February 20, 2010
Poor Little Liddle
Somehow this one got through for nearly a week without anyone on the left/Stop Liddle Campaign picking it up in a major way. Presumably because we’ve all got better things to do than read Rod Liddle’s weekly bile in the Sunday Times.
But his effort from last weekend is really worth a look.
Ostensibly, Liddle is bemoaning the case of a primary school that set up it’s own farm, and when a little lamb was old enough to go to the chop house, suddenly “all hell broke loose”.
Apparently “It was at this point that the endlessly hyperactive, bone-headed online fascists got involved”.
“Some 2,500 cretins started an online petition calling for the beleaguered head teacher [Andrea Charman, of Lydd primary school] to be sacked. It is entirely possible that none of them whatsoever had any connection to Lydd primary school. However, the campaign of vilification and vituperation had begun.”
Righteous Rod goes on:
“Another Facebook site was set up by 650 similarly sad, lifeless, drongoes, demanding not merely that Charman be sacked but — and I quote — to Ban Andrea Charman From Teaching Anywhere. Can you imagine the sort of people who would associate themselves with such a cause?”
But there’s more!
“Thick, bitter, utterly convinced of their own rectitude, though they constitute about 0.001% of the population. Convinced enough to make this woman’s life a total misery. The new electronic media might make the world a better-informed and more democratic place, but it also allows the splenetically dunderheaded to impose their will upon others, in a spectacularly uninformed and undemocratic manner.”
Ouch! But wait, there’s even more to be said:
“ [I]t was a defeat for democracy and a victory for those crepuscular cyber-warriors, holed up in their dank bedsits, who cannot bear other people to hold opinions which differ from their own and demand that their minority views must prevail.”
My-oh-my, Rod has certainly got his knickers in a twist about those evil online campaigners, hasn’t he?
Of course, this article couldn’t possibly be about something other than Lydd Primary School, could it? I mean, it couldn’t possibly be about another highly energetic online campaign that now appears to have succeeded in preventing Rod Liddle becoming editor of The Independent?
Of course not. That would just be the fevered paranoid imagining of a crepuscular cyber-warrior, holed-up in his dank bedsit, laughing his sad, lifeless, drongoe head right off.
February 19, 2010
Redistribution and Elections Round II
Earlier this week I lamented the fact that Labour appears to have a very solid record on achieving redistribution from rich to poor (though see Tim’s considerations), but can’t make a song and dance about this because “redistribution” provokes a largely negative response from the electorate.
Yet it’s been pointed out to me that the story is a bit more interesting than that. Research from the Fabian Society and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year found that whilst people are hostile to the monolithic concept of “redistribution” when they are simply asked whether they are “for” or “against” it, they tend to be far more amenable to the idea of transferring wealth and resources to the worse-off – and in turn, tackling inequality – if it’s explained in more detailed and concrete terms.
The research found that on the one hand:
- It seems that people are interpreting the income gap as that between the very top and the middle, rather than between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ as conventionally understood.
- Concern about the income gap co-exists with a widespread belief that some inequalities are fairly deserved, and this sense of fairness may be violated by some redistributive approaches.
- Even where inequalities are seen as undeserved (for example, inherited wealth), in some contexts there is a sense that an individual is nevertheless still entitled to their resources.
But on the other:
Despite a widespread belief in ‘fair inequality’, participants strongly supported a progressive tax and benefits system – although they complained that the system is not generous enough towards the ‘middle’ (that is, where participants placed themselves). Participants therefore often supported highly redistributive policies on grounds of fairness, even if they did not particularly favour the idea of redistribution itself.
Many participants wanted the tax system to treat them differently from those at ‘the top’. And, in line with beliefs that the ‘middle’ are under most pressure, they wanted the benefits system to treat them ‘not too differently’ from those at ‘the bottom’. Nearly all participants were happy for lower-income households to receive more support than those in the ‘middle’, but many felt uneasy about benefits that were perceived to be very narrowly targeted.
The research drew this interesting conclusion:
A belief in deserved inequality is one reason why many participants did not find abstract arguments for greater equality convincing. Instead, they preferred arguments for greater equality when they were framed in terms of more proportionate rewards for the level of effort and contribution made.
This suggests that any public consensus about tackling economic inequality would have to include an acceptance that certain levels of inequality are fair. Advocates of greater equality might benefit from explicitly acknowledging this, while questioning whether current levels of inequality meet this criterion.
So why aren’t Labour emphasising their achievements in helping the deserving poor and the deserving middle, to mutual advantage? Alistair Darling told the Fabian Review last January that he thought Labour should “talk-up” it’s record on redistribution – yet it hasn’t happened. Indeed, today Left Foot Forward tells us that Gordon Brown will tomorrow use a high profile speech in Coventry to stick to the narrowly-focused “appeal to middle class voters” that he officially staked out in January.
I can think of at least 6 reasons why Brown and the leadership have decided not to emphasise Labour’s record on poverty reduction, filtered through the lens of explaining it in terms likely to be well-received by the middle classes who tend to decide elections:
- They don’t know about the Fabian research
- The know about the Fabian research, but they think it’s wrong
- They think the electorate are too stupid to understand the arguments the Fabians say need to be put forward to get people to realise they actually approve of redistribution in practice
- They think such arguments take too long to expound and are less effective than making standard appeals to one-dimensional middle class material aspiration
- They are still in a 1992-mindset and terrified of being labeled “Old Labour”
- They think it’s too risky to talk-up redistribution for fear of being misrepresented in the gutter press as taking from the middle classes to give to scroungers.
Some of these reasons are good, some of them are not.
But the thing is, I can’t easily and quickly think of much else apart from helping the least-well off (and massive NHS investment) that Labour can be unambiguously proud about 13 years after saying things could only get better. Yet I readily recall Iraq, the economic collapse, bankers’ bonuses, ID cards and suspicious authoritarianism, overall increases in inequality, and the 10p tax.
The truth is that Labour just hasn’t got that much to go to the electorate with. One thing it does have, however, is a solid record on helping the least-well off (even if perhaps it should have done more). This is what Labour should be talking about, albeit carefully and in ways calculated to be well-received. Not peddling a narrow vision of “aspiration” more befitting of dogs than flourishing human beings.
February 18, 2010
How To Think About Torture
On Sunday Nick Cohen – self-style heir to George Orwell and self-appointed last left-winger in Britain – proved his off-the-deep-end credentials by claiming that opposing state torture of terrorist suspects would cost the security services dearly, and that only namby-pamby faux-left relativists could think otherwise.
A few days later, The Independent’s resident neo-con Bruce Anderson decided that despite torture being “revolting”, torturing a suspect’s wife and children would be OK under certain circumstances. (Weirdly, Anderson seems to think that finding torture “revolting” is simply an aesthetic judgement, as though the problem is that torture is nasty to look at because of the blood. Most normal people think torture is wrong because it’s morally revolting. But I digress).
Sunny pointed out some of the blatant idiocies of both Cohen and Anderson’s pieces, and Flying Rodent’s comments are a masterclass in how to deal with torture apologists.
I can’t be as funny as Flying Rodent (so read his blog), but I think it’s worth going over the basics on how to think about torture, seen as the issue is on the agenda (and Nick is again on his high horse about the lost left).
Both Anderson explicitly – and Cohen more implicitly – appear to be motivated by the “ticking bomb” scenario. This is a philosophers’ thought experiment. It usually goes something like this:
There is a bomb about to go off. It will kill hundreds of thousands. The man in your custody knows where it is, and how to stop it. However, he will only tell you if you torture him. If you torture him, he will definitely give you the right answer in time. There is no other way to stop the bomb going off.
Is it wrong to torture him?
The first thing to notice about this philosopher’s fantasy is that it is just that: a fantasy. We are never in the ticking bomb scenario. Partly, that’s an empirical fact about how fantastically unlikely it is that you’ll ever get your hands on one terrorist who definitely knows where the bomb is and torturing him is the only way to stop it. Those sorts of situations happen in hit TV series 24, not real life.
But partly it’s also a logically impossible scenario: how can you ever know completely that the man definitely knows where it is, and will only tell you if you torture him? How do you know he won’t lie, aided by his jihadi powers of restraint? How do you know for sure that no other way of stopping the bomb exists? Etc.
The ticking bomb scenario is a fantasy dreamed up by philosophers to test-out our intuitive and/or reasoned responses to a bizarre situation, to tease out exactly where our moral sensibilities lie. It is certainly not supposed to be the basis for legislative policy decisions, for example.
But let’s suppose, for the sake of philosophy, that we are in the (impossible) ticking bomb scenario. Is it wrong to torture our suspect? Yes. Because torture is a morally horrific thing to do to another human being, regardless of the well-intentioned motives that may (but usually don’t) lie behind it.
So, should we therefore not torture the suspect? No. Because in this situation torturing one man is the lesser of two evils: letting the bomb go off and hundreds of thousands dying is morally more repugnant and unacceptable than torturing one man. But the point is precisely that this is a situation of choosing the lesser of two evils. Just because in this situation preventing the bomb going off is morally more important than not torturing our suspect, it doesn’t follow that the torture therefore becomes OK. It’s still a terrible thing to do. It is still morally wrong.
That’s a very important point to recognise: even when – under highly idealised, utterly abstracted non-real world conditions – we concede torture may be required, it’s still wrong. And that’s the tragedy of ethical existence: sometimes one simply has to do wrong things. “Here I stand, I can do no other”.
But as I said, the ticking bomb scenario is a thought experiment. It never actually happens. And for that reason alone, it’s a very bad idea to make legislative policy off the back of such an idealised situation.
To think about how legislative policy on torture ought to be made, we do much better to think about how torture operates in the real world. The story goes something like this:
We have a man in our custody. We think he’s probably a member of a terrorist cell. We don’t think there’s any bombs planted at the minute, but we think he is in conspiracy with other terrorists to plant bombs at some stage. We believe he is part – perhaps only a very small, very far-removed, part (we’re not sure) – of a vast network of terrorists and potential terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. He won’t speak to us – or at any rate, we don’t trust what he says. So why don’t we torture him?
OK. But the problem with torture is that people tend to say whatever they think their torturer wants to hear, and furthermore under the immense strain of repeated interrogation and torture they will tend to lose their grip on reality, thus making any testimony inherently unreliable. In order to get any worth out of torture-extracted information, it needs to be cross-referenced against other information so that the lies and the fantasy can be filtered out and the truth (if there is any) distilled. But the only way to do that is to collect a great deal of testimony, against which to compare individual cases, thus extracting common strands of truth. The only way to achieve that is to systematically torture a great many people. For torture to be effective and to yield information that is at all reliable to the security services, the practice needs to be systematised and applied to a great many suspects – many of whom will actually turn out to be innocent, know nothing, or possess no useful information.
That’s how torture works in the real world if it’s used to extract reliable information (as oppose to being an instrument of state repression and intimidation, as it is in many brutal authoritarian regimes). And indeed as Flying Rodent pointed out, this is precisely what the Americans have been doing with their system of shadow prison and holding facilities, and which Britain has been colluding in.
The systematic torture of hundreds – possibly thousands – of people as a way of distilling information is simply not a price any civilised society ought to accept. Yes, terrorists may threaten our safety. But the institutionalisation of torture is not the response of a civilised society. The judges were right to rule as they did on the Binyam Mohammed case, both because torture is illegal in Britain but also because there are overwhelming moral grounds for resisting the institutionalisation of torture by the state.
Forget philosopher’s fantasies. Torture in the real world is a monstrosity of such unacceptable proportions that anybody still inclined to think it’s an acceptable state policy suffers such defects of ethical sensibility that I would be extremely concerned about their ability to function as morally responsive members of normal society. Frankly.
February 17, 2010
Redistribution and Elections
The other day I wrote a slightly confusing post about New Labour’s vision of social justice, and how an awful lot of weight has been put on the education system as a result.
My contention was that New Labour has been terrified of talking about inequality, and wanted to undertake poverty reduction only if it was compatible with not reeling-in the better off. Yet to keep-up the image and substance of a party committed to social mobility and fairness, the education system was made the centre of New Labour’s strategy, on the lines that high quality educational opportunity could eliminate undeserved social disadvantage.
I think this thesis is broadly correct. But as originally stated, I inadvertently under-played the extent to which Labour has achieved significant poverty gains, and in the process, some worthwhile redistribution. And that it did this alongside education reforms, not through them. Indeed, especial thanks to Giles for drawing my attention to this table from the IFS:
I’m not a statistician (by any means) so I am happy to be informed of anything that blunts my enthusiasm on this point. But I was staggered when I saw this table. It shows a clear – and considerable – gain for the lowest income households (and especially the very poorest), which is attributable to the tax and benefit system under Labour.
When Stuart White at the Fabian Society calls claims that the poor got poorer under labour “risible“, data like this certainly seems to support him.
But why did this come as such a surprise to me? Or in other words, why haven’t Labour been shouting about this from the rooftops?
A few explanations immediately spring to mind:
- Labour are scared of being tarred with the “big government that penalises hard workers by giving their money to the lazy undeserving poor” brush
- Labour are scared that if they make a fuss about the achievements of the tax and benefit system, they’ll be portrayed in the tabloid press as helping scroungers live the life of Riley at taxpayers’ expense
- Labour are scared that middle class voters, who tend to decide swing seats, will think that the poor have been helped at middle class expense (something made worse by the fact people tend to over-estimate their position on the income and wealth scale, potentially leading many to assume they’ve been hurt by Labour policy when they haven’t)
Prior to 2007 it might have seemed obvious that Labour should reason this way. Re-branding the party away from an “Old” Labour, election-losing image meant dropping overt commitments to redistribution, tax-and-spend policies, and “big government” generally.
Yet this is 2010. There is still widespread public anger at banker’s bonuses. The return of inequality to the political agenda surely matters. So does the widespread realisation via the financial crisis that the world is profoundly more unfair than many had assumed. (It turns out that the super-rich don’t always make their money through sheer hardwork in economically productive activities, but can actually be reckless gamblers who ruin everything for ordinary people, and then still expect a massive pay-packet). And furthermore, a majority of voters supported the 50p tax when it was introduced.
So should Labour now start making a song and dance about its redistributive achievements? Probably not. As Don Paskini recently noted at Liberal Conspiracy:
“Support for redistribution from the better off to those who are less well off has dropped markedly. Fewer than two in five (38%) now think the government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off, down from half (51%) in 1994.” *
Bizarrely, this drop seems to be fuelled in part by falling support for redistribution amongst Labour sympathisers.
Which is all a bit of a bummer. One of the relatively few things that this Labour Government seems to have got right, and they have to keep quiet about it because it’s an electoral loser.
Politics, eh?
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* Then again, Don earlier drew attention to a poll showing “Two-thirds (67%) of respondents say the government should do more to distribute wealth more evenly, while 20% say it should maintain its current level of involvement and only 10% say that it should do less.” That one was done by the BBC/GlobeScan.
I guess the wording of the polls is going to be pretty important, as well as sample-size. Unfortunately, I’m more inclined to put faith in the British Social Attitudes Survey results that Don uses in the more recent post, which showed low support for redistribution.
February 16, 2010
Taking Negative Campaigning to Strange New Places
There’s been something wrong with all the Tory campaign posters so far, even before their myriad and amusing spoofings.
Take the “We Can’t Go On Like This” line, first seen accompanying David Cameron’s shiny airbrushed forehead. Rather than a reason to vote Conservative, it reads like the first stage of a relationship break-up. Almost as bad as “It’s not you, it’s me”, but somewhere above “If you liked it, then you shudda putta ring on it”.
Either way, Cameron’s serious-but-friendly-and-look-I’m-not-wearing-a-tie expression hardly invites the electorate to fall in love.
Last week there were the tasteful “R.I.P OFF” gravestones, taking a mooted proposal, dishonestly elevating it into Labour policy, and turning the morally complex issue of end-of-life care into a macabre political football. But again, the message was hardly “here’s a reason to vote Conservative”. It was more “OOOOHHHH be SCARED, evil Gordon is coming to steal YOUR MONEY when you’re DEAD!”
This week we’re greeted by the “I’ve never voted Tory but…” campaign.
The most incredible thing about this is that the Conservatives are practically admitting that they are a rubbish party, hence why people don’t normally vote for them. The slogan fits the model of “I’ve never licked steaming dog crap before, but I suppose if that’s the only way to save the babies from the baby-grinder…”
I imagine CCHQ thought this would be a clever way to entice new voters. You know, decontaminating the Nasty Party brand by claiming that Ordinaries can vote Tory too. “Conservative Voters: not just climate-change-denying, EU-obsessed, Thatcherite troglodytes wearing tweed!”, or something to that effect.
Yet the negative framing of the slogan may inadvertently prompt people to remember why they didn’t vote Tory the last 3 times. Either way, it tells you something about the Party’s state of self-belief that they admit on their own campaign posters that people think they’re rubbish.
Of course, there’s another good reason why all the Tory posters have been negative, focusing attention on Labour’s failings. Because for as long as the Tories do that, they don’t have to talk about their plans to slash spending and crater the economic recovery, give tax breaks to millionaires, implement incoherent plans to benefit wealthy families at the expense of the poor, their inability to use statistics, or any of the other concrete policy areas that get the party into so much trouble whenever they open their mouths.
Whether this approach will be enough to discourage voters from asking serious questions about Dave and Co for another three months is a big question. This election is Dave’s to lose. And judging by the posters, his party knows it.
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Personally, I think CCHQ should just go with this from now on. It’s to the point, honest, and pretty much spoof-proof.
February 15, 2010
I’ll Never Vote Tory
Another week, another wonderfully spoof-able Tory ad campaign.
The beauty of this one is that you don’t need Photoshop to ridicule it. Microsoft Word alone is sufficient:
More at mydavidcameron.com and #IveNeverVotedTory.
Hat tip Liberal Conspiracy.
Credit Where It’s Due
I’m not a big fan of organised religion. Christianity I find especially bemusing.
Belief in an omnipotent, omniscient sky wizard is pretty weird and extremely metaphysically dubious. Certainly, there’s no good reason to believe in such a thing, at all (h/t David Hume). Belief in an omnipotent, omniscient sky wizard who cares whether I eat meat on Fridays and have sex before marriage, and will have me tortured for eternity if I do either, is just plain barmy.
But the barmy and the metaphysically silly don’t bother me per se.
If Christianity troubles me it’s because Nietzsche was on to something when he observed that the self-sacrificing, self-effacing, timidity and ressentiment of Christian morality can be unhealthy for human beings. That they live better lives if they jettison the teachings that make them into stunted, pious, miserable little creatures crying their way through the Vale of Tears.
But I’m not of the school that says “Christianity/faith is bad because it causes people to do X”, where X is usually “fight wars”, “bugger altar boys”, “persecute gay people” and so on. People do those things, because very sadly it’s often the case that people are shits. Christianity/faith is just one vehicle by which shitty people do shitty things. Tony Blair would have been a lying weasel even if he was an atheist, and Bush would still have been a dumbass.
And it’s right to remember that Christianity can actually do many good things. When my grandmother died the local parish vicar was a kind, supportive and considerate man who offered significant help to my grandfather. When in turn he died, my uncle found a community in the local church to which he could belong. That made a very positive difference to his life.
No secular human association that I know of is able to fulfil the pastoral, inclusive, caring and community-based roles that local Christian parishes perform for millions of people across the country. For some reason secularism seems unable to compete with faith in this matter. The Church isn’t all bad, and we’re fools to pretend otherwise.
Of course, it can be hard to keep a level head when idiots like Vicar Angus MacLeay and his Curate Mark Oden have been telling their Kent congregation “Wives, submit to your own husbands” (and “be silent” when so submitting). Through their infinite wisdom they declare:
“Wives are to submit to their husbands in everything in recognition of the fact that husbands are head of the family as Christ is head of the church. This is the way God has ordered their relationships with each other.”
As Chief executive of the Fawcett Society Ceri Goddard noted, it shows that “certain parts of the Church are living in the Dark Ages”.
Indeed, Churches of many denominations seem determined to put themselves in the worst possible lights at the moment. The Pope recently re-affirmed the Catholic Church’s hatred of gay people, and Simon Jenkins leaped to his defence in The Guardian in a thinly veiled homophobic rant of truly astounding idiocy.
At times like these, however, it’s worth balancing the scales a little. Because not all Christians are raving dark age reactionaries. Indeed, the Church of England’s website hosts a PDF document which I can only applaud for its mature, insightful and sensible advice for how to deal with, and think about, domestic violence.
In its myth-busting section, the document stresses a few basic principles for thinking about the plight of abused women which are – sadly – still far from common place. The approach of the report can only be commended:
“‘Why don’t they just leave? Or report it to the police? If they choose to stay, it’s not our problem, is it? They went back again, so it’s their choice.’
“This is a response we must challenge as a Church. What other crime in the world requires the victim to be the one to leave home? It’s not a normal response to people disclosing burglary or arson or vandalism or harassment from strangers, but it is often our standard response to those who experience the crime of domestic abuse in the home.
“Leaving is far from an easy solution to a very, very complex problem. Those who leave home often have to leave behind all they have – friends, family, neighbours, schools, clothes, photos, gardens, pets – everything they’ve worked their whole life to achieve, and rebuild a life when they are already exhausted, depressed, anxious, demoralized and often injured. It is no small matter to walk out, let alone when children are involved too. In addition, leaving does not always end the abuse. It may end the relationship but may increase the abuse. In many cases for women, the most dangerous time is immediately after separation, when the violent partner is angry at losing ‘control’ of their family. This is especially hazardous in some minority ethnic groups where it is seen as dishonourable to leave the family for any reason.
“As a church, we need to focus on what is possible and safe for that person and their children, not on our own expectations for the couple or individual. We must not assume that God will heal the relationship in the way we want it to be healed.”
There are also extremely sensible sections offering advice to vicars and church workers about how to help victims of domestic abuse. Perhaps most impressively there is a detailed discussion of “harmful theology”, admitting that teachings of the Church have previously been used to justify or ignore violence against women – and that this must end.
Although it’s only one document, it’s good to see Britain’s biggest Church taking steps to deal with this issue head-on. Certainly, Christianity has an extremely poor track record when it comes to women’s rights and equality. It can be tempting to hurl nothing but criticism and anger in response.
Yet credit should be paid where it is due. After all, if we want the various branches of Christianity to struggle all the way into the 21st Century then praising them for what they get right is likely to be far more productive than (only) condemning them for what they get wrong.
February 14, 2010
Social Justice, Education and New Labour
A defining feature of the New Labour project was to deny that inequality mattered. What mattered was poverty, and the two were seen as separable. Hence New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” – so long as those at the bottom got better off too.
That view is now largely out of fashion. Even the Conservatives claim to be responsive to Wilkinson and Pickett’s powerful case that almost everyone does better in more equal societies (though the Tories are faking it). Some New Lab dinosaurs still don’t understand, but they conveniently offer demonstrations of their own stupidity in the process.
Yet as we approach what is likely to be the end of the New Labour project, it’s worth reflecting on a core aspect of its “poverty, not inequality” legacy: education.
New Labour explicitly ruled out overt and large-scale redistribution away from private individuals and big companies towards the poorer. This was considered “statist” and “old” Labour, likely to drive middle-England and (big) business into Tory hands. Similarly, taxes for the rich would stay low (witness Blair’s continued opposition to the 50% top rate) and spending was initially pegged to Tory levels. Yet these re-branding and electoral ploys removed key weapons from the government arsenal in tackling poverty (and inequality).
As a result, enormous reliance came to be placed upon the education system. The New Labour vision was that by increasing the quality of – and access to – education, the least advantaged would nonetheless be able to develop their talents. The best would rise to the top, whether from the council estates of Hackney or the country estates of Hertfordshire.
Indeed New Labour’s vision of social justice was shot through by a vision of meritocracy, and the belief that if genuine equality of opportunity could be introduced then poverty levels would fall as unfair artificial barriers to success were removed. Hence education became of paramount importance as the only available vehicle for achieving New Labour’s (somewhat restricted) vision of social justice. When Blair intoned “education, education, education” that went much deeper than a mere campaign slogan. It was a statement of New Labour’s philosophy of social justice.
And on some measures Labour has achieved a lot by pouring massive amounts of money into the education system. As David Laws of the Lib Dems recently noted, inner city schools in London underwent an “astonishing, dramatic, unbelievable” improvement.
More generally, the comprehensive system has in many ways turned out to be a much better deal for children of middling ability than any British education system has ever been. The view that it’s been “all down hill since the end of the grammar schools” is on some metrics wrong. Take a look at these basic stats from state schools in the area where I grew up, for kids achieving 5 or more A*-C grades at GCSE in 2009:
Birkdale High: 76%; Christ the King: 87%; Greenbank High: 86%; Meols Cop: 75%; Stanley High: 76%.
In the entire borough of Sefton 74% of kids were leaving school with 5 or more A*-C GCSE grades. This is really quite remarkable. It indicates that students of middling ability are now getting a great deal out of modern secondary education, not just in terms of raw qualifications but of a system geared towards fostering the abilities of ordinary children. Something which, frankly, could not be said of the old tripartite system whereby those who didn’t make the Grammar Cut at age 11 were effectively abandoned from an educational point of view.
New Labour’s much-commented-upon aim of 50% of school leavers continuing to higher education has also had a big impact. More people under New Labour went to university than ever before. The vast expansion of institutions and places for students meant that kids whose parents would never have dreamed of going to university progressed there as a common-place.
But there have been drawbacks too. Although the education system now seems to take better care of the middling students, there can be little doubt that there has been significant grade inflation within the GCSE and A-Level assessments. The value of qualifications has been seriously corroded at the top end, and bright students now receive worse educations than in the past. The price of replacing a tripartite system that rewarded the middle classes at the expense of the poor has been a worrying devaluation of standards.
Similarly, university expansion hasn’t translated into straightforward meritocracy. There are long-established concerns that the clued-up middle classes know the unspoken but important differences between Poppleton and Poppleton Met, but that working class newcomers are often unaware of these. There are also concerns that grade inflation has devalued the quality of many degrees, making post-graduate qualifications increasingly important…but available only to the better-off who can afford them. (Though bear in mind the counter-argument).
Perhaps most interestingly of all, despite the fact Labour has done a great deal to improve the educational lot of the average joe, there nonetheless seems to be a dominant popular perception that Britain’s education system is broken, and failing everybody. Hence the frequent calls for the restoration of grammar schools, and complaints that too many now go to university and that all qualifications are now devalued.
With so much weight placed on the education system to deliver New Labour’s vision of social justice, it now seems almost inevitable that it failed to live up to expectations. Although it is untrue that poverty got worse under Labour, with the return of recession there’s a wide sense that 13 years of Blair and Brown didn’t do anything like enough to relieve the lot of Britain’s worse off.
State schools are seen as failing (perhaps against the actual evidence) to the point where the Tories are likely to find widespread support for their plan to introduce the most dramatic overhaul to the education system in 30 years. Yet this is worrying, as the Swedish experiment the Conservatives take inspiration from may be counterproductive in the aims of reducing poverty and educational opportunity. (Though consider the Tory defence, h/t Dan).
Finally, higher education institutions are now bracing themselves for dramatic cuts. This is likely to severely reduce the numbers of students gaining access to higher education,whilst pushing up class sizes and reducing contact hours. It will also devastate university research abilities, thus downgrading the long term strength of universities and in turn the economy. And a weaker economy with less good educational prospects hardly bodes well for addressing poverty (and inequality) in the long term.
So here’s the sting in the tail of the New Labour “education, education, education” philosophy. When the times were good the money existed to be pumped into the sole vehicle charged with achieving New Labour’s surviving aims of social justice, watered-down to fit a right wing post-Thatcher consensus.
Now that the money has dried up, education is going to seriously suffer. Today it’s the universities, but sooner or later it will be the schools. Not least because all but the most severe of education cuts will take their time to be felt in people’s day-to-day lives, hence making such cuts relatively politically attractive.
In the good years Labour achieved a lot through its significant education spending – though the constant meddling and the attack on teacher and university autonomy betrayed one of the most distasteful streaks of NewLab managerial authoritarianism. More widely, the limits of putting all your social justice eggs in one basket were clearly demonstrated.
Yet now that the bad times are here, even the education basket is being drastically reduced in size. One more bitter irony in the final New Labour legacy.
February 12, 2010
The Pre-18th Century Economics Foundation
When faced with the insufferable “New Economics Foundation“, many recoil in intellectual horror.
What most object to is the that they call themselves the New Economics Foundation. Giles has previously suggested that “NEF” should really stand for “Not Economics, Frankly“.
I can sympathise. I recently heard NEF fellow Ann Pettifor declare that North Sea Oil is irrelevant to growth because the Government can just print money and by the way bank interest rates never need to be more than 1% but they are because bankers are greedy. (Or words to that effect. The “logic” of the rant was very hard to follow).
Yesterday the NEFs were at it again, failing economics 101 by being unable to deal with the concept of what “cost” is, as Luis Enrique so devastatingly pointed out. Luis, Tim Worstall, Giles and others demolished the piece, and Giles lamented the manner in which the NEFs can take a potentially sensible idea and bury it under idiot arguments.
But “economics” may not be the only misleading part of the NEFs’ name. There’s evidence that the term “new” is wrong as well.
On the NEF website they have a particularly idiotic piece at present. Here’s a snapshot:
Andrew Simms, co-author of the report and nef policy director said, “We tend to think of growth as natural for economies, forgetting that in nature things grow only until maturity and then develop in other ways. A world in which everything grew indefinitely would be strange indeed. A young hamster, for example, doubles its weight each week between birth and puberty. But if it grew at the same rate until its first birthday, we’d be looking at a nine billion tonne hamster, which ate more than a year’s worth of world maize production every day. There are good reasons why things don’t grow indefinitely. As things are in nature, so sooner or later, they must be in the economy.
“The economic priorities of the rich world are as ridiculous as the impossible hamster. Endless growth is pushing the planet’s biosphere beyond its safe limits. The price is seen in compromised world food security, climatic upheaval, economic instability and threats to social welfare. We urgently need to change our economy to live within its environmental budget. There is no global, environmental central bank to bail us out if we become ecologically bankrupt.”
Most people’s eyes will immediately be drawn to the utterly silly comparison of the global economy to a 9 billion tonne hamster. (Why not really indulge and watch the idiotic video?)
I mean, wow.
What on earth does a hypothetical hamster doubling its weight every day tell us about the complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that is modern global capitalism? About international production, the consumption and trade of goods and services, cross border credit capital flows, integrated financial markets, and all the rest? I mean, seriously? A giant imaginary hamster?
Now, I don’t want to denigrate the NEFs’ claim that present rates of growth are putting the global environment at risk. That’s true. But it’s as much to do with how we currently grow than whether we should grow at all. And the NEF “report” seems to be suggesting that growth is in some sense bad tout court, and that it must stop.
Like, er, a hamster.
Of course, the millions who’ve had their living standards drastically increased by the rise of modern capitalism over the last 300 years, and the billions still waiting to be dragged out of abject poverty, would likely disagree. And indeed, this highlights two of the NEFs main problems: assuming that capitalism is simple (like a giant hamster) and almost completely bad. It’s neither (despite its many and glaring flaws).
But Godzilhamster wasn’t what really caught my eye. What attracted my attention was the bizarre naturalism of the hamster analogy:
“A world in which everything grew indefinitely would be strange indeed.”
“There are good reasons why things don’t grow indefinitely. As things are in nature, so sooner or later, they must be in the economy.”
Time for some history.
The birth of modern economics is often taken to have been 1776 when Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations. Personally I’d date it to 1752 with the publication of David Hume’s Political Dialogues, the economic essays of which greatly influenced Smith.
Hume, and especially Smith, were enormously important in facilitating the breakthrough of a new way of thinking about economics, and in turn nation-states themselves. Prior to their groundbreaking work, international economics had been dominated by what is normally dubbed “mercantilism”. Mercantilism is very hard to define specifically, but roughly it was the view that if Britain was to be rich, her competitor France had to be poor. If France got richer, Britain must get poorer. The way for Britain to prosper was to export as much as possible, import as little as possible, and aim to accumulate all the world’s gold bullion (seen as the foundation of all wealth) so that France didn’t have any, and hence would be poor and weak.*
In short, international economics was conceived as being “zero-sum”: if one country was to win, the others had to lose.
What Hume, and especially Smith, showed was that this was barmy. That in fact by embracing trade and commerce both France and Britain could be become mutually better off in a never-ceasing cycle of improvement. Hume and Smith achieved this, in great part, by sheer economic spade-work: they observed how economics actually worked, described and modelled them (albeit primitively), and checked their hypotheses against the evidence. And the evidence supported them.
But the battle for modernity had to be waged on another level too: that of political-philosophic ideas.
One of the main (but not the only) intellectual underpinnings of mercantilism was what has been dubbed the “civic humanist” conception of political associations. This saw states as tragically and inescapably subject to the corrossion of ongoing time. All nations were inevitably locked into natural cycles of growth and decay; no matter how well-governed a a state, eventually fortune would turn against her and ruin would follow.
The trick of the good statesman, therefore, was to delay that decay and collapse for as long as possible. Given that a common cause of one state’s collapse was being conquered by its neighbour, it therefore made sense to keep one’s neighbours poor whilst aiming to stay rich. Hence, a powerful intellectual foundation for mercantilism.
Hume and Smith their hypotheses and observations about nascent capitalist economics to demonstrate that the idea of a natural cycle of growth and decay could be transcended. That through industry, commerce and international trade all countries could get richer, and none need collapse so another could rise. “Natural” checks to growth were a misnomer; modern economics could leave such confusions behind and in the process abandon the restrictive mercantilism that held-back all nations.
250 years later, they’ve been proved right. The staggering and continual (despite periodic set-backs) advancement of western European and North American economies is an amazing thing to behold. And it’s thanks to capitalism, despite capitalism’s many and abundant faults and its continued need for improvement.
Certainly, the spectre of global warming now means we need to take very seriously the prospect of finding new ways to order and structure our economies. But the idea that somehow there exist natural checks to economic advancement and that this is a brute fact of existence (à la Impossible Giant Hamsters) was dumped in the dustbin of intellectual history two and a half centuries ago.
Hence, there’s perhaps less that’s “new” about the New “Economics” Foundation than they’d have us believe. For they seem determined to hark back to history’s scrap-heap of ideas.
In which case, why not resurrect another defunct notion? Rather fittingly, the tradition of envisaging inevitable natural-checks-to-growth is usually traced to Aristotle. And what quote is Aristotle more remembered for than any other? That “nature abhors a vacuum”, of course.
Indeed, let’s hope it does. For then nature will be compelled to fill the vacuum currently found between the ears of the NEF’s fellows and researchers. Preferably it can do it with cement.
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* Mercantalism was indeed already in decline by the time Hume and Smith got their ideas straight. But Smith especially put the big nails into its coffin.
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For anyone who wants to be really geeky and get stuck in on the intellectual history of early capitalism, i’ve made available an essay I wrote on how David Hume’s economic essays aimed to achieve some of what I’ve described above. Over here, in the Nerd Posts section.
Otherwise, buy Istvan Hont’s excellent collection of essays Jealousy of Trade.
February 11, 2010
Destruction You Can See
Most people are dimly aware that fish stocks in the world’s seas are collapsing due to intense pressure by commercial over-fishing.
Johann Hari did a decent piece on this last June getting the basic points across. It does contain the usual Hari over-exaggerations; the claim that we’ve destroyed 90% of the world’s fish is preposterously unlikely.
However, Hari is right that we could effectively deplete the oceans of edible fish within a generation. And the collapse of oceanic food chains may herald unforeseeable and catastrophic consequences for the wider planet.
To most people this must seem a distant, abstract debate. “We’re running out of fish? Whatever: the ocean is huge!”
But if you take a walk to your local inland freshwater canal, river or lake – provided you live within about 50-100 miles of the coast – you’ll be able to find living proof that the ocean’s are running out of fish, in the form of either of these:
On the left is a European Shag Cormorant, and on the right a Great Cormorant.
Cormorants are sea birds. They do not, by nature, belong anywhere near freshwater.
20 – even 10 – years ago you would rarely have seen such birds anywhere but on the coast. Yet they are now a common site across inland Britain. Indeed, I saw three yesterday on an East London canal.
Let’s put this in perspective. There are now so few fish left in the seas around Britain that cormorants have abandoned the coast and moved inland to find food. They simply cannot survive on their natural diet of sea fish. That’s how few fish there are left in the sea.
You may be thinking: “So what? Now the cormorants just eat freshwater fish.”
Which of course they do. Except, freshwater fish stocks exist – or rather, had existed – as parts of complex, finely tuned ecosystem with a few predators at the top balancing-out the food chain. When the comorants arrived, that finely tuned ecosystem was devastated as the comorants ate everything they could.
In many small-to-medium sized UK freshwaters there has been a huge collapse in fish stocks to the point where only fish that are too big to be eaten by cormorants (and that’s not leaving many) remain. How long they can survive, when the food chain that was supposed to sustain them has collapsed, is a matter of speculation.
Over-fishing of the seas is already having visible knock-on effects away from the oceans themselves. Indeed, that’s the thing with nature: when you mess up one part of it other parts will be ruined in turn, often where it’s least expected.
Don’t take my word for it, go and see something your grandparents would never have seen: colonies of cormorants on Britain’s lakes, rivers and canals.
