Category: Society, Media & Politics

In which I get quite het up about social mobility, and the lack thereof

So I’m 1 day (or 8 days depending when you’re counting from) late with the blogging. Apologies. I’ve been busy. There was work. And my dog ate my blog post, or it was stolen by pixies or vultures or something. There was a reason for my ineptitude I’m sure, and it almost certainly was not my fault.

I’m here now though. So that’s all right. And I’ve been thinking about poverty. Poverty is, when you put your detached academic hat on, a bit of a tricky concept. Do you measure it relative to a national or global average or do you maintain an absolute measure of poverty for a particular country or region? When and how do those measures change – if it’s in line with inflation, then who’s preferred measure of inflation should you use? Should it be one that places high emphasis on the cost of essentials (eg. utilities, rent, basic food) rather than “luxuries,” on the basis that a higher proportion of a poorer person’s weekly budget is spent on essentials than for a better off person? It all gets a tiny bit complicated.

There are some things we can say for definite about poverty in the UK though. Both Save the Children and Oxfam consider it UK poverty to require charitable intervention. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts an 300000 increase in children living in absolute poverty between 2010/11 and 2020/21. They also  predict an increase of 700000 working age adults living in absolute poverty over the same period. The Trussell Trust currently run over 250 foodbanks across the UK, providing essential food to people who can’t afford to buy it.  At that point it ceases to matter how you academically define poverty – when you’re relying on a charity to eat, you don’t need a nice man with a questionnaire to tell you if you’re poor.

And in a sense, so what? Some people are better off than others. This is hardly news. What makes me cross though, is the absolute breakdown in the ability to shift from “Have Not” to “Have”. In some, probably imagined, rose-tinted past, it’s reassuring to think that we believed that if you worked hard it was possible to better oneself. It’s getting harder and harder to believe that.

There is a gulf between the richest and poorest in our society. In 2009 the top 1% of UK earners earned a higher percentage of the total national income than at any point in the previous 50 years. In 2011 the OECD found that the link between parents’ income and child’s income was stronger in the UK than in France, Italy, the USA, Canada or Germany. Wealthy people have wealthy mummies and daddies.

It’s ok though. Our lack of social mobility is being taken in hand. Nick Clegg has a strategy. This is disheartening in itself. Deputy Prime Ministers develop strategies on things that aren’t quite important enough for the Actual PM to bother with them, or for there to be a government department and minister responsible for. Deputy Prime Ministers are places for parking issues where you sort of feel you should probably do something, but where actually doing something might be tricky or expensive, or tricky and expensive.

And in the meantime, we continue to talk about people living with the day to day problem of scrimping on food to feed the gas meter, or arguing with the Tax Credit Helpline about yet another mistake in their calculation, or trying to explain to the children why they can’t go to their classmate’s birthday party because you can’t afford the bus fare and the obligatory gift, as scroungers or shirkers. The language of many politicians is still steeped in the notion that if you’re poor, it’s your own fault, while never acknowledging that if you’re rich, there’s a pretty good chance that that was entirely down to daddy.

And that is my rant for today. I hope I’m wrong about the Deputy PM’s strategy. I mean, I’m not, but I hope I am.

In which I am genuinely confused by the gay marriage debate

Yesterday British MPs voted in favour of allowing gay marriage in the UK. Yay! At least a moderate yay! I’m not gay and so aren’t really planning to do any gay marrying, so it’s not a massive YAY! like it would be for the really properly important stuff that actually affects me. But some people are gay and some of those people want to get married so it’s definitely a yay! for them.

What I am a bit confused about is why anyone who isn’t wanting to have a gay marriage themselves would care enough to actively oppose the idea? This is the absolute definition of an issue that really doesn’t affect anyone else. Objecting morally to gay marriage isn’t the same as objecting morally to stealing. Someone choosing to steal adversely affects the person they steal from. Two people choosing to get married doesn’t adversely affect anyone, unless you’re in love with one of the getting-married people, but then your problem is really that they love someone else – the marrying someone else is simply the cherry on top of the icing on top of your cake of heartachey-pain.

I was absolutely certain that gay marriage didn’t affect me, apart from in a broad “it would probably be good to live in as fair and equal society as possible” sort of a way. But then it was pointed out to me that it does affect me. My husband drew my attention to the issue, and a man on Radio 4 drew his attention to the issue. You can rely on Radio 4 for drawing your attention to things, for example, in this case, it drew my attention to the fact that EngineerBoy has become prematurely middle aged and started listening to Radio 4.

Anyway, I digress. In this instance Radio 4 drew our attention to the fact that some of the objections to gay marriage are predicated around the notion that a marriage between a man and a woman exists, in substantial part, for the purposes of making and raising babies. There’s two issues there – we’ll deal with the one that isn’t just all about Me first.

It’s not just straight people who want to raise children. I know. Who knew? Some gay people like the idea of doing their child-raising within a marriage. Clearly, there are some additional challenges for a same-sex couple in the area of actual baby-making. However, we live in a society where there are children who can’t be cared for by their biological parents and need loving adoptive carers. If you feel that parenting is something best done by married people (for the record I don’t personally feel that particularly, but some other people do), then gay marriage is a big positive for lots of potential adoptive children. Yay again!

And now onto the bit that is mainly about Me – the idea that marriage is substantially about raising children causes me some concern. I’m married. I appear, by the “raising children” standard, to be doing it wrong. I’ve never really wanted kids (a characteristic I mused on at much greater length here). Neither has EngineerBoy. This is just one of the very good reasons that it’s fortunate we married each other, rather than lumbering two other poor unfortunates who might have been of more baby-friendly mindsets. The implication seems to be that I’m not doing marriage properly. It would appear that quite inadvertantly, and despite having married someone of the opposite sex, I have made a union that some people would equate with a same-sex marriage. So Yay! indeed for MPs voting in favour of gay marriage – it turns out it does affect me after all.

Or to put it more concisely – people loving each other is nice. People wanting to celebrate that love with their friends and family is nice. People wanting their community to recognise their commitment to each other is nice. People wanting to love and raise children is nice. None of those things are compulsory. None of those things follow automatically from the one before. Everyone having the option is good, and giving everyone the option doesn’t really make the tiniest bit of difference to anybody else.

Farewell then. See you all back here next week?

UPDATE: I’ve just had a query over on fb about my use of the term gay marriage rather than equal marriage, suggesting that equal marriage is a preferable term. I’d broadly agree with that. I’ve used “gay marriage” as a term in this post because that’s the common term used in a lot of media and because that tends to be the term that opponents of equal marriage use, and it’s really the thought process leading to opposition that I’m musing on in my own mind today rather than the actual issue of equal marriage itself. Hope no offence is caused by my choice of terminology.

In which I think about Michael Gove and it makes me go “Grrrrrrr.”

Last week I claimed I was going to blog about MPs voting on a 30% pay rise for themselves in the same week as approving a 1% cap on welfare benefits rises. It turns out that was lies, not least because it would be a very short blog. It’s pretty much obscene. That’s all I really want to say.

So now I can move onto other issues, and the thing that has caught my flutter-minded attention today is the intriguing phenomena that is Michael Gove. Mr Gove, the Gove-ster if you will, is Education Secretary. Just to be clear, that means that he’s in charge of education policy for England, not that he does the typing.

Since taking office Gove has had three main headline-grabbing policies. First he decided that he would send a bible to every school. Then he decided that GCSEs were too easy and he wants the young people of today to do proper old-fashioned manly academic exams instead. Today, he’s decided that A-levels, in their current form, are too easy and he wants the young people of today to do proper old-fashioned manly academic exams instead. And yes, I do see that technically, that’s only two policies, and the first one of those is just silly anyway.

The bible for every school thing is daft, not least because it’s pretty much the most widely available book on the face of the planet. The whole thing’s available for free online in multiple different editions and languages. Amazon will download you the full King James, Gove’s preferred version, to kindle free and gratis. If anything is holding back the educational progress of British schools, I think we can say with some confidence, that it’s not the inability to access bible texts.

So let’s have a look at his 2nd policy – the idea that young people today aren’t learning enough proper hard academic stuff and that exams should be harder. In both the replacements for GCSEs and the current A-levels one of the key ideas is that assessment will be by a single end-of-course examination, set and assessed by an external body.

Now that’s something I should probably be in favour of. I was one of those annoying kids who was good at exams. I passed the coursework part of my History A-level by writing the full 5000 word course work essay over a single night, starting at 6pm the night before it had to be handed in. Essentially I reduced the whole research-draft-reflect-revise coursework process into a 12 hour high pressure exam.

But I’m not blown away by Gove’s ideas, and I’m not blown away because I have no faith at all that he understands what he’s actually doing. Designing assessment in education is hard. Good assessments are ones which have reliability, validity and fairness.

Reliability, is sometimes called replicability. Essentially it means that if the same student, with the same level of knowledge/skill, took the same assessment at a different time and place they would get broadly the same result. Similarly, results between similar groups of students should be consistent.

Validity means that you are actually testing the thing you are setting out to test. This is incredibly difficult. If you are trying to assess knowledge of a particular subject, do you do it by ongoing course work or by single exam? Ongoing coursework might assess subject knowledge, but it also assesses research skills, time management, organisation, and possibly, ability to copy from the internet or get your mum/friend/teacher to write it for you. Single exam assesses subject knowledge, but also ability to cope with pressure, ability to write quickly, ability to cram or revise, and possibly, creativity and imagination in your approach to cheating. Coming up with a form of assessment that solely assesses the thing you’re claiming to assess is all but impossible, and I don’t think Michael Gove understand that.

Fairness means that all your students have a fair crack at getting a good result – it relates closely to validity. It covers things like not assessing students’ descriptive writing by asking them to write a paragraph describing the taste of bacon. Jewish students, for example, are likely to find that significantly harder than a child who’s eaten a full english every day for the last 16 years.

So, yes, review assessment and education processes. It’s important that we make them as good as we can, but understand that doing that is really difficult. Simply deciding to make it “tougher,” or “more academic,” or – and this is what a lot of education reforms ultimately amount to – “more like it was in my day,” is lazy policy making. And it’s policy making with no basis in evidence, and no basis in an understanding of how learning and assessment work.

Several eons ago I had a little rant on this very blog about the rise of the career politician, and Michael Gove is a prime example of why this matters. Gove is a product of the political bubble. Prior to entering Parliament, he was a political journalist and the chair of a conservative thinktank. If only there was some sort of training or job one could do that would allow a person to enter politics with some knowledge of how education works, or doesn’t work. But no… I can’t think of any such career. Oh wait. Hold on one tiny little second. There’s actually being a teacher. There’s an idea. How about having an Education Secretary who knows something about education, beyond a general sense that things were better in the old days, and that every child’s schoolday would be best commenced with a gown and mortar-boarded master reading verses from the King James Bible before requiring the boys (and weirdly in the mental picture I’m creating there are only boys) to recite their 12 times tables out loud until their tonsils start to bleed?

I think that’s all. In summary – Michael Gove: grrrrr. Comments please!

In which I share some thoughts about localism

The current government are very keen to talk about localism. It’s second only to the, much talked about but rarely explained, Big Society, on their list of favoured nebulous concepts that sound like they might possible be a good idea, but only in a way sufficiently vague not to offend anybody.

Localism is more than just an idea though. It’s a whole Act of Parliament. The Localism Act, passed in November 2011, covers areas such as planning, local council structures and housing provision. The claim is that the Act, and other pieces of coalition policy, make decision making more localised and, therefore, more directly accountable to local voters. It’s dubious whether the Act actually does that at all. For example, the Act allows central government to cap levels of council tax rise, and define who should be considered high priority in housing allocation.

The other poster-policy for localism has been the introduction of elected police commissioners. Commissioners were elected in November 2012 with stunningly low turnout and high levels of spoilt papers. The idea is that an elected police commissioner is more accountable than a committee-based police authority, and, therefore, power is handed-back to the wider electorate.

Let’s unpick that a bit. A major premise here is that elected individuals are intrinsically more accountable. In one sense that’s clearly true. After a specified period of time the people who chose them get to consider their successes and failures and decide whether to let them carry on. However, it’s only true in a very limited sense. Officials elected for a fixed term are incredibly difficult to get rid of before the end of that term. If an elected police commissioner is just a bit irritatingly incompetent there’s no neat way of sacking them until election time comes around. (Worryingly, the same is true of Prime Ministers.) That means that an elected police commissioner in the first couple of years isn’t really accountable at all, knowing that all but the most major cock-ups of the first half of the term will be forgotten by election time. Similarly, a police commissioner with no intention of standing for re-election isn’t accountable to anyone at all, knowing that they will never actually have to explain their decisions or defend their record.

There’s another problem with the localism agenda and it’s highlighted by playing a very simple game when you watch the news. Every time you hear a national politician talking about “increasing local accountability,” simply replace the phrase with the words “decreasing our accountability,” because that’s what it means. Frustrated by the slow response of the police? That would be a local issue. Cold, wet, and hungry because of the lack of affordable housing? That would be a local issue.  But they’re not local issues, because central government retains its control of the purse strings. They want local police forces and local councils to appear accountable for local decisions, but they also want to maintain a capped level of council tax and reduce national police funding. That means that local councils and police commissioners are expected to be accountable for reduced outputs, but aren’t allowed to control the financial inputs.

More recently, the Local Government Secretary, Eric Pickles, has gone further, demanding that local councils re-instate weekly bin collections, and threatening cuts in funding for those who don’t comply. You can understand Pickles’ concern over the bin-emptying turmoil sweeping the country. I don’t see anyway that a rational individual could look across the national political landscape and conclude that anything other than how often people’s wheely bins get emptied was the most pressing issue facing the nation.

What we have here is central government setting local decision makers up to take the blame for the way that national policies play out in local communities. Local councils and police commissioners aren’t able to set their own budgets and, increasingly, see their spending priorities dictated from Westminster too. They then take the flak for reductions in local services, because, the coalition tell us, these are local issues. All the while, the coalition talk about localism, directing voter’s attention, and anger, towards their local politicians, rather than national government, which is naughty of them really. Bad politicians. Bad.

So that’s my little rantette for this week. Come back next week, when there’s a reasonable chance I’ll be talking about 1% rises in welfare benefits and 30% rises in MPs’ pay, unless something more interesting distracts me in the meantime of course. Toodle-pip.

In which I am slightly confused by the BBC’s employment practices

So the BBC is having something of a kerfuffle. I think kerfuffle is the right term. Some media outlets would have it that the BBC is in irredeemable crisis, but those are media outlets with short memories (fallout from the Hutton Enquiry anyone?) and lazy typing brains, so their opinions are best stepped over like the slightly muddy puddle that they are. Anyone would think there was some sort of big report on print media ethics coming out soon, that they maybe wanted to distract attention from.

I should probably make plain right now that I’m a big ol’ fan of the BBC. I think public interest broadcasting is massively important. I’m with Mitch Benn on this one (even given the slightly unfortunate reference to Newsnight in line one).

I think that Doctor Who, Only Connect, most of Radio 4 (but not The Archers, never, ever, ever The Archers) and everything ever made involving Brian Cox, Alice Roberts or David Attenborough justify the licence fee in full, making things like decent news coverage an (albeit essential to making democracy work) add-on benefit.

It is unfortunate for the BBC that it finds itself unable to defend itself without being accused of bias, and that the rest of the media sees it as a competitor so is very happy to stoke the flames of any perceived problem or mismanagement. It also seems clear that there were major weaknesses in child protection during the Jimmy Savile years – although it’s not yet clear that those weaknesses were any worse than those exhibited at schools, by the police, within the CPS, and indeed in certain hospitals, during the same period. There have also been, more recent, problems of editorial control on Newsnight, but to generalise from that to a wider damning of the beeb feels a bit baby/bathwater-ish. You know the saying: “Be careful when you throw out babies, that you don’t get rid of the bathwater. Water’s a precious resource, you know. You could use that bathwater on the garden.” Or something along those lines. So, anyway, if you’re looking for some BBC bashing, please move along or scurry down to the bottom and entertain yourselves in the comments.

One thing has particularly caught my attention during the recent kerfuffle though, and that is the BBC’s slightly odd employment practices. I’m not talking about the major odd practices that led to this whole thingummy doo-dah. I’m talking about something else – in fact two something elses.

Firstly, George Entwistle has resigned as Director General of the BBC but is still going to receive a year’s salary. Secondly, Newsnight editor, Peter Rippon, BBC Head of News, Helen Boaden, and Deputy Head of News, Steve Mitchell, have all “stepped aside” during this crisis. What irritates me here, and I do see that it’s really not the biggest issue but it irritates me nonetheless, is the wanton use of euphemism.

In employment law there are basically 4 options:

1. You still work there, which involves regularly turning up, and at least presenting the facade of doing work.

2. You’re suspended on full pay. This is what employers do when they’re investigating a possible disciplinary issue and deciding whether to take further action. They don’t need to start a disciplinary procedure to suspend an employee on full pay, because they’re still meeting their employer’s obligation to hand over money.

3. You resign. That means that you don’t work there anymore because you don’t want to, and, fairly obviously, you don’t get paid anymore.

4. You get sacked. That means that you don’t work there anymore because your employer doesn’t want you to, and you don’t get paid anymore (after whatever notice period you’re entitled to).

So for George Entwistle, if he genuinely resigned, why on earth is he still getting a year’s salary? That hardly sounds like a resignation. That sounds like an offer that any one of us would be insane to refuse. “So you’re saying I don’t have to come in anymore? I don’t have to do any work? But you’re still going to pay me in full for the next 12 months? Er…. sure, OK.”

If he wasn’t pressured into resigning, why give him the cash? It’s not normal to pay someone not to work for you. If he was pressured into resigning, why do it in such an expensive way? Why not just sack the man? If the BBC Trust felt he wasn’t up to the role and had lost the trust of the public and the corporation staff, then that would be a perfectly legal thing to do.

And what’s all this “stepping aside” malarkey? Call a spade a shovel for goodness sake. I’m guessing – and it is just a guess – that those people referred to as having “stepped aside” are suspended pending further investigation, which would be the employer’s decision. Generally, in employment, there isn’t an option where you go to your boss and say, “I’m finding work a tad tricky at the moment. I think I’ll just step aside for a while…” You either quit or you keep working there, unless your employer decides different.

I hope the BBC gets through this kerfuffle, and I’m confident that it will, and I hope that they appoint a new Director General who’s prepared to stand up for the organisation, both externally and internally. That might, on occasion, involve doing decisive things like firing an incompetent, not inviting them to step aside, or paying them excessively to go away without fuss.

Last, but by no means least, let me just squeeze in a tiny little point about David Cameron. David Cameron thinks that the year’s salary paid to George Entwistle is “hard to justify.” I happen to agree with him. However, the man who told Rebekah Brooks to “keep her head up” during the phone-hacking scandal might want to check the solidity of his moral high ground before wading into dhe debate about any other media exec’s pay arrangements. Brooks is now facing criminal charges over phone hacking and, apparently, left News International with a something in the region of £7 million.

In which I think about American elections, British politicians and Others

So Barack Obama is still President of America, and many column inches have been expended on musing about why. Received wisdom has 2012 down as an election that the President should have lost, based on one of the most fundamental of all political truisms: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Incumbent Presidents in the US, or governments in the UK, don’t win when the economy is in meltdown, but Obama did, suggesting that we should probably be checking whether anyone’s still got the receipt for the wisdom we’ve received, and seeing if we can exchange it for something more useful. Like a hand blender or bobble hat.

What seems to have changed the electoral mathematics for Obama is good old-fashioned demographics. As many Republicans in the US already know, the party had slipped into the trap of only appealing to people just like them, and had failed to realise that that wasn’t going to be enough. Republican senator Lindsey Graham boiled the realisation down to a handy soundbite earlier this year when he noted that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Unfortunately the need to focus on widening the base was somewhat undermined by incidents such as a black journalist having nuts thrown at her by Republican conference delegates, and the tendency of various Republican candidates to come over a tad unattractively wrathful on issues like rape and abortion. Probably not the way forward if you’re trying to broaden your electoral appeal beyond those angry white guys.

“But why does this matter? This is all about America, and you are a British based blogificator,” I hear you cry. At least I assume it was you. It’s also perfectly possible that the voices have come back. Well, it does matter, and there is a point. If you could just bear with for a few paragraphs more, I will totally get to it. It involves looking at the wider narrative about those demographics. So, it appears that Obama won because he held onto votes from African Americans, Latino Americans, younger voters and a significant proportion of women. In some quarters this has caused proper flarey-nostrilled consternation. Bill O’Reilly, who is reliably nutty on Fox News, came close to spelling it out in this clip, with its implication that self-interest is a somehow a non-white, non-masculine, non-American trait, which the non-white (and as Donald Trump would have it) non-American President played into.

Now you can form your own opinions on the intrinsic rightness, wrongness, reasonableness or racism of O’Reilly’s comments. What he’s doing is, in many ways, no different to what politicians and their supporters do in any election campaign at any time the world over. What he’s doing is what historians, anthropologists and sociologists would call “Othering.” That’s the process by which you define one set of values, and people, as Right, Good, and American (or British, or French etc), and one set of values as immoral, debauched, and un-American (or just not British). That second set of values are the ones held by the opposing side, by those people over there, who are different, other, not like us.

The key for a politician is to make sure that the big scary Other that you construct doesn’t end up being bigger or more attractive than set of “people like us.” That seems to have been where the Republicans fell down in this presidential race. By sticking to the hard right on issues like immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage, they shifted a whole lot of people who might have embraced a “hard-work, family-centred, low tax, small government” narrative, into the group of Others (or Obama voters as they are now known).

Othering phrases that do seem to work in politics are those which are inclusive enough for lots of people to think you mean them. “Hard-working families” was the buzz phrase in UK politics for close to a generation, and is still in use today. Politicians stick with it because they know that very few people will self-identify as lazy or idle, even if their work ethic rarely extends beyond bashing out a blogpost two days later than intended. In the long-term the phrase, potentially, falls down on the demographics again – as a nation we now have more single people and more couples living without children, so the emphasis on families becomes potentially alienating.

Ed Milliband’s more recently coined “squeezed middle” is another great example of an, apparently inclusive, othering phrase, because not only do a lot of people think they’re part of the “middle”, they also have a really strong notions of who isn’t part of the “middle.” Different people’s ideas of what the “middle” is will be wildly different. That doesn’t matter, so long as enough people think that the “middle” is them, and think that they are different from, and more deserving than, those Others, whether the Others are swanking around with undeserved millions or lounging around on undeserved benefits. If you achieve that, then the phrase is doing its political job.

And political rhetoric does matter, because effective rhetoric defines the terms of political debate. Phrases like “hard-working families” get used again and again with little examination. Those phrases allow politicians to obfuscate and talk about policy in generalisations rather than specifics. They also create a political narrative of division. By focusing on a notion like “hard-working families” politicians solidify a language where benefits claimants, for example, can be painted as undeserving because they are seen as not hard-working, and therefore not like us. The implication is that “hard-working families” are right and good, and people outside of that are Other, different, to be punished, to be feared. Getting sucked into the notion that people who aren’t like us are less deserving in some way seems like a dangerous path. So I think it matters that we notice when politicians, commentators and political journalists talk in othering terms, because then we can employ the oft-underrated skill of thinking about what they’ve said, rather than simply absorbing the underlying ideas.

That is all. Off you go now and have cake, or some celery, or just sit quietly. It’s very much up to you.

In which I muse on whether I ought to have A Policy

I am self-employed. I eke my little living out by touring about the place and training people about things. I teach for various different organisations, usually on a freelance/self-employed basis, occasionally as a hourly-paid employee. Generally it’s quite a jolly (if slightly unreliable) way to make a living, as it affords the benefit of getting paid without the drag of having to get out of bed at the same time every day.

It also means that I am spared having to attend meetings at which people discuss policies, you know –  how they ought to have a policy about something, how there should be a working group to design the policy, how the policy should be maintained and reviewed, and then (almost inevitably) how everyone’s ignoring the policy and doing exactly what they did before anyway. I can honestly say that since I packed in having a proper job and went self-employed in 2009 I’ve not had to have a policy about anything. Basically I just do stuff. I don’t even have to go to a meeting to talk endlessly about the stuff I’m going to do. I just do it. It’s at least seven different sorts of lovely.

But last week, something disturbing happened. One of the many and various organisations I work for sent me a “supplier form” to complete asking me to detail my Data Protection Policy, my Equality and Diversity Policy, and my Environment and Sustainability Policy. Now the sensible thing to do would be to append a letter to the form explaining that I’m a sole trader and I don’t really handle personal data and I have no intention of recruiting anyone or building a fossil fuel burning power station in the course of my current business, and then just tick “Not applicable” a lot on the form. That would be the sensible thing to do, but what would be better I think, would be to write myself some policies. That would be a whole hunk of time I could tell myself I was doing work, whilst not actually having to achieve anything. In many ways it’s a win:win situation.

Only it turns out not to take that long. I think I’ve managed to write the perfect one size fits all policy that deals with any and all issues that could ever arise. It has three points. As is my want, I have numbered them.

1. Try not to do stupid things.

2. Try not to do unkind things.

3. (Because most workplace policies ultimately are about covering one’s back against the risk of getting sued) Try not to do illegal things.

That is all. And I think that genuinely does cover all eventualities, and is actually a doubly good environmental policy, as it saves you from having to print out reams of different policies on different things.

Let’s check how it would work in practice – Thinking of printing out a 5000 word document one word per page over 5000 pages? Check the policy. Nope – turns out that would be stupid, so that’s a no! Thinking of poking someone with a stick because they don’t share your ethnic group? Check the policy. Nope – turns out that would be stupid, unkind and illegal. That’s a triple no!

So that seems to work. Right. Lovely new business policies written. Probably ought to get on with doing something useful now. Maybe I’ll have a go at simplifying laws. There’s like loads of them. It’s probably terribly inefficient.

As always, do commenting and following and all that sort of thing. Do you want to amend my policies for all things? Please feel free to make suggestions (so long as I’m not expected to do them – we’re not operating a democracy here people).

In which I think about Jimmy Savile and manage to generate two entirely valid and utterly contradictory points of view

I grew up in Scarborough, where Jimmy Savile, British TV and yoof radio God of the 1970s and 80s, had one of his many and various abodes. I believe he also owned houses in Leeds, London and on the south coast. Over the last week Savile’s reputation as a charitable TV eccentric has taken a premier league battering. If you’ve missed out on the story this is as good a introduction as any. In the week since the story broke the allegations have come thick and fast, and the perception seems to be that Savile’s abuse of young girls was something of an open secret for a large part of his career.

Now, like many people who live, or have lived, in Scarborough I have my own Jimmy Savile anecdote. He was (sort of) at my wedding reception. EngineerBoy and myself got married in Scarborough and our reception was at a large hotel on the south cliff, not far from Savile’s flat in the town. Essentially, that meant that the hotel bar was his local, and, on the night of our wedding, there he was resplendent in shell suit and string vest. This was 2002, a good 15 years after the height of his TV fame, but Savile’s presence was still enough to cause some small excitement amongst those guests who’d grown up with “Jim’ll Fix It” as a Saturday tea time fixture. Various people got him to pose for photos, including one in which he cheerfully licked a plant (for reasons known only to himself). I’m told that when invited to come and join our party, Savile declined, commenting that he, “didn’t like being around happy people.” I was also told, by more than one female guest, that Sir Jimmy had taken a vigorous feel of their bottom while posing for pictures. Generally, the women involved shrugged off the fact with a kind of world-weary, “typical, dirty old man,” attitude.

And that seems to be symptomatic of the way that a lot of people over the years responded to Savile, and it’s an attitude that most of us have probably adopted at some point or another. I suspect there’ll be very few women reading this who’ve never had their arse pinched or slapped by a stranger or distant acquaintance, and simply shrugged it off. I certainly have. In the moment it feels more pragmatic and a lot easier than saying something and being accused of being shrill and over-sensitive.

Many of us will also have had situations where we’ve heard rumours of something more sinister going on. For example, a teacher at my former secondary school was jailed last year for sexual relations with students dating back into the 1980s. The shocking point about that story was that it hadn’t happened sooner. There were constant rumours, when I was a pupil, about that particular teacher sleeping with students. Some of those rumours must surely have made it back to the staff room. Maybe not, or maybe, without a clear accusation in front of them staff and governors found it easier not to dig too deeply. No-one wants to be the person who is seen as taking things too seriously and making unnecessary fuss.

And here’s where I manage to generate and hold two potentially contradictory opinions. Firstly, I absolutely applaud anyone  finds the courage to speak out and try to take action when they’ve experienced abuse, whether they do that immediately, a week later, or several years later. It’s completely understandable that young girls don’t speak out about abuse at the time. Part of the psychology of an abuser is in the ability to convince the victim that they’re special or chosen, and that they’re party to secrets that must be held close. It can take years, if it happens at all, to break down the mental and emotional bindings created by an abusive elder.

But secondly, there is one really big difference between the case of Jimmy Savile and the teacher I mentioned. The teacher was still alive when the allegations came to light. He was arrested, charged, tried and found guilty, after the opportunity to defend himself in court. Savile will never have that opportunity, and with no opportunity to defend himself I don’t see how he can fairly be proven guilty. Does that mean he remains innocent? Well, clearly not from the point of view of the women who say they were raped or sexually assaulted by him, but legally it probably does. It may be that there are other people who conspired to assist or hide any abuse that occurred and there may be criminal charges that can be brought against them. That might offer some small very sense of resolution to the women involved.

I don’t think that even Jimmy Savile’s closest friends or (rapidly diminishing group of) defenders would argue that he wasn’t an odd man. But odd isn’t the same as guilty. Eccentric isn’t the same as criminal. Weird isn’t the same as abusive. Any woman who experienced sexual abuse, by Jimmy Savile or anyone else, should always feel able to speak about it. Their stories are important, and they form a, too often ignored, part of our cultural make-up. We need to learn when it’s not ok to turn a blind eye, when the other adults around and about need to be awkward and shrill and make a fuss. But we can’t try a dead man.

This is an almost overwhelmingly sad situation. There’s a group of women who experienced incredible trauma and only felt safe to speak out when the man they believe abused them is cold in the ground. There’s a man whose reputation is comprehensively destroyed with no means to offer a defence. And there’s little hope of justice for anyone.

In which I identify what is news

List number one: the list of things that are (or could be) News

Man bites dog, man bites fruit loaf and finds a mouse inside, man bites fruit loaf and finds a tiny dog inside, income tax rises, Nobel prizes, freak tornadoes in Devizes, the storming of embassies, the expulsion of diplomats, new information on the effects of trans-fats, Afghans killing NATO forces, NATO killing Afghan civilians, “honour” killings, military killings, violent killings, generally killings, revolutions and natural disasters (including those in places a long way from here involving people who do not look like me), industrial actions, warring factions (unless said warring exists only on Twitter, in which case, No), changes in levels of homelessness, changes in levels of joblessness, cuts to legal aid, what expenses MPs get paid, whatever Justice Leveson says, what the Hillsborough Independent Panel already said, international politicians who are suddenly dead, the results of major sporting events, legislation requiring working ladies be treated the same as gents, cases of discrimination, unexpected shifts in the wealth of the nation, leaks of chemicals from power stations, also leaks of radiation, rates of sexual assault conviction, the awarding of major prizes for fiction, suicide bombings, other sorts of bombings, welfare benefit reform, health reform, education reform, and other things which aren’t the norm.

List number two: the list of things that are not, never have been, and never will be news

Kate Middleton’s boobies.

So I hope that’s clear. I’m sure there are lots of other things that are or aren’t news. Please add your own suggestions in the comments. Then we can make a definitive list, send it to news editors across the world and never have to sit through reports on what some people who aren’t important or interesting reckon about some random sleazy photos ever ever again. And thus, the world will be a better place.

In which I consider how David Cameron is really surprisingly bad at politics

Last week saw a cabinet reshuffle at Westminster. Cue lots of twitter jokes about rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, and lots of Newsnight footage of MPs in varying states on promotion and getting-sackedness. It was a truly amazingly terrible reshuffle, pretty much whatever point of view you look at it from. There are essentially four reasons for reshuffling a cabinet: 1) To make your government look more public-friendly and re-electable; 2) To shore up your leadership with the party faithful 3) You have no choice, because someone high profile quits or; 4) Because you want to announce something truly horrendous on the same day and it’s a handy way of distracting the media.

This reshuffle was in the middle of a paralympics, so I don’t think it was 4). We’ve had a summer absolutely tailormade for burying bad news, so why not save your reshuffle until you really need it? It’s not 3) either. Everyone who’s gone or been demoted appears to have gone unwillingly. So let’s assess the esteemed Mr Cameron’s success on points 1) and 2).

1) To make you government look more public-friendly and re-electable.

Let’s put aside the fact that we didn’t actually entirely elect this government. It’s looking increasingly likely that the next general election will be a good old fashioned two-horse race, the Lib Dems having thrown away the longer electoral war for the short-term “victory” in the Battle of the Coalition Agreement. Given that, if Cameron was looking for a reshuffle that would improve public perception of his government, how’s he done?

Let’s start with the positives. Andrew Lansley, formerly Secretary of State for Health was kicked into the political semi-retirement role of Leader of the House. That’s going to be popular in most circles. The year’s Health & Social Care Bill (on which I had views here) was astronomically unpopular, and the decision to present poorly people with bedside video of his big old head was, entirely inexplicably and unpredictably, met with some derision.

Other positives? No. None at all really. Let’s look at a fairly significant group in the electorate with whom the Conservatives are vulnerable, a full 50% of the population: the Lady-women. Now, astoundingly, despite being ruled by our wombs and prone to fits of fainting and hysteria, women in the UK are permitted to do voting. Historically, going back to the immediate post-war period, women were seen as much more likely to vote Conservative than men. That big gender disparity has largely broken down (as demonstrated in this analysis of the 2005 election polling and result), but Cameron still can’t afford to annoy half the electorate. His “Calm down, dear” comment during PMQs coupled with MPs’ schoolboy responses to comments about Nadine Dorries MP’s “frustration” have rather combined to create an impression of a boys’ club government, slightly confused that not all women around them are solely focused on perfecting their victoria sponge and selecting soft furnishings for the nursery. This was an opportunity to shuffle some women into the cabinet, but actually the number of women has gone down from 5 to 4 and a half (Baroness Warsi is still allowed to attend cabinet but can’t vote – one can only assume her role is to bring the biscuits and sit quietly).

But what about wider electoral issues for men and women? The political orthodoxy in the UK says that you win General Elections by occupying the centre ground. Even the most vilified of right-wing leaders, Margaret Thatcher, was able to present herself, accurately or not, as more middle-ground that the very left-wing Labour Party of the time. Tony Blair brought Labour back into government by steering the party sharply to the right and occupying the centre position left vacant by the Tory’s descent into infighting and obsessive preoccupation with the EU. This reshuffle can only be seen as a shift to the right. The cabinet (and indeed the Tory party’s) highest profile moderate, Ken Clarke, has been dumped from the Minister for Justice post and made Minister Without Portfolio, a position which doesn’t really mean anything very much at all. The architects of many of the most electorally difficult policies (Gove at Education and, of course, Osbourne at the Treasury) have stayed in post.

So, this isn’t a reshuffle to shore up Cameron’s position with the wider electorate. Maybe his focus is on…

 

2) To shore up your leadership with the party faithful

Moving to the right will be popular here. There’s real resentment amongst Tory rank and file at having to pay lip service to funny new fangled Liberal Democrat ideas, so the perception that Cameron is recommitting himself to core Tory values is likely to go down well.

But for these purposes you’ve got to question whether Cameron has gone far enough. More than anything else, this reshuffle looks kind of lame. He’s managed to only half-sack Lansley, Clarke and Warsi, which makes him look like a deeply indecisive and unconfident leader. Does he want them in the cabinet or not? In addition, he tried to get Ian Duncan Smith out of the Department of Work and Pensions, but Duncan Smith was able to leverage his popularity with the party to politely (or not) refuse. There’s no other context in which a boss can try to dismiss you and you get to just go, “Er, no thanks mate, if it’s all the same to you.” The papers, this week, are full of pre-party Conference gossip about stalking horse candidates and a possible return to the Commons for Boris Johnson, something of a perennial thorn in Cameron’s side. This is a time when Cameron needs to look strong as a leader – on the evidence of this reshuffle he just looks a bit meh.

 

There’s other things to be concerned about in this reshuffle too. Realistically, it doesn’t look like there are going to be any major policy changes on the Big News economic stuff. There might be policy shifts in other areas – Transport is the obvious one here, where the vexed issue of London’s airport capacity has shot right to the top of the agenda. But, essentially, the cabinet doesn’t make policy anymore anyway. Including those people, like Ken Clarke and Baroness Warsi, who don’t really know why they’re there, the new cabinet meetings will have 32 attendees. Anyone who’s ever sat through a meeting with more than about 8 people will know that a group of 32 ain’t going to be a well-oiled decision making machine. And this reshuffle underlines the practice of policy being made by a inner circle of PM, Chancellor, their special advisers and possibly a handful of powerful ministers – Michael Gove and Ian Duncan Smith look like the men who’ve come out of this with influence in tact. Accepting that ministers don’t make policy, means that it’s fine to have ministers who know little or nothing about their area of responsibility. The position of Justice Secretary is a case in point. The post was created in 2005 when Tony Blair got rid of the post of Lord Chancellor. Previously the Lord Chancellor had to be drawn from the legal professions. The new post, as with any other cabinet position, was entirely in the gift of the PM. Up until now, all the occupants have been former barristers. Chris Grayling has no legal background or training, but he’s the minister responsible for Britain’s justice system. Knowing about stuff no longer matters, because it’s no longer the role of ministers to make decisions. It’s the role of ministers to appear on Question Time and try not to accidentally say anything controversial or interesting. It all makes me a bit sad really.

Oh and, Jeremy Hunt is the new Health Secretary. Jeremy Hunt supports homeopathy, apparently opposed the NHS tribute in the Olympics opening ceremony, supported the takeover of hospitals in his own constituency by Virgin Care and co-wrote a 2005  pamphlet which recommended healthcare system based on insurance and individuals choosing their own healthcare provider. In 2010, David Cameron claimed that the Tories were “the party of the NHS.” In 1997 Tony Blair promised us that things  could only get better. Reader, they lied.