parties like the BNP. Under FPTP we know that the BNP aren’t going to get elected to Westminster – thus there’s an incentive not to care about them very much. In turn, there’s an incentive not to bother having a free and open discussion about what is wrong with them, and why their views are heinous and to be rejected.
By contrast, under PR the threat of the BNP gaining some national traction provides an incentive the other way: to engage in public discourse about why the BNP are a disgusting political outfit, and why people should vote against them. Indeed, the upcoming EU elections – run on PR – are a demonstration of precisely this. That to me seems like a far healthier approach to democracy than complacently sheltering behind the cover of an electoral system which systematically disincentives people from engaging in open debate and actually thinking about their political views.
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May 22, 2009
Posted in History, Tax Justice at 5:32 pm by Paul Sagar
If you ask a representative of a secrecy jurisdiction – the more accurate term for what is normally known as a tax haven – about their business standards, they will reply by telling you two things.
Firstly they will say that they are not a secrecy jurisdiction. They will feign outrage at the suggestion that their lack of a public register detailing company accounts, high number of unidentified trusts and woeful dearth of tax information exchange with other nations is evidence that they operate banking secrecy. Heavens no! They are committed to transparency. Honest!
Secondly, they will tell you that they have the absolute highest standards of business integrity. They only allow scrupulous businesses and individuals to invest in their “tax efficient” jurisdiction. Can they prove this? Well, not directly – but hey, they don’t operate banking secrecy, therefore only clean business is attracted to their paradise of transparency! Right. Right?
Take a second to check the logic: “We don’t operate banking secrecy, because we only accept scrupulous investors, because we don’t operate banking seriously, because we only accept scrupulous investors…” And cyclically it goes off into eternity. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum, as the Romans would say.
I recently had direct experience of trying to break this circular logic when I met some representatives of a prominent Offshore Financial Centre, which I would certainly class as a secrecy jurisdiction. I asked them to prove that they weren’t committed to banking secrecy by detailing how many pieces of information they had exchanged with other nations. I asked when their company accounts would be open to audit by being placed on public register. I wanted to know when the Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) they claimed to have signed were actually coming into force.
I didn’t get answers to any of those questions. What I did get was a catch-all reply that went: “Hey, we’re fully committed to stopping crime – if you know of any criminals, we’ll help you catch them!”
This is the closest thing secrecy jurisdictions have to a trump card. It’s their claim to the moral high-ground. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stand up to a moment’s consideration. The problem with criminals who operate their finances via offshore is that usually the criminality cannot be proved until authorities have access to their accounts. Yet the offshore centres in which the criminals stuff their stolen wealth will refuse to release any accounts until their client is proved to have engaged in criminality. See the problem? You can’t prove criminality until you have the accounts, but can’t get the accounts until you have proved criminality. Yossarian would recognise the predicament only too well.
When secrecy jurisdictions claim that they are committed to fighting criminality, no rational observer can conclude that this commitment is anything but hollow. Unfortunately, in the world of offshore rationality – let alone morality – has got little to do with anything. Secrecy jurisdictions know that they hold the cards, and they’re not letting them go.
So we are stuck in an awkward situation. The commitment to banking secrecy means we can’t prove that tax havens attract the criminal and the unscrupulous. Secrecy jurisdictions offer hollow proclamations of their commitment to fighting criminality – and we can’t prove that their very nature attracts the criminal, due to the Catch-22 situation highlighted above.
At least, not in the present we can’t.
But it turns out that if we delve into the past we get a very good idea of the kinds of people banking secrecy attracts – and it’s not a pretty picture.
I’m currently working in the National Archives for the Tax Justice Network, researching the development of many of Britain’s ex-colonial territories into a network of tax havens. In the process I’ve come across some correspondence relating to attempts by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to expand their tax haven operations. From 1970-2 the BVI sought to increase bank secrecy laws and offer extended tax exemptions to development investors as a way of attracting them to the Islands.
The Inland Revenue, the Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office were appalled – and with good reason.
I provide you here with some sample correspondence about a certain Dr Henwood, who put himself forward to the BVI as a developer. Dr Henwood was hoping to invest in companies granted extensive tax exemptions. The correspondence – as far as I can tell, the file isn’t wholly clear – was generated by some alarmed members of the BVI administration, who were very worried about the sorts of chaps being attracted by their recently expanded tax haven legislation. They aksed the Treasury for information – because after all, their own banking secrecy laws constrained their ability to get it themselves.
This first page is a bit boring, laying out some basics:
But the second page is altogether more jaw-dropping:
Then there’s some further correspondence about Mr Henwood, who apparently doesn’t pay his rent:
Then there is the letter from the Bank of England (I think; the file’s not entirely clear), concluding against “any involvement with Henwood in any shape or form”:
This correspondence is instructive.
Look at the kind of person who is attracted to investing in jurisdictions that enact banking secrecy and offer extended tax exemptions.
Whilst it can certainly be argued that all development projects run the risk of attracting unscrupulous investors, there is a clear difference between secrecy jurisdictions and other nations. After all, do we know whether Dr Henwood succeeded in taking advantage of the BVI’s tax secrecy measures? There’s no indication in the National Archives file one way or the other. Given the BVI’s secrecy measures, we may never know. And that’s the point. Banking secrecy means people like Henwood can’t be tracked if they do manage to get inside.
This gives the lie to the claims by secrecy jurisdictions that they only accept investment from scrupulous investors. The point of banking secrecy is not just that third-parties (e.g. foreign governments) are denied information, it’s that the secrecy jurisdiction itself doesn’t ask questions of the investor. That’s part of the very appeal of such places to those who are inclined to use them.
The above correspondence arose because some concerned figures within the BVI administration were alarmed at the characters their banking legislation was attracting. Even if Henwood was denied access to the BVI (and we don’t know if he was, thus further illustrating the problem), how many like him got through? And if Henwood was denied access, how do we know he didn’t just go somewhere even more secretive in the early 1970s than the BVI, like the Cayman Islands? What guarantee can we possibly have that the Dr Henwoods of today are not gleefully setting up shop in the world’s myriad secrecy jurisdictions?
We don’t know the answers to these questions (except for the last one, which is almost certainly “none”). The fact that we don’t know the answers highlights the problem of banking secrecy. It also demonstrates the paucity of claims by tax haven jurisdictions that they oppose criminality. For how can they, when we have to wait 30 years for Government records to be declassified, and rely on the chance correspondence between concerned officials increasingly aware that the genie has escaped the bottle, to even get a glimpse of what goes on in these places?
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Posted in Media, Other blogs, Politics, Society at 10:37 am by Paul Sagar
Rowenna Davis has written an excellent piece for The Guardian. She points to the fact that the most vulnerable people are being denied things as basic as milk for babies, or a place to sleep when pregnant, whilst (some) MPs claim for duck islands and moat-cleaning.
Annoyingly, the Guardian has relegated the piece to its online “society” pages. This is, apparently, because the plight of abandoned asylum seekers is a little too dark and dirty for the queesy sensibilities of the average middle class reader.
Which is a shame, because what Rowenna has uncovered is shocking and harrowing.
Go read.
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Posted in Feminism and Gender Equality, History, Media, Politics, Society at 9:51 am by Paul Sagar
Whenever there’s an article about feminism or gender on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, it inevitably attracts comments from those convinced there are “radical feminists” subverting society. Take this extreme example from “Thunderchild”:
Personally, I consider the likes of Women’s Aid etc some of the most sinister organisations operating in the UK today. They are little more than anti-male propaganda outlets. I have known “rape survivors” and volunteers for such organisations who all have a very dim view of what goes on behind their closed doors. One summed it up by describing them as places where women are taught to be perpetual victims and how to hate men
Most respondents, however, don’t wish to label organisations helping female rape victims “sinister propaganda outlets”. A more common reaction to articles on feminism and gender inequality is to reply, sincerely, that British women have already achieved equality, so what’s all the fuss? After all, many women now work to earn independent livings – women whose mothers were restricted to cooking, cleaning and childcare. And compared with places like Saudi Arabia the UK appears a beacon of equality.
But appearances don’t tell the whole story. To see the truth of modern inequality we must go beyond simple comparisons with bygone eras and backwards theocracies.
Consider something as simple as getting out of bed. My girlfriend gets up 40 minutes earlier than me, because that’s the time required to wash her hair and apply make-up before work. My hair is short enough to not need washing every morning, and society doesn’t require me to paint my face before I show it. If you think society doesn’t demand that of a woman, watch the famous clip of Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent. Part of the reason the audience mocks her is that women are expected to make efforts – costing time and money – over their appearances that men simply aren’t. When women fail to make those efforts, the reaction is ridicule.
Or take a trip to the newsagent. There you’ll find dozens of magazines and “newspapers” (should The Sun, Star and Sport be considered such) plastered with naked women. These women have tiny waists and enormous breasts. They look very little like women I know, not least because most of the pictures are digitally altered. The message of these images is that women are available sexual commodities for male consumption. Is there a parallel the other way? Well, when David Beckham’s Armani underwear advert was plastered on double-decker buses, there was much consternation and comment about his larger-than-average member being waved in our collective faces. The fact this generated so much attention, when the exact same treatment is applied to women on a daily basis with no such discussion, speaks volumes.
And then there’s the statistics. Here’s some of the worst: 30% of women earn under £100 per week, versus 14% of men. The pay-gap between men and women has risen to 17.1%. Female MPs make up 19.5% of the total while 19.7% of peers are women, meaning the UK ranks 58th in terms of female representation, behind Angola and Afghanistan. Women make up 11.7% of UK FTSE 100 company boards. In 2006 women made up 1% of senior ranks in the armed forces, 26% of civil service top management, 18% of trade union General Secretaries or equivalent, and 21% of local authority Chief Executives. Oh, and 70% of married UK men still do no housework, meaning today’s women are not so free from cooking, cleaning and childcare after all.
It’s not up for debate whether men and women have equality in modern society. They don’t. Modern gender inequality is simply less obnoxious, less bare-faced and less extreme than its historical and cultural comparisons. But it still matters.
The problem is, many people sincerely don’t believe that our society is still unequal. I couldn’t find statistical data on public perceptions of gender inequality when researching this piece. But the Ipsos Mori poll showing 1 in 7 thought it acceptable to hit a wife or girlfriend if she wore “sexy or revealing clothes in public”, or was “nagging or constantly moaning at him” was alarming.
I strongly suspect that most Britons believe – as I did only a couple of years ago – that gender equality is here, and that the only complaining voices are “axe-grinding, man-hating feminists”. I would like to have ended this piece by proclaiming that we stop debating the fact of inequality, and start tackling it. But how far can we tackle a problem that many – including many women – don’t even believe exists?
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May 17, 2009
Posted in Other blogs, Politics at 9:14 pm by Paul Sagar
Over at Mark Reckons, there’s a very interesting piece showing an apparent statistical correlation between MPs having a safe seat and abusing the expenses system.
This is a great post, for two reasons. Firstly, because the analysis itself is elegant yet compelling. Secondly, because it proves that blogs can be more than just an “echo chamber” for “proper journalism”.
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May 16, 2009
Posted in Economics, Other blogs, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society, Tax Justice at 6:56 pm by Paul Sagar
Just in case anybody missed this at Liberal Conspiracy, Sunder Katwala – who is head honcho of the Fabian Society, and also blogs extensively at Next Left – has written a simply outstanding piece about social immobility in football, and its implications for wider society.
I’m reproducing it here with permission, because everyone should read it:
You can learn a lot, growing up, from football. Local identities across Britain, European geography from club competition. The location of the cruciate ligament and other crucial medical science issues. Basic arithmetic, for league tables and goal difference, though also now an early introduction to highly leveraged debt finance. A weekly masterclass in cliche and mixed metaphors. Even, it was once rumoured, fraternity, solidarity and the character education to deal with victory and defeat: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”, wrote Albert Camus, the famous goalkeeper whose works appear to be mysteriously understudied in the Chelsea dressing room.
If we seem to be losing that battle, perhaps football could yet prove an important lens through which to study the big arguments about political ideas, outcomes and distributional fairness in society as well as sport. Our study of “football mobility”, by myself and Tom Stratton, published today on the Fabian website offers what we think may even be the first comprehensive study of social mobility in club football. We have called it ‘Sing When You’re Winning: What we can learn from football’s collapsed social mobility’
We analysed three pretty standard questions about opportunity, meritocracy, mobility and competitiveness, assessing these across English football history.
Firstly, who can have prizes? More teams competing to win would be good evidence of meritocracy. We found three distinct eras in the post-war period as the top honours became more narrowly contested and the magic of the FA Cup was lost.
Second, is there room at the top? We wanted to know whether promoted teams could compete on equal terms, or whether the dream was to avoid relegation.
Thirdly, is downward mobility possible too? Did past success guarantee future success, or could even the mightiest fear relegation, as happened to Manchester United in 1974 just six years after Matt Busby and George Best had won the European Cup
If football outcomes were mostly down to the influence of great teams, players and managers, we would expect to see the level of competitiveness fluctuate over time with the ebb and flow of the game. If we found a consistent sustained change in one direction, that would suggest that structural factors of the governance and finance of the game had most influence.
And the evidence very clearly points to a major structural change in English football. Although a great deal changed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – from the maximum wage to the first £1 million transfer – this was the “level playing field” era of footballing hypermobility and competitiveness. England had the most open and competitive league in Europe. But the last gasp of this era came with Brian Clough’s 1979 European Cup victory. In the previous two seasons, Nottingham Forest finished third in the second division, then won the league championship as a newly promoted club. Nobody believes that could be emulated today.
The transition years of the 1980s and 1990s saw money matter rather more, but in hindsight there were stark differences with the last decade. On every indicator, this decade has been the most predictable and least competitive decade in English football history.
There were always bigger and smaller clubs. But the football class system was open, fluid and meritocratic, often to a now astonishing degree. It has been replaced not so much by a class system as a rigidly hierarchical caste system, in which the top four clubs have segregated themselves into a league of their own, using their exclusive access to the additional resources of the Champions League to lock in their advantages.
This being Liberal Conspiracy, I shall not go into the anorak details of recent footballing history, nor the sports governance and reform implications, where the evidence strongly supports the arguments of UEFA President Michel Platini and UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, but instead highlight two central implications of this study as political allegory.
Firstly, political philosophy. The Football Association have, in the Premiership era, offered us equality of opportunity from the FA Hayek textbook. After all, every team starts the season level-pegging on no points. Every team plays 38 matches, playing everybody else home and away. The rule of law is in place: nobody can bribe the referee. Each team can only play eleven players at a time. This is the equality of opportunity that asserts that the Premiership title could just as much end up in the hands of Hull City or Sunderland as at Old Trafford again.
So why doesn’t it ever happen? I would suggest it is a question of resources and the capabilities to compete. Perhaps libertarians could let us have their explanation too.
Secondly, political sociology. Fellow pointy-heads might be struck by just how closely the pattern of collapsing football mobility seemed to track that in wider British society, as in the much discussed LSE studies by Jo Blanden, Alissa Goodman, Paul Gregg and Steve Machin which found declining social mobility for those born in 1970 compared to those born in 1958.
The cohort born in 1958 could reasonably expect better jobs than their parents as they entered the labour market in the mid-1970s. Exciting and competitve football seemed to be their birthright too as the grew up during the age of football super-meritocracy with eleven different league champion clubs in jusy fourteen seasons from 1959, and even seven different champions in consecutive seasons from both 1959-65 and again from 1967-73. They turned 18 in the year that second division Southampton won the FA Cup and QPR fell just short of the league title.
But their experiences in neither the labour market nor in the final years of the football terraces were not repeated by the 1970 cohort: Thatcher’s children who left education from 1986 to 1988. They may just have caught the end of the golden age of the FA Cup – nine different winners in the 1970s – and turned eighteen as Wimbledon won their unlikely victory, yet could see Liverpool’s 1980s dominance being taken over by Arsenal and then Manchester United, who will today seek to clinch their eleventh league title in the seventeen seasons of the Premiership.
There is a difference in the last decade between football and society. New Labour has struggled to run up the down escalator, at least seeking to hold back the tide of rising inequality though failing to reverse it. By contrast, the policy in football has been to simply let inequality rip to unpredecented levels. And how. So more recent LSE evidence suggests the fall in social mobility in society has been halted, but not reversed. Football mobility continues to collapse apace, and if nothing is changed off the field, nothing will change on it for the foreseeable future. It could well get worse still: look at how Arsenal struggle to keep up even within the big four.
How to respond? Many will be fatalistic or resist the idea of any change. Nothing can or should be done. This is the way of the world. Talents differ. Get over it. Melissa Kite argued in last Sunday’s Telegraph that levelling the playing field is a recipe for mediocrity; a failure to understand how competition works. But there was nothing mediocre about Clough’s achievement. The stratification of football into a caste society is a denial of competitive principles, not a celebration of them.
And we have evidence that it does not have to be like this. It is a question of governance and choice. We can show how football was recently so much more meritocratic and competitive in the recent past, just as Scandinavian countries prosper while choosing to be more equal.
Football’s collapsed social mobility offers clear evidence that equal opportunity is not delivered magically by an invisible hand. If we hear much breast beating from all parties about social mobility in the run up to the General Election, the test of all of them is whether and how they talk about inequality too.
It is not only in football that today’s unequal outcomes become tomorrow’s unequal opportunities unless there is an effort to level the playing field.
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