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February 28, 2005
Victims and their oppressors
According to David Cracknell in the Sunday Times, the Government is about to publish a bill that will make it illegal for the providers of any goods or services - such as hotels, shops, pubs or restaurants - to refuse service to someone because of their religion. It had been expected that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation would also be included, but the report says that Downing Street fears that Muslims might feel offended if they were ‘lumped together’ with homosexuals in the same bill.
This is not the first time that one of the official victim groups in society has squabbled with the Government over the planned Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR). Until now there have been three protected groups: women, ethnic minorities and disabled people. Three new categories are to be added: sexual orientation, religion or belief, and age. A few months ago I attended a meeting in the House of Commons where enthusiasts for gender equality objected to being ‘lumped in’ with old people, who they felt were not as deserving of victim status as women, and when the Government issued a consultation document on the CEHR, the Commission for Racial Equality was opposed to the initial plan because it lost some of its privileges. Above all, it did not want to lose coercive powers to punish employers for disobedience.
Once the protected status of all six victim groups is legally in force, there won’t be very many people left who can’t fit into one or more of the categories, leaving white males as the undisputed oppressors of all the others.
Posted by David Green at 05:28 PM | Comments (2)
February 25, 2005
Call a spade a spade
Ruth Kelly’s attempt to address what she terms the ‘intellectual snobbery’ surrounding vocational education is in fact, exacerbating it. What is proving to be an inherent educational snobbery in the DfES towards non-academic skills will undeniably, have the effect of further segregating pupils into two channels of high and low achievement.
Having dismissed Tomlinson’s overly optimistic recommendations to implement a unified diploma designed to create ‘parity in esteem,’ the Education Secretary claims to be pursuing an alternative route to re-balancing the status gulf between academic and vocational subjects. Kelly’s plans for 14-19 education allegedly seek to put an end to the second rate reputation of the vocational subjects through a form of re-branding which will revamp their image and quantifiable educational value.
The very premise of Kelly's plan is counterproductive as she proposes to redress the image of vocational skills by making them essentially pseudo-academic. To raise the status of more practical subjects, the manner in which they are taught as well as their outcomes will now more closely mirror their academic counterparts. Consequently, pupils learning vocational skills are to be formally taught in the classroom as well as through first-hand experience, and grades achieved to be treated as comparable with academic subject grades. Furthermore, the aim is to get those learning hands-on skills not into the job market as soon as possible, but to continue formal education to university level. This appears to be a falsely egalitarian move shrouded only superficially by politically correct rhetoric. Inevitably in this system some courses will enjoy high status and others low, rendering this hybrid model actually damaging, as it undermines both standards in skills acquisition and the value of academic achievement as well as the real scholarly purpose of institutions such as universities. If academic learning is genuinely not superior, why is there a need to get everyone to participate in it? Kelly’s reforms thus reinforce the snobbery she claims to be targeting, by highlighting the monopolising currency and value in education and public discourse of academic-style formal learning.
Vocational skills, common sense would assume, are best learnt in relation to their employment context, not removed to an artificial classroom environment. Indeed, as Kelly herself keeps saying, A levels and GCSEs will remain the gold standard; so new plans for education will simply act to accentuate this dichotomy, reasserting vocational learning as the poor cousin. A public re-evaluation of vocational skills cannot be achieved from within the education system in isolation, particularly not in this artificial and transparent manner. It is unlikely that even Kelly believes this to be possible. However she must somehow reconcile a commitment to tomorrow’s economy with Blair’s pledge to get every child achieving more - in a context where achievement is rigidly defined.
The point is that there are, of course fundamental differences between vocational training and academic learning, and rhetorical attempts to negate these simply highlight the devaluation of vocational skills. Perhaps what really needs addressing is not so much the education system, but the image that non-academic skills have in wider British society. In the 14-19 White Paper Kelly repeatedly refers anxiously to the high number of pupils going into vocational training abroad, misguidedly attributing this to their countries’ education systems rather than to cultural attitudes within their labour markets. Once the DfES is able to banish the notion that success in today’s ‘knowledge economy’ is achievable solely through academic-style qualifications, we may be able to work towards a training system to generate a highly skilled and subsequently highly valued, manual labour force.
Anastasia de Waal
Posted by at 10:20 AM | Comments (4)
February 24, 2005
Faith's Nope to Charity
An evangelical group, Christian Voice, is reported in today's Times as having successfully managed to ‘persuade’ a cancer charity, Maggie’s Centres, to decline the donation of £3000 offered by the cast and company of the West End musical, Jerry Springer-the Opera, raised by a special charity performance of it last Friday.
Christian Voice considers the musical blasphemous in the manner of its portrayal of Jesus and hence that all proceeds stemming from any performance of it unworthy of being accepted by a charity that Christians either work at, attend or support through donations.
Christian Voice conducted its campaign by employing a number of different strategies. It spoke to the charity of the offence it would cause its Christian clients and employees were it to accept the gift. Additionally, it claimed that, were it to do so, the charity would lose even more money than it would gain because otherwise would-be Christian donors would withhold their donations to it. Christian Voice also threatened to picket the premises of the charity were the gift accepted.
No right-minded person can possibly take exception to members of Christian Voice exercising their right to protest peacefully and lawfully against a musical they consider blasphemous. More questionable is their method of conducting their campaign against the musical by extending it to a charity offered a gift out of proceeds from its performance.
In one of the briefing papers published on their website, members of Christian Voice explain that they ‘attempt to analyse current issues in the light of God’s eternal word [and] try to filter current events through scripture.’ Accordingly, at the risk of entering an arena of controversy into which even angels might fear to tread, I shall express some of my reasons for having misgivings with their tactic that draw on the very source from which they claim to draw their inspiration.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul explains that, when in a previous letter he had bid them not to associate with immoral men, he did ‘not at all mean the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.’ Paul went on to explain that he only intended to bid his Corinthian Christians not to associate with ‘any who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber… For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. ”Drive out the wicked from among you” .
Now, it seems clear that many non-Christians must have been involved in attending or performing at the charity performance of the musical at which the money in question was raised. It also seems clear non-Christians work for the charity as well as make use of its services.
It seems, therefore, that, in putting pressure on Maggie’s Centres not to accept the donation from the musical, Christian Voice will have succumbed to the error against which Paul warned his fellow Christians of holding non-Christians to the same exacting standards as Christ only bid Christians observe.
At a more ad hominen level, since the leader of Christian Voice was willing to be interviewed on a radio channel of the BBC which also broadcast the musical, how can it be acceptable for him but not Maggie’s Centres to benefit from using such a tainted source?
Indeed, since all public services that derive their revenue from general taxation, how can anyone avail themselves of any of them ensure that they do not benefit from tainted money, since some of that revenue undoubtedly comes from the taxes paid by those working on musicals like Jerry Springer and other producers and distributors of material Christian Voice must find no less offensive?
Only when members of Christian Voice are willing to martyr themselves by forgoing all NHS treatment, all use of public roads, etc., should they be considered to enjoy the right to tell charities to refuse donations from musicals that they consider blasphemous. In sum, he who is without sin….
Posted by David Conway at 04:13 PM | Comments (1)
February 23, 2005
It's good to talk
Why John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, wasn’t lynched for having the audacity to make suggestions about the differences between the sexes is mystifying, given the intolerant fury that has been directed at Lawrence Summers recently. No one seems to mind when counsellors confirm certain stereotypes, such as that men are more competitive than women, more physically aggressive and have better spatial reasoning, or that women are more concerned about relationships, more adept at understanding body language and better with words. Yet what Summers, president of Harvard and former secretary to the US Treasury, said to a conference of economists last month has now been so mangled that one could be forgiven for thinking that he announced men were good at science while women were not because they were thick.
According to the transcript of his lecture, he compared the relatively low number of women in the sciences to the numbers of Catholics in investment banking, whites in the National Basketball Association and Jews in farming. All of which are statistical certainties, irrespective of why. After declaring that racial and sex discrimination needed to be ‘absolutely, vigorously’ combated, and conjecturing that bias might not entirely explain the lack of diversity in the sciences, he posited a set of possible reasons. Firstly, he said, women need to take career breaks to have children; secondly, women are ‘innately’ less scientifically minded; thirdly, and consequently, the pool of women to recruit into top-level scientific posts is smaller.
No prizes for guessing which one of those caused the kafuffle, but there’s something wrong when it’s a heresy even to suggest that biological differences might be worth considering. What’s curious is not that a politicising press should fan the flames of controversy, but that the halls of academia – putative heartland of intellectual advancement and dispassionate debate – should field reactions like that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins who, upon hearing Summers’ words, told reporters that her ‘heart was pounding’, her ‘breath was shallow’ and she was going to be sick. Evidently, she hardly demonstrated her rationalism by spitting her dummy like that, but there is a bigger problem. The great illiberal trick is to discredit contrary opinions by declaring that their arguments are unfounded, whether or not they can actually be verified, and drown all salient opposition in torrents of indignation.
At one level, the debate has been encouragingly open, to the extent that dialogue has opened up even within single publications. Nevertheless, it’s fairly typical to see someone like Natasha Walter, for example, writing a sneering article about ‘sexual mumbo jumbo’ in The Guardian, and dismissing all countervailing cognitive research, even though Brenda Maddox had already provided counterevidence in the same paper, and Simon Baron Cohen¸ a Cambridge psychologist also writing for the same paper, had broadly concurred with the Harvard leader. Cohen is at pains to state that ‘you cannot tell what kind of brain a person has from that person’s sex’ but, he adds, ‘Summers may be right that biological factors are producing sex differences in the mind, which are further acted upon by the social environment.’
The suitability of women’s brains for scientific research is not in question, nor is the fact that the barriers against women in academic science have been incredibly high until very recently, nor that there have been numerous important female scientists and will undoubtedly be far many more. My point is not that Summers was right. It’s just that it can’t possibly be a bad thing to highlight existing inequalities in the sex ratio in science, and to encourage debate. What matters, for anyone who chooses to engage, is to accept that both sides can marshal evidence, and that it is on evidence, rather than opinion, that the battle should be waged. The evidence may show us that there are cognitive, genetic, environmental, or no differences between the sexes, but we have to be able to consider it without recourse to moral and political shibboleths. Whether or not men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or both are from Earth, equality of opportunity should be the objective: an open and honest discussion is integral to that process.
Posted by Nick Seddon at 02:06 PM | Comments (2)
February 22, 2005
Gender discrimination and Harvard University
Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, continues to be in trouble for pointing out that there are only a few outstanding female scientists because scientific ability is not evenly distributed between males and females. Sarah Baxter provides an update in the Sunday Times.
Why do some people find the mere statement of this fact so upsetting? It seems to be because they have confused moral equality with equal outcomes. The origins of moral equality lie in our Christian heritage. As earlier liberals would have said, we are all equally children of God and, since all will be judged by their maker, all must be seen as equally capable of choosing right from wrong. But career success and failure have nothing to do with moral equality in this sense.
Closely allied with the idea of moral equality is the view that a person’s life chances should not be determined by his or her ascribed status (such as male or female; black or white). All should be able to advance according to their individual merits.
Some people now interpret this ideal to mean that any real and existing differences associated with an ascribed status cannot be acknowledged. This view implies a further assumption, namely that particular abilities are equally distributed between groups defined by their ascribed status. Consequently, it is inferred that, if success or failure in a particular career are not equally distributed between the groups, then it must be because of discrimination. Yet the liberal ideal has always been to allow individual talent an outlet, with the inevitable result that some will be more successful than others because talent is not equally distributed between groups.
Concern with the proportionate distribution of favourable outcomes between groups defined by their ascribed status is a return to a pre-liberal view of the human condition, in which the main category of analysis is the group (the tribe, the clan, the aristocratic family) rather than the individual. So long as any woman is free to become a scientist and to pit her abilities against anyone else, no liberal should be surprised to find disparate outcomes and there should be no liberal objection to the mere declaration that differences in outcome between men and women have been discovered. Let’s hope that Larry Summers will not be deterred from speaking without fear or favour.
Posted by David Green at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
Things You Can't Say
Rod Liddle has a thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times about the inconsistencies of groups insisting they are victims of oppression.
You can say that black and Asian women make up 8% of the general population and 29% of the female prison population, so long as you think it is proof of discrimination. But you can't say that a higher proportion of black and Asian women commit crimes compared with their white counterparts.
Why? Because political correctness demands that blacks and Asians are victims of an oppressor group. Any unfavourable outcome must therefore be due to discrimination, even if it's not. Mere facts must not be allowed to get in the way of solidarity with victims.
But hold on, perhaps they were 'fitted up' by the white police. Then why did 79% of people who appeared before magistrates in 2003, and 63% of those who appeared before Crown Courts, plead guilty ?
Posted by David Green at 08:00 AM | Comments (6)
February 18, 2005
In Defence of Church Establishment
Advocates of church disestablishment rarely miss an opportunity to argue for their favoured cause. Many of them believe they have been provided with a glorious one by the recent announcement of the forthcoming civil marriage of Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles in a ceremony that will immediately be followed by prayers and a dedication conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
One such opponent of church establishment quick to seize this opportunity was self-styled Anglican atheist, Theo Hobson. (You go figure!)
In an article of his in last Tuesday’s Times (Feb. 15 2005), entitled, ‘Get Off Your Knees, Dr Williams’, Mr Hobson claimed that, by having publicly expressed its approval of the marriage, despite being unable on doctrinal grounds to conduct the ceremony since the couple are divorcees, the Church of England ‘has opted to become part of the heritage industry ... [and] no longer a convincing or compelling form of Christianity.’
It remains a complete mystery why anyone should suppose, as clearly Mr Hobson does, that the Church of England would become any more convincing or compelling a form of Christianity were it to sever its special connection with the monarchy.
The purpose for which sovereign and church became linked in England was never thereby to enable either party to obtain extra legitimacy or authority through being made to consort with the other. It was, rather, to ensure that every holder of public office in England, above all that of its chief executive or sovereign, should come to look upon their office as a sacrament, and thereby feel constrained to discharge it on behalf of the public good for which it was given them, rather than for mere personal advantage.
Clearly, to accomplish this purpose a political society need not require its citizens to belong to the same, or indeed any Church, nor need it even require this in the case of all who hold public-office. However, it does require that there be some specific form of organised religion that enjoys a uniquely close relation to any royal family in which succession passes through primogeniture. This link is required to ensure that each incumbent sovereign is able to take the necessary vows at their coronation.
Some may protest that this special link between state and church has become an anachronism in an age so secular as ours. To make such protest, however, is to beg all the relevant questions.
So long as the vast majority of the English remain at least acquiescent in the institution of monarchy and show no sign of wishing to disavow at least notional affiliation with the established church, there is no reason why these two time-honoured institutions should not continue to retain their close historic symbiotic relation.
Rather than it being the Church of England or the Prince of Wales who needs to think twice about their continued place in the political scheme of things, it should be those, like Hobson, who should reconsider what England stands to lose were its historic religion to withdraw from the public square.
It is not only suicide bombers for whom religion can offer sufficient consolation to provide them with the motivational wherewithal to make acts of supreme self-sacrifice. We should remember this, not least when bidding farewell to troops off to battle, as well as when each incumbent sovereign takes their coronation vows.
Posted by David Conway at 10:12 AM | Comments (6)
February 17, 2005
TB or Not TB is the Question Britain Must Ask to Avoid Becoming the World-Capital of Health Tourism
“They don’t know it, but we’re bringing them the plague”, reputedly quipped Sigmund Freud to the two fellow psycho-analysts who accompanied him on his first trip to the USA as their boat approached New York harbour in August 1909.
They had gone there after the head of a Massachusetts university had invited Freud to lecture on his revolutionary new form of psychotherapy about whose supposedly miraculous efficacy rumours had started to circulate in the US.
Ignorance of their own very much other than metaphoric highly contagious disease is not an excuse that can be pleaded by the many TB carriers from overseas who have seemingly been entering Britain of late to gain the benefits of free NHS treatment for their condition. Their numbers would undoubtedly have helped to make Britain the world’s capital for health tourism and significantly have contributed to the startling rise of reported cases there of this disease in recent times.
Nor can ignorance be the plea of either the Government or Opposition of the risks to which they seem willing to continue to expose the country by failing to advocate that all would-be entrants to it from countries in which TB is prevalent be made to undergo prior screening and found clear of the disease before being allowed to enter.
Neither political party seems willing to demand that all seeking entry from these countries should undergo prior screening before being able to travel to it. At present, both seem content to demand the screening of those coming from them who seek permission to enter for periods of six months or longer.
Both political parties at present thus seem willing to allow in without screening those with or who suspect themselves of having the disease, if they simply declare they intend to stay for only a short visit. Once through immigration control, they can then make straight for the A & E department of the nearest NHS hospital which is obliged to admit and offer unlimited free treatment to all carriers of this disease.
The current failure of the British authorities to demand prior screening of all would-be entrants coming from high risk countries may help to explain why, as Sue Reid reports in a chilling story published in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Britain today is host to staggeringly much higher proportions of TB sufferers who have entered it from high risk countries than is the USA which insists that all would-be entrants to it from high risk countries undergo prior screening, no matter for how short a declared stay.
It does not take the special talents of a psycho-analyst to speculate why neither party is willing to call for the appropriate policies to stem health tourism in general and the rise of this deadly disease in particular. It seems they are afraid of losing the potential votes of those who hail from high risk areas whose kin might find it harder to enter, if such policies were adopted.
But all in Britain are equally vulnerable to the spread of diseases like TB. Political parties should start to think about what votes they would attract if they were first to promise to clamp down once and for all on the problem of health tourism.
Anyone tempted to think the above scare-mongering is recommended to read this letter in The Times for Saturday 19 February.
Posted by David Conway at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
A Health Care Manager A Day…
According to the NHS Board Room Pay Report 2005, the pay of NHS chief executives rose 70 per cent in ten years, while nurses’ pay only went up by 50 per cent. The NHS accounts in the year to March 2004 show that the average salaries of chief executives in England was £107,500, with the fattest cat of them all being the chief executive of Hammersmith Hospitals who takes home a tidy £212,500 each year. Meanwhile, many nurses are struggling to make £18,000. Union leaders are not the only ones who should be concerned.
Not entirely surprisingly, there’s strong evidence to suggest that increased spending on medical resources has a beneficial impact on medical outputs. In particular, researchers at the OECD have repeatedly demonstrated that higher doctor numbers are significantly associated with lower mortality, and in its 2003 report International Health Comparisons, the NAO declared that the number of doctors per 1,000 of population is the second most important measure after occupation in terms of explaining variations in premature mortality.
Last year, says the Daily Mail, medical staff made up less than half the NHS workforce: of the 1.28 million staff in the UK, only 663,375 were qualified doctors, nurses, therapists and ambulance staff. In comparative terms, the UK, with 1.8 doctors per 1,000 of the population, ranks at the bottom of the more developed countries. What's more, the UK has the second lowest reported number of practising nurses in relation to the population. The number of specialists also matters: it’s long been accepted, for example, that cancer care is under-resourced. Professor Karol Sikora, former head of the WHO’s Cancer Programme, has shown that ‘Britain has fewer radiotherapists per head than Poland and fewer medical oncologists than any country in Western Europe.’ In light of these deficiencies, the news about executive pay is disturbing.
Too much money is being allocated to bureaucrats when it should be spent on medical staff. Were it the case that the UK could afford to be complacent because of the effectiveness of its healthcare system, these staffing concerns could perhaps be dismissed. But the UK performs poorly on a wide range of outputs, and today, according to Michael Howard, ‘you are more likely to die of an infection you pick up in hospital than to be killed on Britain’s roads.’ In 2002, Tony Blair accepted that his government may stand or fall on the reform of the NHS: ‘if the NHS is not basically fixed by the next election,’ he said, ‘then I am quite happy to suffer the consequences. I am quite willing to be held to account by the voters if we fail’. Hoist by his own petard?
Posted by Nick Seddon at 04:34 PM | Comments (2)
February 15, 2005
Education Standards
Are education standards going up or down? Here is our survey of the evidence (PDF).
Posted by David Green at 06:33 PM | Comments (2)
February 14, 2005
Exports to the EU declining share of GDP
The EU accounts for 49% of UK exports, which amounts to 19% of GDP, a declining share. Britain also invests twice as much in America as it does in Germany, France, and Italy combined.
For an update on the declining importance of EU trade to our economy check out this New Frontiers Foundation report.
Posted by David Green at 05:46 PM | Comments (2)
February 11, 2005
Why Anyone Feeling Suicidal in Sheffield May Soon Have Only Hookers to Call Rather than the Samaritans
According to reports in yesterday's papers, the Sheffield branch of the Samaritans is facing threat of closure. It is doing so because the Big Lottery Fund recently rejected an application from it for a £300,000 grant with which to refurbish new premises it recently acquired because of the imminent expiry of its current lease.
The Sheffield Samaritans claim it was told by the Big Lottery Fund that the reason it rejected their application was that it judged they had not been doing enough to target minorities such as asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, the young, and the elderly.
The Big Lottery Fund deny this was their reason for rejecting the Samaritan's application. They claim they rejected the application simply because of the sheer competition from other worthy causes.
Clearly, if the Samaritans’ version is accepted of why their application was rejected, the group to whom the Big Lottery Fund has just awarded £360,000 to help prostitutes in their work was judged by it to be doing enough to target these minorities.
Even if the Lottery Fund’s own version of why it turned down the Samaritans' application is accepted, it still seems odd they should have judged that helping prostitutes in their work is worthier than helping those in a state of desperation and often on the brink of suicide.
Given their name, it would be irony, indeed, were, of all charities, the Samaritans to be guilty of discriminating against anyone in need of assistance on grounds of race, sex, or religion. Indeed, not even they are suggesting this is what the Lottery Fund had found them guilty of.
However, for a charitable body today to qualify for public funding, it seems it is not enough that it not actively discriminate against anyone on such grounds. It seems it also needs to show that it is benefiting, or else is actively striving to benefit, some disadvantaged minority or assortment of such minorities.
If the Sheffield Samaritans is made to close as a result of the Big Lottery Fund's refusal to award them a grant, then all who in Sheffield subsequently commit suicide, and who would otherwise not have done had they been able to contact the Samaritans, will have been made to suffer by the Lottery Fund's refusal, regardless of the race, religion, colour, and gender of these unfortunate people.
In that eventually, all who think the Sheffield Samaritans had not sufficiently targeted minorities to qualify for Lottery funding will be able to take comfort from the thought that all in Sheffield now enjoy exactly the same opportunity as each other to receive help from the Samaritans -- namely, none.
A great step forward will have been taken on behalf of race equality and social cohesion, I don’t think.
Posted by David Conway at 01:43 PM | Comments (4)
February 10, 2005
'PC ' Gains Whole New Meaning Under New Police Commissioner
Among the very first acts carried out by Sir Ian Blair in his new job as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was to change their logo. At the cost of several thousand pounds drawn from his budget, the word 'together' was added making the logo now read, 'Working Together for a Safer London’.
Londoners, I am sure, will now all be able to sleep more soundly in their beds together, safe in the knowledge of Sir Ian's bold initiative.
At the time he announced it, Sir Ian remarked “The word you’ll hear a lot from me is ‘together’”.
The Commissioner has certainly lived up to his promise. In an open letter sent to all Londoners at the start of his appointment, Sir Ian remarked, after declaring one of his central aims to be ‘to build stronger links with Londoners’, ‘If we are to be successful, we must work together with you.’
Few at the time could have appreciated just how much a man of his word Sir Ian would turn out to be, or how literal-minded.
Sir Ian is reported in today’s papers as having just announced his intention of encouraging senior police officers to spend up to five years away from their jobs working in industry and commerce to improve their management skills.
Now, we know what Sir Ian had in mind by saying he wanted London’s police and population to work more closely together.
Whether their doing so will ultimately make the capital any safer is doubtful. However, if the way in which Sir Ian has started his job is anything to go by, part of his undying legacy will will be to have given fresh currency to the familiar police initials, ‘PC'.
Posted by David Conway at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2005
One damn thing after another (not)
The old saying that history is just one damn thing after another is no longer true, according to Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Last week the QCA published a report confirming what many teachers, university lecturers and parents have been complaining about for years: history is now taught in such a fragmented way that children have no chance to develop a chronological sense of the order in which important events happened. Survey after survey has told us that a majority of people questioned thought that Oliver Cromwell fought in the Battle of Britain, and other such absurdities: now we are getting it from an important government agency charged with monitoring what is actually going on in schools.
The list of failings is startling. Not enough time is allocated, to start with. Only 4% of curriculum time is allocated to history in Key Stages 1 and 2. To make it worse, certain periods are covered two or three times, while other periods are completely ignored. The phrase which was taken from the QCA report by the newspapers – the Hitlerisation of history – describes the way in which twentieth century history, especially the Second World War, is covered in depth, with no reference to earlier centuries. It is as if the twentieth century just sprang out of nowhere. The British Empire is conspicuous by its absence.
The ‘modular’ approach to history – asking children to imagine themselves to be medieval serfs or Egyptians building the pyramids – has added to the confusion over the order in which things happen. One friend of mine told me that his nephew, who has been educated at an expensive independent school, asked him if the Victorians came before or after the ancient Egyptians.
According to some of the teachers who spoke to the QCA, history is sometimes being done in half-terms, alternating with geography. It is also getting muddled up with citizenship. Of course, knowledge of the history of your own country and its institutions is a vital part of becoming a good citizen, but that doesn’t mean that history as an academic discipline should become subordinated to the short-term aims of politicians, like increasing the youth vote.
Now that the QCA has confirmed what many people have been complaining about for years, we must hope that politicians will learn the lesson and stop using history to promote their concerns about gender, race, equality and multi-culturalism, and will instead just let enthusiastic history teachers get on with what they have always wanted to do, which is to encourage a love and understanding of the past.
Posted by at 03:31 PM | Comments (1)
February 08, 2005
Intimidation of Christian Converts from Islam
In The Times last Saturday Anthony Browne describes the risks many Muslims face when they convert to Christianity. One courageous individual told The Times that:
‘He and his family have been regularly jostled, abused, attacked, shouted at to move out of the area, and given death threats in the street. His wife has been held hostage inside their home for two hours by a mob. His car, walls and windows have been daubed in graffiti: “Christian bastard”.’
Mr Blair’s Government is falling over itself to pass a law against the encouragement of religious hatred at the request of the Muslim Council of Britain in the hope of winning Muslim votes. Ostensibly the measure will protect Muslims from Islamophobia, but the most serious problem we face is not the victimisation of Muslims by non-Muslims, rather it is the intimidation of former Muslims by those who have retained their faith. Few freedoms are more important than the ability to join or leave voluntary associations of all types, including religious faiths, without fear. Instead of inventing a thought crime, the Government should enforce the law against violence as it stands.
Posted by David Green at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2005
Crime and Police Effectiveness
According to the British Crime Survey, overall crime is falling and, according to police records, it is probably stable after allowing for changes in the method of recording. In any event, since the mid-1990s, under both the BCS and police records, crime has fallen. This still leaves us with the fourth highest crime rate among the other 39 European countries covered by the Council of Europe’s, European Sourcebook of Crime, and it only means that crime is ten times what it was in the 1950s instead of eleven or twelve times.
Why has it come down? And can the police claim credit? There are two main reasons.
First, some high-volume crimes have fallen because private householders have spent a lot of their own money defending themselves. The 17-country International Crime Victims Survey found in 2000 that a higher proportion of people in England and Wales had burglar alarms than any other country in the survey: 34% compared with an average of 15%. We had also spent more on special door locks. Some 69% had such locks, second only to the Netherlands where the figure was 70%. The 17-country average was only 44%. The Home Office estimated in 2000 that, for every stolen car, £370 had been spent on security and another £320 on insurance, a total of £690. For every domestic burglary about £330 had been spent on defensive devices and another £100 on insurance, £430 in total. In England and Wales in 2000 about £4.9 billion was spent on security, or about £200 per year for every household. (The Economic and Social Costs of Crime, Home Office Research Study 217, 2000.)
Second, detection rates have been falling but imprisonment rates and sentence length have been rising. In 1951, 47% of indictable offences were detected by the police. By 1991 the rate had fallen to 29% and the latest figure is 23% in 2003. (Criminal Statistics 2003, Table 1.1) In 1992 crown courts sentenced 47% of those convicted of indictable offences to immediate custody. In 2002 they sentenced 66% to immediate custody. Over the same period, average sentence length increased from 21.1 months to 27.8 months. (Criminal Statistics 2002, Table 4.16.) Partly as a result of these changes in sentencing , the prison population has risen since 1993, from about 46,000 to around 74,000 today. The incapacitation effect of locking up repeat offenders goes a long way towards explaining the fall in crime since the mid-1990s. Criminals can’t break into your house while they are behind bars.
Since police detection rates have fallen over the period from 1991 to 2003, it is not easy to attribute the fall in crime to police success. On the contrary, if the police had played their part more effectively we might have got crime down even more – perhaps to the extent that we no longer had the fourth highest crime rate in Europe.
Posted by David Green at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
Under New Labour, NHS Increasingly Stands for 'No Humans Saved’
‘The most seriously ill NHS patients should be allowed to die so that the money can be better used elsewhere, the Health Department is expected to tell the Court of Appeal. John Reid, the Health Secretary, is expected to refer to the cost of keeping coma patients alive with food and water.’
So ran the opening sentences in a report in yesterday’s Times.
Anyone intrigued to know how NHS resources might be better deployed than on keeping sick people alive need only wait to today’s Sunday Times for an answer. Here a damming front-page report on current (lack of) cancer care in the NHS opens by informing readers that: ‘The government’s £2 billion scheme to revolutionise the treatment of British cancer sufferers has failed, with much of the money wasted on creating 400 bureaucrats.’
It is reassuring to see that, in a world in which so much else is changing so fast, New Labour remains wedded to Labour's public-sector traditions -- unless you happen to be seriously ill or not rich enough to be able to pay twice for health insurance.
Posted by David Conway at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2005
Newsnight and Mayor Livingstone
I am in the United States, and I have heard only indirectly about the recent edition of BBC Newsnight that dealt with crime and policing in London. I understand that, just as, according to the press, Civitas's Cultures and Crimes aroused the 'fury' of the Association of Chief Police Officers (a little intimidating to people of nervous temperament, that, I should think), so the Newsnight item that used Cultures and Crimes has provoked Mr Livingstone into going or threatening to go to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission about the staff who reported and produced it.
Labour's White Paper A Mayor and Assembly for London proposed in 1998 that oversight for the Metropolitan Police should be transferred from the Home Secretary and Parliament to a Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA). In July 2000 the MPA came into existence, replacing the arrangement that that had lasted for the previous 170 years.
Of the 23 members of the MPA, 12 are appointed by Mayor Livingstone, and Mayor Livingstone sets the police budget, which then goes to the London Assembly. There are seven 'independent' members of the MPA, one of whom is appointed directly by the Home Secretary. In 1999 the Greater London Act made the Metropolitan Police Area the same as the area of Mayor Livingstone's jurisdiction, i.e. the area covered by the 32 London boroughs.
In 1997 there had been 27,400 robberies in London. But in 1999 there 36,300. In the next year there were 41,000, and the year after that there were 53,500.
The argument of Cultures and Crimes is that while at the beginning of the 1990s New York recognised there was a problem, and did something about it, in London the academic and news establishment stubbornly denied there was one until the beginning of the 2000s.
The book does not ignore the fact that from the beginning of the 2000s crime dropped in London. It features it. In 2003-2004 the number of robberies had dropped from the peak of 53,500 to 40,600.
All the book says is that we ought to keep in check our euphoria over the wonders of Mayor Livingstone's London. As late as 1990 there were only 36,000 robberies in the whole of England and Wales--'only', that is, when compared with the current London figure. In the mid-1980s the national figure of robberies was 24,000; in the mid-1970s the national figure was 9,000; in the mid-1960s, 3,000. When we go back to the statistics for those years we can begin to properly use the word 'only'.
If I am correctly informed, Mayor Livingstone did not care for the comparison Newsnight drew between London, which has a population of 7.2 million, and New York, which has a population of 8.0 million. I doubt whether the Broadcasting Complaints Commission could make a convincing case, however, that the unfavourable comparison was unfair.
In 1955, when there were under one thousand robberies in the whole of England and Wales, there were 7,400 robberies in New York City. The figure rose to a peak in New York City in 1990, when there were 100,000 robberies. But by the financial year 1996-1997, the figure had been cut to 45,200. The figures for subsequent years show with one slight exception a steady decline: 41,800, 37,500, 34,000, 29,800, 26,900, 27,000, and, for the year 2003-2004, 25,100.
From the vast gap in favour of London in the middle of the 1950s, under one thousand robberies in London as against more than 7,000 in New York, a vast gap in favour of New York had appeared by the middle of the 2000s, 25,000 robberies in New York, as against 41,000 in London, with its smaller population.
By 2003-2004 in New York there were 314 robberies per 100,000 census population. In London there were 567 per 100,000 census population.
Similarly burglaries, which reached a peak of 101,000 in New York in 1993, were cut to 28,600 by 2003-2004, even though the population of the city had risen from 7.3 million to 8.1 million. In London, burglaries reached a higher peak, and peaked much later, at 129,100 in 1999-2000. By 2003-2004 the burglary rate was 376 per 100,000 of the census population in New York. The burglary rate in London in 2003-2004 was still no less than 1,469 per 100,000 of the census population, another reversal of roles of astounding proportions.
It might be embarrassing to Mayor Livingstone and the Metropolitan Police for Newsnight to have pointed this out. But it is scarcely unfair, and some guardians of the means of public communication might even think that the programme was performing no more than its elementary bounden duty in doing so.
Posted by at 11:59 PM | Comments (4)
February 04, 2005
Why More than Just Some of Labour’s Best Friends Should be Worried by Its Ads
‘Labour wants to destroy Mr Howard as a political leader by using his Jewishness against him. They know to a hair’s breadth what they are doing. Of course, any anti-Semitism has been denied; the purpose of the operation is to raise the controversy and then withdraw…. [V]oters who do not like Jews will have been reminded of their prejudice, by modern advertising techniques… It is a dirty, dirty, dirty business and it disgraces both the Labour Party and the Prime Minister …[for]this is his campaign’
Although Labour Party spokesmen vehemently deny any anti-Semitic intent behind them, Labour has now removed the advertisements displaying Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as flying pigs and Howard in similar guise to Fagin from its official web-site and will not use them in its forthcoming election campaign.
However, the words quoted above from Lord Ress Mogg's characteristically astute and trenchant article in last Monday’s Times continue to have cause to resonate. For they have a profound bearing on an important political issue currently facing this country that has by no means been resolved.
How, one wonders, would the Labour Party have responded had the BNP beaten them to the punch -- as it were! -- by having produced these advertisements before they did? And how would Labour have responded had they done so were this to have happended after it had succeeded in enacting its proposed bill to prohibit incitement to religious hatred?
Again, imagine, in some future time after this bill has been passed and when British Muslims have risen to similar senior rank in mainstream political parties as Jews have. Suppose two Muslims came to occupy the same positions in a future Labour Cabinet or Shadow Cabinet as Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin now do for the Tories. Now suppose the BNP or Tories ran a similar campaign displaying these two British Muslim politicians as flying pigs to that which Labour ran against these two Jews.
Would Labour then be calling for the BNP or Tories to be prosecuted under the act and, if not, why not? Would Tory or BNP denials that they had sought to tap into Islamophobia be at all likely to persuade the Muslim Council of Britain under the circumstances?
In raising these questions, I do not seek to suggest that it will be a good thing if political parties become liable for prosecution under Labour’s proposed bill for running any such such negative campaigns in future. Nor am I suggesting that Labour's proposed law should not be enacted lest it prevent such campaigns from being run.
I raise these questions merely to show how arbitrary and politically tendentious any use of such a proposed law is liable to be in practice.
Laws incapable of impartial application are bad laws. Labour’s proposed bill to make incitement to religious hatred a crime is incapable of impartial application. Therefore, Labour's proposed law is a bad one and, for that reason, should not be enacted.
Sadly, I suspect, it will not be until a band of flying pigs appears on the horizon coming to the resuce of the country that it can hope to be spared this particular piece of legislation.
Still, we can always live in hope. Remember, it used to be said there would never be a woman PM in this country. And remember what happended when there was….
Posted by David Conway at 11:47 AM | Comments (2)
February 03, 2005
Bell’s Warning … But Who is Ready to Listen?
Despite its promise to make ‘education, education, education’ its top priority, schooling under the present government has shown few real signs of improvement. A major problem with it that, if anything, has steadily worsened under the present administration has been pupil disruptiveness.
Today’s papers carry reports that David Bell, Chief Inspector of Schools in England and Wales, has just declared that ‘classroom discipline is worse now than at any point since Labour took office eight years ago. The proportion of secondary schools with good pupil behaviour has fallen from three quarters to two thirds, while 9 per cent have serious discipline problems, compared with 6% in 1997’.
With the imminent prospect of a general election, it seems the government has finally decided to do something about the problem. Reversing its former policy of actively discouraging schools from excluding their disruptive children, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, announced last Tuesday schools are now to be allowed and encouraged to adopt a policy of zero tolerance towards them. Schools are to be allowed to expel and refuse to readmit them until judged ready.
The Secretary of State pulled few punches, ’Every teacher knows what [it] is like and every teacher hates it: incessant chattering: calling out in class and answering back; inattention; lateness; leaving the premises without permission; flouting uniform or dress codes; and causing a nuisance to their children in class. ’ If this is what being a member of Opus Dei does to an education minister, all I can say is 'Hallelujah'.
However, and this is a big, big caveat, the Minister indicated schools are to be given only a short and temporary reprieve from the problem. By September 2007, they are expected to have put in place systems to enable their disruptive pupils to be accommodated in school.
A suggestion of what these new systems for tackling disruptive children might be -- and cost – appears in today’ Times. It comes from journalist, Mary Ann Sieghart, who writes, ‘ Where money needs to go is on intensive provision outside the normal classroom for .. challenging children.…And it needs to start early ideally before primary school.‘ So far so good.
But then Ms Sieghart goes on to suggest what special forms of provision should be made. These are simultaneously both so in line with other present government policies, as well as out of touch with the root cause of the problem, one can only despair at what might be in store for the country.
So far as concerns pre-school provision, what Ms Sieghart seems to be after is yet more of what is currently starting to be provided by Sure-Start – viz. more state-funded pre-school nurseries.
As for the early years of schooling, what she claims is wanted for dealing with their disruptive pupils is that they should all install so-called, “nurture groups”. These groups are each to comprise no more than 10-12 disruptive children, staffed by a teacher plus an assistant and are intended to ‘create a more family-like setting in which they could learn social skills and catch up on heir child development’.
In sum, what Ms Sieghart appears to be proposing as the way forward both to prevent and deal with the problem of disruptive young children is ever more institutional care of them in place of care by their parents, but modelled on home care where necessary as a remedial measure.
Adopting this policy can be anticipated to bear ghastly results. It is a demonstrable but uncomfortable fact that, in all but the most expensive nurseries, young children in receipt of such forms of child-care tend to exhibit higher levels of aggression than their counter-parts raised at home by parents, typically their mothers.
It is simply no good for schools to seek to replicate home conditions in dealing with their disruptive children who are likely to have arrived at them with such proclivities because earlier on in their up-bringing they were denied the benefits of proper parenting by being placed in nurseries.
If they are ever to seriously address the root cause of the problem, what is really needed from major political parties is willingness and preparedness to tell the public an awkward truth. This is that the main cause of the high incidence today of delinquency and maladjustment among the young has been a breakdown of the two-parent family, and the traditional sexual division of labour within it, which saw mothers be the primary carers of children during their early years and fathers the main sources of family income.
Until and unless that uncomfortable fact and its implications are acknowledged and faced up to by politicians and public alike, children are liable to continue to grow up ever more maladjusted.
What needs to be given zero-tolerance is the unwillingness of government and public alike to face up to the basic facts about what forms of child-care arrangement best suit very young children- viz full time care by a single adult, ideally their mothers, as well as zero tolerance for refusal by parents and political parties alike to acknowledge the responsibilities of parents and prospective parents that follow from this fact. Among these should be recognition by women that they should not bear children unless and until they are willing and able to give their children such care, and by men that they shouldn't cause women to become pregnant unless and until they are willing and able to assume their attendant obligations towards any children that might result and to the mothers of them during the years of dependency of these children.
Posted by David Conway at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)
February 02, 2005
Recommended Site - A Copper's Blog
We have just come across a website by a police officer (writing under a pseudonym) that offers dry, and often amusing, commentary on the leadership decisions of today's generation of sociology-trained chief constables. Well worth a regular look.
Posted by David Green at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)
Education indefinitely
When Tony Blair famously stated his priorities as ‘education, education, education’, no one could have foreseen the extent to which this subject would come to dominate the news, on an almost daily basis. Pronouncements from the Secretary of State, speeches by the Inspector of Schools, reports by OfSTED, seem to pour forth in an unending stream, outlining failures and promising success.
The frankness with which which those charged with running the state education system describe the problems which beset it is something new. The old idea of all pulling together and not rocking the boat seems to have been abandoned. This is a good thing, because it helps if the public discourse bears some relation to reality, and the reality is that for many children in Britain today, the education they receive is simply appalling.
Rich parents can opt out, of course, either by sending their children to independent schools, or by moving to areas where the state schools are good. But many thousands of parents are simply stuck, having to watch while their children’s futures are blighted by their schools’ failure to impart knowledge or control bad behaviour.
It would help if the government could make up its mind which line it wants to pursue. For years, the buzz-word has been ‘inclusion’, meaning that disruptive pupils have to be kept in the classroom. Now, according to Ruth Kelly, the policy is to be ‘zero tolerance’. This sounds more sensible, although throwing a system into reverse can damage the gears. The teachers’ unions are (unsurprisingly) supportive of the new line, although in some cases they are claiming that it must be accompanied by special facilities to teach and train the disruptive pupils. But why? Educational resources are scarce, and should be concentrated on those who want to learn. You cannot educate children against their will, and it is almost as true to say that you cannot educate children without the support of their parents. Education is a privilege, not a right. Young hoodlums who disrupt the classroom should be expelled until such time as they realise that, without education, their lives will go nowhere. It might take a long time, and indeed, in some cases the moment of revelation may never arrive, but it is better to be realistic about a grim situation than to live in a world of fantasy policy initiatives that are supposedly going to make children sit still and learn, against their will.
Posted by at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2005
Releasing of foreign terrorists
A foreign terror suspect held without trial or charge since December 2001 has been freed from Woodhill Prison. He is an Egyptian known as ‘C’. According to the Home Secretary, there was not enough evidence to maintain his ‘certification’ as a terrorist suspect. His case was due to be reviewed at a Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) hearing later this week.
At a previous appeal hearing, Home Office lawyers had argued that C was a leading member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, now allied with Al Qaeda. He was said to have been in contact with prominent extremists in the UK and had assisted in fraudulent fundraising. He was wanted in Egypt where he had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for terrorist offences.
Instead of releasing him, he should have been deported to Egypt. The counter argument is that he might be tortured or executed, but other countries, such as Sweden, have successfully agreed to extradite terrorist suspects to countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Jordan by making an agreement that prisoner will not be executed. France regularly sends terrorists back to Algeria. It is further argued that such agreements are only ‘a piece of paper’ but all these countries are friendly nations, with whom we have diplomatic relations, and often very close ties, going back many years. They have strong reasons not to break their word.
Moreover, they deserve our full co-operation in the struggle against terrorism. Looked at from the vantage point of countries such as Egypt or Jordan, it must seem as if we are giving safe haven to terrorists who threaten them. If the Human Rights Act gets in the way, then it’s yet another reason to abolish it.
Posted by David Green at 08:24 PM | Comments (4)