Archive for October, 2006
No amount of ‘Youth in Action’ will make EU citizens
Posted by James Gubb in European Union on 31/10/2006
Last Wednesday the European Parliament voted to extend the EU’s Youth in Action programme through 2007-13. This programme will eat up a budget of some €885 million, or €147.5m per year. It’s goal? “To encourage young people to work together to acquire new skills through non-formal education activities, for a common project, for the defence of cultures, for a future of prosperity, understanding and peace,” according to Ján Figel, EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism. All sounds very complicated, and very nicey nicey.
But let’s consider two points for a minute. Even taken at face value, is €885 million worth of grandiose projects really the way to go about promoting what is essentially social cohesion and intercultural dialogue between young people? Almost certainly not; Civitas’ own research has shown time and time again that such initiatives are best run and coordinated at the local level, and certainly not by an organisation as bureaucratic and cumbersome as the EU.
Taking this aside though, is this ‘social cohesion’ really what ‘Youth in Action’ is all about? Again, almost certainly not. The Conservatives clearly don’t think so, having already dismissed the project as ‘propaganda’. In reality – as is alluded to several times in the Draft Report by German MEP Lissy Groner – the project exists, to a not insignificant extent, to foster the idea of belonging to the EU among young people.
A previous statement by the EU Commission on ‘Youth in Action’ states: “One of the main challenges facing the European Union remains how to bring the EU closer to its citizens and have them more involved in the development of Europe….the Commission believes it has a role to complementary role to play [through ‘Youth in Action’]”. For the EU itself, it has to be true that it needs to be closer to its citizens; it is an elite project. Nor should there be a strong objection to non-prejudicial dialogue and friendship between European nations and cultures. But this is not going to happen by the EU throwing money at projects such as this. I feel British, and even to some extent European, because I have an affinity to British and related culture and values, not because any government spends ridiculous sums of money trying to make me feel like I do.
Less housework, more gender equality
Posted by Robert Whelan in Family, Marriage and the Culture on 30/10/2006
Comparable to the Future Foundation’s report, ‘The Changing Face of Parenting’, which looked at parenting patterns, is a new American publication ‘Changing Rhythms of American Family Life’. The significant thing about the study (a collaborative work between the American Sociological Association and the Russell Sage Foundation reported in the New York Times) which explores how parents spend their time, is its scale and detail. Building on one of the three authors’ demographic research done for the Census Bureau, ‘time diaries’ were used to chart how families divided up their work, childcare and housework time. This involved interviews with thousands of households by professional interviewers who used a standard set of questions. As with the Future Foundation’s report, what made headlines with this study was the fact that despite an increasing number of working mothers and total working hours in families, the amount of time American parents are spending with their children has risen in the last 40 years.
But perhaps the two most interesting findings are to do with gender equity and the amount of time spent on housework. In relation to the former, the authors state that there is now ‘remarkable gender equity in total workloads’ between mothers and fathers. This claim is based on the fact that although women continue to do twice as much childcare and housework than men in two-parent families, in terms of total unpaid and paid workload, men and women both appear to do around 65 hours a week. Relating to the latter point of interest, time devoted to housework, the study also revealed a steep decline since the 1960s of time women spend on household chores. This finding applied particularly to married women. Furthermore, whilst married women’s housework time has nearly halved, married men’s has more than doubled.
Anastasia de Waal
Is It ‘Cos They’re White, Trev, that New Accession Immigrants Are Not Wanted?
Posted by David Conway in Race and Equality on 27/10/2006
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make EU members, especially if their former imperial links with third world countries have already resulted in their having previously undergone large-scale immigration from them.
Why that should be so has been very well explained by Carl Mortished in a ‘European Briefing’ article that appeared in Wednesday’s Times under the title ‘A black and white view of immigrants from Eastern Europe’.
Mortished points out that, because so many immigrants from the new accession East European member states are willing and now able to accept very low-paid jobs here, whatever feeble formal attempts might be made to prevent them, their coming here to work is likely to exacerbate the already very high unemployment rates among some of the country’s black and Asian and minorities, especially their young men.
New Labour’s New Maths: How to Get Less from More
Posted by David Conway in British History on 26/10/2006
In his last budget, Gordon Brown pledged to increase public expenditure so as to bring funding per child in state schools into line with the average costs per child in the independent sector. This move would involve increasing annual state spending per child from £5,000 to £8,000. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to close this gap, the Exchequer would need to spend an extra £17 billion per annum.
According to a report in today’s Times, the Chancellor has just been taken to task for this pledge by the House of Commons Select Committee on Education. They have argued to carry it out would only anger tax-payers unless the extra spending could be shown to result in improved performance by state schools.
To date, there has been little precious sign of extra spending in this sector having done so. According to the same news report, during the last eight years in which New Labour has been in power, annual public expenditure on education has increased by over 50%, yet last year only just over a quarter of pupils from state schools managed to obtain good GCSE grades in English, mathematics, science and a language — a fall of 4 percentage points from 2002.
I wonder whether, if instead of increasing public spending on state schooling in the manner pledged, the government were to award to parents of pupils at them who obtained good GCSE grades in these subjects a sum of £2,000 for each year their child had attended one, there would not soon be a spectacular and demonstrable improvement in the attainment levels of state schools at far less cost to the taxpayer.
The EU: 12 years of dodgy accounts
Posted by James Gubb in European Union on 24/10/2006
The European Court of Auditors have, for the twelfth year running, refused to sign off EU accounts. The Court did, this time around, certify administration, development and some agricultural spending, but found errors elsewhere accounting for around two-thirds of the EU’s £70bn budget. Most significantly the Court found that the EU Commission still has inadequate mechanisms to ensure beneficiaries do not claim more than they have the right to claim. This of course lays the budget open to error, but also to fraud.
It is worth referring to the NAO’s report earlier this year on the EU’s accounts for 2004, which found evidence of fraud to the tone of £667m. This was a 12% increase on the previous year – despite the Commission’s insistence it was reforming its accounting procedures. One might therefore be sceptical of Siim Kallas’ counter-attack on the Court’s decision to refuse to sign off accounts this year. He claims the auditors are not playing fair, particularly given that three-quarters of the EU budget is spent by Member States, not the Commission, and ignore the fact that money mis-spent one year is often clawed back the next. For example, the Commission got back E2.17bn of mis-spent EU cash from Member States in 2005 and wrote off just E90bn. But while this clawing back may look good for the Commission, it comes directly from the domestic taxpayers pocket. Secondly where the Court has been most critical – in the 44% of agricultural spending not covered by IACS (Integrated Admin and Control System) and in structural measures (totalling about E56bn) – are precisely the areas the NAO reported as the most fraudulent.
The fact is EU accounts are so ridiculously complicated at least in part because the tide of regulation coming from the Commission is still unrelenting. For example, of the 22,000 pieces of legislation on the EU statute book, about 12,000 were introduced in the eight years between 1997-2005. It is unsurprising the EU is so vulnerable to fraud and dodgy accounting when beneficiaries have to wade through streams of complex rules and regulations to access the EU budget. Yet another reason why deregulation is so vital.
Flaws ad infinitum
Posted by Robert Whelan in Uncategorized on 23/10/2006
Criticism about the education system has been coming in hard and fast for much of New Labour’s time in power – particularly as Blair’s term comes to an end. However, over the last few days the curriculum has received a critical double-whammy. On Friday, new research confirmed what has already been confirmed by a plethora of evidence: that the persistent overload of Whitehall initiatives is doing little to improve schools, when not actually doing harm. A report published by the Nuffield Foundation warned that ‘policy busyness’ has failed to impact on the entrenched weaknesses in the education system. A key criticism to come out of the study led by Oxford University’s Professor Richard Pring, is that rather than focusing on the causes of these weaknesses the government has focused on the symptoms. Moreover, the report goes on to say that: ‘…in responding to symptomatic problems, Government has attempted to implement a whole range of policies at a very fast pace.’
Today, the National Geographic published research showing that in a survey of 1,000 children one in five of British under-14 year-olds was unable to find the UK on a map of the world, and that one in 10 was unable to name any of the world’s continents. The general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union took a rather odd defence against this finding saying that there was a ‘constant desire’ for groups to produce statistics doing down the system and thereby teachers’ abilities. Yet it is extremely unlikely that the glossy coffee table would be taking such a political stance to be actively seeking evidence of poor teaching. What is more, the weakness the survey reveals reflects not teaching quality but the effect of an over-concentration on A roads and river-flow in Geography. The only injustice might be blaming New Labour on the poor geography curriculum. Country geography seems to have fallen by the wayside pre-1997.
Anastasia de Waal