2010 May « Sarah Ditum

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).

Shot By Both Sides, 22 May 2010, “Puttin’ it down”

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

Cross-posted to Liberal Conspiracy.

Barbara Harris (right), the founder of Project Prevention, is the definition of a social entrepreneur. She’s the kind of person who, under the Big Society ideology of the Conservatives, might be represented as a worthy provider of a public service.

She saw a social problem where she lived in LA, and she – with the time, money and inclination to do it – implemented her own solution. She even uses the language of entrepreneurship to describe the poor and desperate people she works with: they’re her “paid clients”.

And now, she’s bringing that solution to the UK, campaigning from the This Morning Sofa and the BBC’s Hard Talk.

The problem she identified is the birth of babies to drug-addicted parents. And the solution? Paying addicts to be sterilised.

Before her current UK tour, Harris claimed to have received 400 requests for her services and a $20,000 donation. That’s enough to pay about 65 women to get sterilised at the standard rate of $300 a time.

While Project Prevention doesn’t exclusively offer sterilisation – long-term, reversible contraceptive methods such as the coil, implants and injections are also supported – more than a third of her “clients” do take the tubal ligation option, according to Project Prevention’s own statistics.

In interviews Harris fequently describes herself as offering sterilisation. It’s fair to say that sterilisation is presented as the first choice for drug-addicted women. (And the “clients” mostly are women – fewer than 50 of Project Prevention’s “paid clients” had a vasectomy, which means that fewer that 2% of them are men.)

There are some pretty obvious ethical issues in offering drug addicts money for medical procedures. Harris has said (in an interview for Radio 4’s Taking A Stand) that that “in most cases” the money Project Prevention hands out goes to pay for more drugs.

Ultimately, Project Prevention’s money could be used to subsidise the drugs trade, supporting dealers and helping to create new addicts.

But Harris’ interest isn’t in the long-term outcomes for the women she works with or the areas they live in. There’s no subsequent monitoring programme and no requirement that addicts sign up for treatment – Project Prevention’s involvement with these women begins and ends with their fertility.

If they should later regret their sterilisation, Harris says “that’s no worse than if they got AIDS prostituting”, putting Project Prevention on the same level of responsibility as a virus.

At the bottom of this, Harris is responding to a genuine problem, even if she does exaggerate its severity. Babies born to drug-addicted mothers have a bad start of it.

If the pregnancy comes to term (drug or alcohol abuse both increase the risk of miscarriage), it’s more likely to result in a premature or early birth, low birth weight, infant mortality and other health problems. And then there are the social costs: children of the addicted are more likely to grow up in impoverished or disrupted conditions, and more likely to end up in care. It’s fair to say that drug addiction isn’t a great foundation for family.

Dr Petra Boynton, agony aunt and sex educator, acknowledges this, but says that Project Prevention’s approach isn’t the answer either: ”

Aside from their work being based on ideology rather than evidence (they’ve not published any research on the effectiveness of their approach for example), there is the issue of existing UK services.

We have got overstretched reproductive health services, but generally they are good and are currently seeking to improve their work. It seems odd that an organisation from outside the UK wants to parachute in and start their own approach which may run counter to what’s being attempted here.

After all, all the options offered by Project Prevention are available for free in the UK through the NHS. A better way for Harris to help addicts access contraception would be to help drug services and sex educators to work together – but then, that would take a much more sympathetic approach than Harris seems able to offer.

Harris says that she’s happy to accept donations from far right organisations, so long as the money can help her cause. Distasteful as that all might be, it isn’t the reason we should reject what she’s offering: Project Prevention should be turned back at the border because what it’s offering is short-sighted, liable to exacerbate the problem it’s supposed to solve, and most of all, it just isn’t needed.

Sarah Ditum

Freelance writer and journalist

Posted in May 2010 …

Paper chasing

Does paying drug addicts to be sterilised work?

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