The coalition’s attack on the family
Iain Duncan Smith loves families. Nice families, of course, with a mum and a dad – not any old rag-tag childrearing unit. His Centre For Social Justice believes that “married two-parent families produce the best outcomes for both adults and children”, and in government, he’s contributed to the policy of removing the dubious “couples penalty” from the benefits system. Read more…
The child experiment
Tim Harford of the FT reckons that the evidence is in favour of charter schools proving education. Looking at the mixed evidence from the Swedish and American experiences, he concludes: “This suggests that more choice can raise standards in British schools. The Conservative policy is well worth trying.” Read more…
Bad habits and dull shapes
We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war.
Alasdair Gray, Lanark
The emergency budget is intended to change the arrangement of the state permanently. The cuts it contains have been trailed as inevitable as well as irrevocable. The extent of the deficit has been talked up mercilessly. Tim Harford points out that almost all the ‘extra’ debt the government claims to have discovered has in fact been public knowledge for a very long time, but it doesn’t matter: the debt has to seem new, because it has to justify the mercilessness of the cuts. Read more…
Project Prevention and the price of eggs
Barbara Harris is profiled in The Guardian today with a substantial interview about Project Prevention. It’s a doubly disappointing piece – because of the opportunity it gives Harris to promote her questionable charity, and because of the missed opportunity to scrutinise what she’s offering.
Jenny Kleeman’s feature suggests that the journalist is personally appalled by Harris’ methods (“It feels profoundly unsettling to be walking around one of Britain’s poorest districts with a woman who’s promising people serious money in exchange for their fertility,” she writes) but willing to give creedence to the campaigner’s aims – Kleeman accepts that the birth of children to drug-addicted mothers is a problem that needs solving.
Project Prevention isn’t the only approach to that problem, though. In fact, and moral objections aside, it looks like a painfully ineffective program when the numbers are laid out. In its 12 years, Project Prevention has served just over 3,000 individuals. Meanwhile, about 2,000 children every month are referred to the Department Of Children And Family Services in LA, where Project Prevention was launched.
The problem is that, while bribes can be a good incentive, they’re limited – they’ll only work on the person who receives the money. Take into account what Harris must lay out for travel and admin as she takes her project to the world, as well as the expense of providing contraception where there isn’t an NHS (a contraceptive implant costs £80 for the device, not including the cost of actually inserting the thing), and suddenly this is a really pricey way of preventing pregnancies.
Education programs, on the other hand, could reach many more people for the same price. And it’s not as if pregnancy and childbirth are cost-free experiences for the mother: they’re risky, they’re inconvenient, and the resultant offspring are pretty expensive. An education program aimed at deterring conception in addicts could lay out these penalties among the arguments for using contraception.
But Harris’ bribes turn fertility into a commodity that can be pawned away. If you were desperate for money, and aware of the program, there’d probably be a hefty temptation to wait until Project Prevention could serve you rather than go through the NHS for free. As well as putting money into the drugs market (because addicts undoubtedly spend their bribes to feed their addictions), Project Prevention creates a subsidiary market in fertility.
So, ethics aside, this looks like an ineffective program with potentially bad unintended consequences: what, then, is it actually for? Well, Project Prevention started out as a campaign to criminalise women who gave birth to drug-addicted babies and subject them to compulsory sterilisation. Harris failed to get the law she wanted – but Project Prevention allows her to continue lobbying for control over other people’s fertility. Because while it’s an inefficient way of providing contraception, its shock value means it probably works out quite cheaply as a way of buying press coverage. And it’s Harris’ ambitions to legislate fertility that should really make us look hard at the ethical basis of her campaign.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
Farewell, Aarowatch
Aaronovitch Watch claims to have watched its last Aaro:
the Times is going to go paywall at the end of this month, and that seems to us like a natural point to bring “Aaronovitch Watch” to a close. Whatever the ease or otherwise of getting Aaro’s weekly column on the down-low, the fact is that with his disappearance behind the paywall he’s going to be a less influential and less important columnist – with the passing of New Labour as well, this was always going to be the case anyway.
In the wider “World of Decency”, I also feel that a historical moment has largely passed by. There are still imperial wars out there, of course, still ludicrous double standards on human rights and even the New Labour project is not 100% dead yet. And Harry’s Place and Normblog and all will presumably continue to be as ghastly as they ever were, while Nick Cohen is unlikely to shut up as he is to ever write a readable column again. And all of these baleful social phenomena will still have their crowd of cheerleaders from a soi-Decent Left perspective, with willyoucondemnathons and all. But, well, do you care as much as you did five years ago? I know I don’t. If we carry this thing on beyond its natural life, it’s almost certain to end up as another site about bloody Israel.
(Prescient, because a week and a half later, the flotilla happened and even the most reluctant blogs threatened to become “another site about bloody Israel”.) I can’t remember exactly how I first found Aaronovitch Watch – probably by googling some combination of the words “Nick Cohen” and “is wrong” – but it’s been one of the best things in my RSS feeds ever since I subscribed to it.
As well as rustling up well-informed analyses (not just of Aaro, but of pretty much any rhetoric from the bizarro world of liberal beligerance that huddled under the tag of Decency), Aaro Watch has always been pleasingly provisional. Loads of blogs are written on the premise that the author knows a Great Deal about something and you have come to imbibe their worldview; the writers of Aaro Watch say things like, “It’s perverse, but I like being wrong. If I’m not wrong at lot of the time, I know I’m not trying hard enough.”
And, probably because the blog has always been written in explicitly discursive style, a strong and interesting community of discussion has gathered around it. I’ve only ever been an irregular commenter on there, but the threads are always worth reading: long without turning cyclical, smart and usually funny too. I’m going to miss that part of the blog maybe even more than I’m going to miss it as a centralised location for Nick Cohen abuse.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
Everything red
This post was edited on 12 June 2010 – a commenter on Liberal Conspiracy pointed out that I used “civil” rather than “civic”, and I’ve now put that right.
Things are looking rosy for ResPublica, the Conservative think tank led by official enemy of Paperhouse and original Red Tory Phillip Blond. There’s now a government that’s broadly sympathetic to ResPublica’s aims (Red Toryism occupies the same sort of self-help space as Compassionate Conservatism), and it’s received a hefty injection of support – enough to be recruiting for six new positions offering “competitive + bonus” salaries.
One of the roles it’s looking to fill is “head of the security and civic cohesion unit“. Wait, what? Why does “security” go with “civic cohesion”? I know I’m approaching this from my standard fuzzy left position, but doesn’t “security” mean “people with guns and things that go bang”? And isn’t that a bit of an awkward fit with “community cohesion”, which seems to mean… Well, I don’t really know what it means. People rubbing along together, I guess. Municipal halls. That sort of thing.
Actually, I can have a pretty good guess at what it means in Blond-world. There’s his insidious insistence that the “indigenous white working class” have been “marginalised and ignored” (by whom?); he has a “sense” that “racism is returning”, but he treats racism as a rational response to barely-defined social conditions, rather than a repellent attitude that ought to be publically thrashed.
Blond is not keen on difference. He writes about the “ruinous consequences of state sanctioned multi-culturalism and the lazy moral and social relativism of the liberal middle class” as though those ruinous consequences are absolute and their cause confirmed. Whatever the ruinous consequences are, they were caused by multiculturalism, whatever that is. Clear? Good.
It’s that sort of floppy logic that makes sense of ResPublica’s decision to class civil cohesion with security issues. Things were nicer, in Blond’s view, before the 1940s – and maybe it’s not a perfect coincidence that his British Eden pre-dates Windrush. In Blond-world, security comes from sameness and pockets of otherness mean danger. And that, presumably, is why ResPublica puts “civic cohesion” under the same remit as spies, terror and invasions: because if you’re not like Blond, then you’re against his nebulous, homogenous little idea of Britain.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010; photo by Kudomomo, used under Creative Commons
How Compassionate Conservatism writes off the poor
As secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith will oversee the application of those “savage”, “momentous”, “way-of-life disrupting” cuts to some of those at the very bottom of the social heap. His late metamorphosis into the Tory party’s social conscience was one of the more endearing curiousities of the Conservatives’ wilderness years.
Sure, the assumptions from which IDS’s Centre For Social Justice worked were often numbingly traditionalist. Talk of wanting a “welfare society” to displace the welfare state could be cynically compared to the Victorian practice of offering voluntary poor relief (mostly workhouses, which don’t sound as huggy).
And then the think tank’s obsession with marrying the nation off, turning out endless papers on the presumed value of legally enshrined heterosexual coupledom, made it a bit of a meddling grandmother to the nation, constantly trying to nudge us all down the aisle. But still, Compassionate Conservatism meant well. And who wants to be anti the anti-poverty think tank? Anyone who wanted to criticise the Centre’s work had to pass through a pretty invidious double negative to make their point.
Actually, that was part of its function. The mission statement says it was established “to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blight parts of Britain”. But it was also part of the reorientation of the Conservative party away from being the big bad benefit-slashing wolf of British politics, and into a more lovable Red Riding Hood guise (basket of goodies, keen on the extended family).
In a 2005 interview, IDS was disarmingly frank about the fact that his policy contributions were inspired by salesmanship as well as sympathy. Asked about how the Tories could make themselves electable again, he explained that the party needed to “present a set of values which represent compassion”: “You need people to say, rather like they say about Labour, actually these are OK, they are decent people, their heart is in the right place.”
But while he was persuasive on the heart part of the argument, it was the head that caused IDS problems earlier this year – specifically, his flawed interpretation of one neuroscientist’s work on the developing brain. As the Guardian reported, IDS was caught extrapolating wildly from Dr Bruce Perry’s research on the brains of children who experienced extreme neglect.
Perry’s work found that infants who experienced profound sensory and emotional deprivation tended to have restricted brain development. Duncan Smith spoke about that finding as though it applied to a whole range of more minor deprivations, from witnessing abuse to growing up in the care of a mother who has several partners. And IDS posited brain size as an explanatory factor in poverty and crime.
Perry described Duncan Smith’s comments as an oversimplification and distortion of his research. It’s a depressingly lax attitude to evidence, but that can hardly seem surprising in a politician. What’s perhaps worse is that Duncan Smith is making a deterministic case for putting the poor and supposedly disruptive beyond help.
After all, the government can’t be expected to make people’s brains bigger. And people with small brains can’t be expected to make anything of their lives. It’s a nonsensical perversion of the research, but very seductive to a party that had already committed to the Broken Britain lie – a pseudo-biological explanation for inequality that exonerates the well-off from responsibility. In fact, it’s practically Victorian. As the cuts start to take effect – starting, it turns out, with some of the smallest and poorest – that workhouse comparison might not turn out to be as facetious as it sounded.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010; photo by Alyceobvious, used under Creative Commons
Teaching God
It’s not easy being the national religion of a mostly secular nation. Christianity is priveleged in lots of ways in the UK. The presence of the Lords Spiritual in the House Of Lords gives a legislative voice to the C of E; the BBC offers Songs Of Praise and the Daily Service, making Christianity a consistent part of our cultural output; and state schools are required to provide “broadly Christian” acts of collective worship, meaning that the religion is an unavoidable part of most children’s education.
But if you feel that Christianity deserves even more prominence, then all this might seem dignified rather than efficient. After all, only 50% of Britons describe themselves as Christian, while 43% say they have no religion (according to the British Social Attitudes Survey). Some people wonder if there shouldn’t be a way of making this ostensibly Christian country a bit more, well, Christian.
And so, when Ofsted releases a report criticising the provision of religious education in UK schools, traditionalist voices like the Telegraph are ready to jump all over it and blame “misplaced enthusiasm for multiculturalism” and the “ignorance” of teachers for the limited treatment of Christianity. Ofsted’s report highlights several areas of genuine concern in the way Christianity is taught, and most educators would accept that a stunted understanding of religion will affect children’s ability to learn about (say) history and literature – studying the Renaissance or the Reformation without a rough grasp on Christian beliefs is pretty much going to be a bust.
That doesn’t mean the same as this claim from the Telegraph, though:
Our youngsters have no chance of understanding the history of Britain, or its fundamental values of equality, toleration, and freedom of conscience, unless they also understand where those values came from.
If it even makes sense to talk about instilling “freedom of conscience” through compulsory religious instruction, it’s patently excessive to ascribe all those liberal values to Christianity. Many Christians have done great work for social causes – but then, so have people of every other faith and no faith at all. Christianity hasn’t got a monopoly on the nation’s morals.
The problem for the Telegraph is that, if it wants Christianity to be taught like very other religion, then it has to accept that Christianity is like every other religion. Not an unchallenged part of the national life, and not an inevitable object of worship, but a system of belief that can be studied as an outside phenomenon. And the scrutiny of religious beliefs (although the Telegraph doesn’t mention this) is another area where the Ofsted report noted that religious education was failing:
There were significant inconsistencies in the way humanism and other non-religious beliefs were taught, and some uncertainties about the relationship between fostering respect for pupils’ beliefs and encouraging open, critical, investigative learning in RE.
So while the right is presenting Ofsted’s report as another warning from the death of Western civilisation (snore), the report itself is arguing that agnostic and atheist arguments need to be better presented in schools. And that’s not all: while the Telegraph is getting all hot for the “self-starting schools [that will] spring up as the state contracts”, Ofsted is clear that the problems with religious education could be down to too little centralised control.
“There is still very significant variability in the quantity and quality of support for RE provided to schools by local authorities and Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education,” states the report. “A review is needed to determine whether the statutory arrangements for the local determination of the RE curriculum which underpin the subject should be revised or whether ways can be found to improve their effectiveness.”
The ill-fitted union of classical liberals and social conservatives that makes up the Tory party (and, by extension, the coalition) is going to founder on issues like this. At the moment, both tendencies have reason to believe they can get what they want from education reforms (as well as the policy on academies and free schools, Gove has already said that he wants neocon historian Niall Fergusson to advise on the history curriculum). But the ideological tension between the desires for a small state and a homogenous culture suggests that they’ll soon find themselves in opposition to each other.
What’s guaranteed is that, whichever side gets the ascendancy here, it’s going to be the thoughtful, critical parts of the curriculum that suffer – and, inevitably, the children who are dependent on the state for their education. The Telegraph likes to promote the idea that Christians are under cultural siege. But the coalition’s contradictory impulses are going to ensure it’s the pupils who get thrown to the lions.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010; photo by Paul Johnston, used under Creative Commons.
School for scoundrels
It’s not exactly surprising that secretary of state for education Michael Gove has said he has “no ideological objection” to schools being run by businesses for profit. After all, as he points out, he is a Conservative: it’s pretty much a given that he’ll prefer corporations to citizens if the former wants something that the latter has. In this case, the something is funding for education.
I’m still small-minded enough to think that if there’s money washing about in the education system, then it should be reinvested back into education, not diverted to shareholders. I’m such a giddy idealist, I think that having already paid tax to support state education, it’s a bit bloody much for the state to cast that money out to the private sector on the understanding that profit is a better motive for education than responsibility. And I’m sufficiently economically naive that I just can’t understand how installing extra layers of non-educators is going to make the system more efficient or better value.
But while Gove says that “school improvement will be driven by professionals not profit-makers”, the profit-makers have already moved in. According to The Economist, Swedish for-profit company Kunskapsskolan is due to set up two academies in London. University College London is also getting into the academy business, and The Economist reckons they’ve chosen well: “Other universities might be advised to follow suit, for the government is ring-fencing spending in this financial year on schools. Universities are not so lucky.” (I guess someone has to pay for those grotesque vice-chancellors’ wages, and if the degree student glut is over, the younger ones will have to do.)
Even The Economist – which clearly thinks academy and free schools are a very good thing – is frank about who these new arrangements will help. It’s not going to be the children who most need support:
Whether having more academies will close the growing gap in academic performance between rich and poor children is moot; the new academies are more likely than existing ones to end up teaching well-off [pupils].
So the flagship education policy is going to entrench inequality, as well as suck funding away from schools and into the pockets of “providers”. And while all this is supposed to encourage appealing-sounding virtues like “autonomy” and “freedom”, Gove isn’t such an ideologue that he’s above a bit of centralised crowd-pleasing curriculum fiddling: he’s keen for empire-apologist Niall Ferguson to direct the history syllabus.
That’s the Niall Ferguson who, having weighed up everything and thought very hard about it, reckons that the deaths of millions of colonised Indians sits very fairly on the balance sheet opposite an entry for “increasing the GDP of Great Britain”. So children can learn the dogma of profits over people in the classroom, while they’re having the dogma of profits over people inflicted on them from outside, making Gove’s centralised decentralisation one of the most elegant hypocrisies of the coalition so far.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010; photo by Xin Li 88, used under Creative Commons.
Paper chasing
Guardian, Guardian, why did you desert Labour? Since The Guardian plumped its electoral backing behind the Lib Dems, there’s been a l0w cry of anguish from some Labour supporters, involving words like “betrayal” and “hypocrites” and “haha, look, David Cameron’s the prime minister anyway”. Kerry McCarthy MP goes for The Guardian again in a blogpost this weekend:
… with its ‘once in a lifetime chance to get PR’ line, [it] lost us the chance of winning several seats where the Labour challenger would have made a far better MP than the Lib Dem incumbent. See Lucy Powell’s campaign in Manchester Withington, where victory looked a dead cert until the Guardian stuck its oar in, and Bristol West, where the votes ebbed away after the Guardian came out for Clegg. And Labour was offering a referendum on AV anyway, which could have put PR on the agenda for discussion too (especially if Labour had been the biggest party, with the Libs holding the balance).
One of the curious things about this election was how little the campaign seemed to matter. Back in October, when the feeling of inevitability for Dave was running high, I caught an episode of The Week In Westminster with a pollster and a psephologist discussing the relative standing of Labour and the Conservatives after conference season. Both of them called it for a hung parliament, on the grounds that the swing needed for a Tory majority was immense. Six months before polling day, before most of the papers had pinned on a rosette, it was known that the general election would come down to two things: how big the swing from Labour to Tory would be, and which party was most successful in courting the Lib Dems.
So did the papers’ support make any difference at all? Not really. After all, if The Sun’s Camobama fantasia and The Mail’s dire threats of a fiery doom couldn’t sway it for the Tories, it’s laughable to imagine (even in tentative brackets as McCarthy does) that The Guardian’s support might have made Labour the biggest party in Westminster. As it happens, the Lib Dems gained a measly 1% of the vote and lost 5 seats – hardly a triumph for tactical voting. This was a bad election for newspapers, and a combination of poor judgement and hubris served to underline the fact that newspapers really aren’t as influential as they’d like to be.
But politicians still believe in the power of the press – still crave the cushion of a friendly new agenda. Which leaves the depressing spectacle of the Labour leadership contenders running around, chirping anti-immigration talking points back at the right-wing media that created them. This dedication to becoming BNP-lite seems more likely to undo Labour than any amount of disagreement with The Graun over electoral reform. Labour’s pursuit of press support will hurt it much more than the withdrawal of media backing ever could.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2010
