The Government Inequalities Office

The recent newsletter from the Government Equalities Office can basically be summed up as "Well, it's all a bit difficult. Let's not bother". It's the result of their previous "regulation is evil" review.

The measures announced today include:

Repealing Third Party Harassment law, which will ensure employers are no longer liable for the harassment of an employee by a third party (for example, a customer). A consultation on this change is launched today.

The Law Gazette has a summary of the existing law, and the case law it's based on.

Note that it firstly requires this to happen more than once and secondly requires that the employer could reasonably have done something about it but didn't.

The 'Bernard Manning' case (which held that the employer was liable for inviting a racist and sexist comedian to insult their staff, even though the comedian was not a direct employee) is fairly important since third parties include suppliers and contractors.

It's not clear that repealing this part will actually stop employers being liable, as the Equalities Office apparently holds the view that all harassment is direct discrimination, and of course the case law establishing liability predated the law they're going to repeal. Unless they intend to repeal it by adding a statement that employers are explicitly not liable, of course, which is unlikely to stand up in court.

Next...

Reviewing the Public Sector Equality Duty - a legal obligation on public bodies to consider the impact of their decisions on different groups - to establish whether it is operating as intended.

Repealing the Socio-Economic Duty - a legal obligation on public bodies to consider the impact of their decisions on social class.

I'd be more worried about the first point if the government had not repeatedly shown that it's completely trivial to ignore it anyway, if you are the government. Repealing the Socio-Economic Duty is hardly surprising either, given how obviously they've been ignoring it so far.

Then...

Tackling gold-plating and over-compliance by working with the British Chambers of Commerce to help small-and-medium-sized companies understand what they do and don't need to do in order to comply with the Equality Act.

We must remember that the Act's purpose is to give plausible deniability when people are discriminated against. Some companies have got confused and gone beyond this to attempt to actually stop the discrimination.

Repealing employment tribunals' 'wider recommendations' powers, which will remove the power of tribunals to recommend the introduction of, or changes to, policies that affect all of an employer's staff - not just the employee who brought the case. A consultation on this change is launched today.

We must remember that it is far more effective, and good for the employer, if they have to deal with several separate discrimination cases for the same issue, rather than a tribunal being able to suggest a way to improve general practice after the first one.

The "individual solution to systematic problem" approach of course never fails to keep discriminated-against people from causing too much trouble.

And a bunch to do with the EHRC

Repealing unnecessary powers and duties. Some of the EHRC's powers and duties under the Equality Act 2006 will be scrapped in order to help it focus on its core functions.

Tighter financial controls. The EHRC will comply with government-wide spending rules - in particular, controls on recruitment, consultancy and marketing.

Budget review. The EHRC's budget was cut by over half as part of the 2010 Spending Review. There will now be a comprehensive review of the remainder of the EHRC's budget, to be completed this autumn.

New leadership. A new Chairman and a new, smaller Board will be recruited.

"Having funding, powers, and staff is interfering with the EHRC's duty to pretend everything is fine. We will review this."

They're not necessarily the most useful or sensible organisation, but I doubt these changes will help.

...all in all, about what you'd expect from the Conservative Party.

About four years ago, you couldn't talk about an issue like this without a Lib Dem popping up to say that they were the only major party to have:

Upholding these values of individual and social justice, we reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour, religion, age, disability, sex or sexual orientation and oppose all forms of entrenched privilege and inequality.

in their Constitution. The lack of an entry for "social class" is telling, in light of the above repeals, isn't it.

I haven't seen a Lib Dem mention that for a while now. Whether that's because there are fewer Lib Dems or because they've realised that like a lot of Constitutional statements it's basically meaningless words, I'm not sure.

Keep poor people out

The BBC reports that:

The government has pledged to cut net migration from 242,000 - the figure for the year ending September 2010 - to the "tens of thousands" last seen in the 1990s.

It plans to do this by making the UK such an unpleasant place to live that large numbers of current residents leave.

Well, no. That's just a happy side effect of its other policies. It plans to directly do this by setting a really high minimum salary - over £31,000, or more than 75% of existing workers earn.

Because the Conservatives are a pro-family party, people wishing to live with their non-EU partner in this country will be subject to a somewhat less strict standard. Their partner need only earn around £20,000, or around median wage, to be allowed in.

(Their pro-business and pro-British credentials are going to take a bit of a hit from this "minimum wage increased for foreigners only" policy, too)

Two quick thoughts

ATOS are apparently getting rid of internal email. Apparently it's to improve productivity, which may be true, but I expect - given the dubious nature of what our government employs them to do - that the more transient nature of instant messages compared with email is a big bonus.

Meanwhile, in good news for future ATOS contracts, polling suggests an increasing number of people are blaming poverty on poor people and less willing to pay taxes to help others. Mark Easton says:

One would expect that when the economy goes down people become a little less judgmental of those in need but this year's report finds 26% of people feel poverty is the result of 'laziness' or 'lack of willpower'. In the mid-1990s that figure was down to 15%.

I'm not sure - benefit of hindsight! - one would expect that. Obviously as people get into worse financial situations, their likelihood of being in favour of extra taxes on them personally decreases. Also, of course, there's an important psychological effect of blaming poverty on the poor - if it was due to flaws in character or morals which you, of course, do not share, then it won't happen to you. It's not surprising in these times that the increased number of people who need reassurance it won't happen to them outweighs the increased number of people who know so many exceptions that they know the causes are bigger than that. So far, anyway.

Loitering within tent

[trigger warning: state violence]

Why aren't the people in charge simply ignoring the Occupy movement? It's not obvious to me.

Petitions, protests, marches, letter-writing campaigns, voting - all can be and are largely ignored by elected politicians. A representative who is already sympathetic to their cause can use these things to be more forceful in Parliament. With consistent effort of this sort over many years, then the number of sympathetic representatives in Parliament can be grown and public opinion can be altered - but this is an extremely slow process and as, for instance, the blatant racism or heterosexism shown by some MPs today demonstrates, can be ignored at will by an unsympathetic representative.

The "ultimate sanction" of making them lose elections is only a statistical deterrent. A party may occasionally lose power temporarily - though that was going to happen anyway - but individual representatives in safe seats (and there are equivalents in almost all electoral systems) can stay in office as long as they want.

So, given that, what is it about Occupy that stops it being ignored. Look at it entirely from an abstract point of view - ignore the aims, just look at the methods.

• A protest march will, if it's large enough, block off multiple streets in a major city for several hours. Normal day-to-day life is disrupted over a large area. Then, everything returns to normal, and it gets pushed back in to the pile of previous marches.
• Occupy take an area of public space, put some tents up, and stay there. The vast majority of the city continues as normal - indeed, from a distance, it's not obviously there - and even nearby it's generally relatively straightforward to walk around them. Generally, far fewer people are participating at any one time, in any particular Occupy location, than would appear at any medium-sized protest march in the same city.

The only thing that makes it more "disruptive" than a protest march is the permanence in a public space. But alone, that's not particularly disruptive¹. They may be a reminder of something governments and the powerful don't like to be reminded of - but they should be an easily avoidable and ignorable reminder. The late Brian Haw camped outside Parliament for years without changing policy, and only really made the news on the (many) occasions where they tried to have him removed.

Likewise, while the Occupy movements are - to a greater or lesser extent - trying to develop alternatives to the established order, that they're doing so in a square in the rain, instead of on an internet forum or on a commune somewhere out of the way, shouldn't be particularly threatening. It's not as if people merely walking by are going to pick up the interesting details of that, as opposed to a few messages and slogans on signs.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if the governments and powerful had completely ignored Occupy Wall Street, giving non-committal platitudes about the right to protest and "they can stay if they want[, I don't care]" if anyone asked, then it would not have reached the numbers it has - across North America and Europe - and not have received anything like as much press coverage.

Occupy LSX has pretty much only been in the news since it started over disputes as to whether they should be "allowed" to stay there or forcibly removed. The reasons they're actually there are getting very little press coverage. If they'd been passively allowed to continue without interference, then they'd still be there, of course - but no-one who didn't physically go past them would have noticed.

Similarly, the recent attacks on Occupy Oakland - and now New York and Seattle, at least - and the slightly less aggressive ongoing policing and "health and safety" disruptions of the sites - may have deterred some people from attending ... but they've also kept the protests in the news, encouraged the protestors, often grown their numbers overall, and made them think that their strategy is working.

Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" statement has been repeated to the point of cliché about Occupy - but while their eventual victory (and what that might mean, anyway) is still nowhere near inevitable, they're larger in number and angrier as a result of governments and the powerful not being content to remain at the "ignore" stage.

So why try to repress them so much? It can't be the ideas alone. There's nothing new in their ideas (and that is not a criticism!) - and there's nothing new about a significant angry minority holding those ideas. The economic collapse has made more people receptive to those ideas, and the Occupy camps mean that (a few) more people hear about those ideas.

It also can't be about permission to hold those ideas and express them publicly. The only part unique to Occupy is "in a square" or "in a tent". Again, if ignored, they wouldn't be powerful there.

It can't be personal inconvenience or conscience. If the powerful had those, then plenty of other forms of protest would either be more rapidly effective, or more heavily restricted, or both.

It can't be about "health and safety" or other such concerns. The only health and safety potentially being affected is generally that of the people inside the Occupy camps - which they obviously don't care about. Yes, the protests may after legal argument be found to be breaking some technicality of the law. But probably most protest marches could after the fact be found to have done the same. It's largely irrelevant to whether they can be ignored, and it's more focus on enforcing every single law at once than ever gets applied anywhere else. Enforcing laws - and making up new laws to enforce - is a means, but it can't be the end in itself.

It shouldn't be about personal fear - hundreds of thousands of people in a square like Tahrir Square can be threatening to a government: that's enough people that if they did turn out to be armed revolutionaries they could do some serious damage to the government even if the police and army stayed loyal - and a sign of enough popular support that a dictator can't rely enough on their loyalty. So Egypt's government fell.

But a few hundred people? Maybe a few thousand at the biggest? That's not dangerous. They're not even particularly close to government buildings, or the offices of the truly powerful. Even if they were all armed to the teeth if they tried anything violent they would go down very quickly in the "fatally failed revolutionaries" list. And clearly if they were armed and shooting, the loyalty of the police and army is nowhere near weak enough yet in North America or Europe to end up defecting: the recent police assaults on Occupy should show they don't have a problem there.

So - there seems to be nothing to lose by simply ignoring Occupy like they ignore every other protest and fringe movement. And much more to lose by attacking them through the courts and through violence, thereby increasing anger and public sympathy. So why pick that strategy?

I really don't get it. What do the rich and powerful know that I don't that makes Occupy so specifically threatening to them that they're willing to take such disproportionate and panicked action to try - counter-productively - to stop them? What am I missing here?

Footnotes

¹ If the public space is "across a major motorway" or "in the middle of Oxford Street" or "right where you wanted to build a block of flats" or "in front of the gates of a military base", then it's definitely very disruptive. But that's not what Occupy is doing.

We are the 70-100%. Tax the 40-70%.

While writing my thoughts on Occupy, I was thinking quite a bit about how revolutionary and protest movements are often either explicitly about the interests of the relatively-privileged upper-middle and middle classes, or end up co-opted towards their interests anyway.

And then an example comes along.

I wrote about the tuition fee plans last year when the original Browne Report was published. At the time I thought they were surprisingly good, all things considered - though with some potentially very dangerous and largely ignored consequences.

Political changes to the report's proposals in the process of turning it into legislation took away the most dangerous consequences - but at the cost of taking away most of the proposals' internal logic and consistency too.

My general assessment, though, remains about the same: a surprisingly good deal for students and universities. The protests against the tuition fees - and they're mainly about the tuition fees - are effectively a protest by the rich against the poor. That's not to say that the participants think that's what they're doing - but the protest and anger has been quite effectively co-opted by upper-middle-class interests.

Lets look at the current system first.

A student on a typical undergraduate course will pay around £3.5k in fees a year, and take out around £4.5k in maintenance loans each year, for either 3 or 4 years. This will leave them with a maximum payment requirement of either £24k or £32k (indexed to inflation), to be repaid at a rate of 9% of all gross earnings over £15k. Because that £15k earnings figure isn't indexed to inflation, just about everyone will repay all of it - in 25 years, when the debt is written off if not repaid, the median wage is likely to be around £40k in absolute terms (assuming an average 3% nominal inflation). Repayments will therefore be over two thousand a year even for that salary - and a graduate 25 years after graduation is likely to be earning considerably more. Total real-terms payments are therefore going to be approximately the full value of the maintenance and fees "loan".

Furthermore, if this scheme were to continue, the gap between £15k and nominal salaries would increase, so repayment sizes would rise.

Now compare this with the new system.

Repayments are now at 9% over £21k, but the repayment threshold is itself linked to changes in median wage. This means - using this calculator, which seems accurate - that, depending on the exact assumptions made¹, to repay more than (real terms) £24k under the new system would require a salary greater than around £29k in real terms. A slightly higher salary would be required to repay more than £32k.

On the one hand, £29k is not a huge salary. On the other hand, it's quite a bit higher than the median income - it's currently around 70th percentile of income. It's also higher than the median income for almost any age-band, gender and region combination: that is, the majority of people² will not earn more than £29k (in real terms) at any point, never mind as a career average salary!³

So under the new scheme: The bottom 30-40% don't pay anything under either scheme. The next 30-40% or so pay less than now both in total and per year. The top 30% (by income) pay more in total (though still less in the early years). The ones who have to repay the greatest additional amount under the new scheme compared with the old are the top 10-20%⁴.

Very approximately, therefore, the protests are about trying to persuade a right-wing mostly-Conservative government that it should charge the rich less and the middle more for their education. Even more strangely, the government is refusing: tax rich graduates instead, they say.

Footnotes

¹ I pinned personal salary growth in the simulator to equal the average earnings growth (both at RPI+1 or RPI, it makes little difference) to mimic having a fixed real salary over the whole time period. That's not realistic, but it allows a comparison with median wages.

² Now, graduate salaries are generally higher than non-graduate salaries, and there's nothing like a bit of self-interest, but even then it's mainly benefiting the richer graduates. It's very tricky to assess by how much and there are several conflicting sources (and the premium varies by degree, too) - but it probably works out, on average, at only around £3-4k additional gross earnings a year. Even the median graduate is therefore unlikely to be earning much more than £29k in real terms.

³ And this is also assuming continuous employment for the full 30 years after graduation. Take time off to raise children, or become unemployed for more than a couple of months, or become ill and spend a year off work on long-term sick leave, etc. etc. and the likelihood of repaying more than £24k falls further.

⁴ Above a very high threshold - in to the top 5% or so - total repayments start falling again because their earnings clear the loan before the higher interest rates only charged on higher earners have much effect. But they'll still even in the absolute best/worst unrealistic case (walk straight out of university into a £400k corporate directorship) repay almost twice as much under the new scheme as they would under the old scheme. And someone with that sort of immediate earnings potential probably has sufficient family wealth and connections that the cost of university is largely irrelevant anyway.

Occupy Ambivalence

I have very ambivalent thoughts about the Occupy Placename movements. On the one hand, they're highlighting that there are many areas in which the cosy political consensus does not have the support of the population, in a way that governments don't quite know how to respond to and can't entirely ignore. On the other hand, while the movements aren't likely to fall to party-political co-option, there's a definite problem with default-person co-option, Tyranny of Structurelessness, and so on. While some Occupy groups are trying to explicitly deal with these problems, some are very definitely not - and it makes their claim to be for "the 99%" rather dubious.

Part of the reason for the ambivalence, of course, is that there's no one Occupy movement - other than vague solidarity and similarity in some aims, and a global slogan and broad methodology, there's nothing to connect Occupy City A to Occupy City B. The actions and decisions of one don't directly affect the actions and decisions of another.

So the actions of one group can make me hopeful that this attempt at a revolution might really be a revolution - while the actions of another make me sure that it's just another attempt to reshuffle the people at the top (or as Melissa McEwan puts it, "[...] you're not staging a revolution: You're staging a change in management.")

Differences between the US and the UK

One of the questions regarding the UK protests has to be "why now?". The practical answer - that the US protests, themselves having at least some similarities in form to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions - have been successful and encouraged people elsewhere, isn't sufficient.

But the situation in the US and the UK is rather different. The recent news that the US median weekly wage for 2010 was $507, for instance. On hearing that, I needed context. So, I converted it to pounds, adjusted for the (small) purchasing power parity difference between the two nations, and then started comparing it with the ASHE results for the UK in the same year.

I live in the North East of England. It's a region that's been largely abandoned by successive governments, has high unemployment, high social deprivation, very little incoming investment, and wasn't in good shape even in the boom years. On a regional basis, it has the lowest median wage in the UK.

It also has a median wage - after currency conversions - around 10-15% higher than the US equivalent. Furthermore, the social safety net is more generous, and health care is both free and available.

The US as a whole is noticeably worse off than the worst bits of the UK. It's not surprising that the US is rising up in protest; nor is it surprising that it didn't before.

10% or 30% or 99%

The UK, meanwhile... there are some seriously deprived parts of the UK. But most of these have been hated by governments for years. The protests in the UK - their appearance at this time - aren't about those bits. They aren't about the consistent demonisation of disabled people that has been ongoing for decades. They aren't about the consistent racism and classism that set off riots in the 80s and riots this summer. They're - in many ways - about the worry on the part of the middle classes that they'll end up poor too.

The UK economy is heading into a severe mess, inflicted by the "expansionary austerity" beliefs of the government - and this is making the middle classes less secure. Not unreasonably, they're worried. But the people at the bottom of the classism pile, and the people seriously affected by other marginalisations, have been there for a long time, and failed by our governmental and economic power structures for a long time. People could have come out on the streets to criticise those structures any time in the last decade.

And part of it - part of it - is that just as you can't have a riot by yourself, you can't have much of a protest - the late Brian Haw excepted - by yourself. The success of the US protests gives some of the discontent in the UK the knowledge that they could do this and not be alone. That might be why the Occupy camps in the UK appeared, and stayed. But there have been protests before.

Who are the protests for? Are they for those who were never at the top of society but thought that if they followed the rules they could lead a comfortable mostly-privileged life, or for the rest of the 99% as well, who knew that they'd never get that far as things stood? Are the efforts of the very poor, disabled people, women and [trigger warning] rape victims and other generally marginalised groups to be heard when speaking for themselves considered a part of Occupy, or separate? The answer varies from camp to camp, and even within a camp, of course. But the general trend I'm reading about in the UK is not making me optimistic.

We know best, now rise up and revolt

Claiming to be representing the 99% is rather tricky. That's a lot of people, who, collectively, agree on absolutely nothing. While the wealth and power may be concentrated in a very small group - far smaller than "the 1%" - that doesn't mean that the rest are going to agree, even on the necessity of overturning the established order.

But the standard response to anyone disagreeing with the approach is to point out that they are in the 99% too. It reminds me a bit of the contempt for people who make the "wrong" voting decision that s.e. smith talks about in the context of the US urban/rural divide.

Why assume that everyone below a certain extremely high wealth level should agree on:

• The current system being unjust (when many of those protesting now didn't think so until it started obviously hurting them)
• The proposed solution being better

It can't be better for all of the 99%, even afterwards.

If the revolution makes a fair effort to dismantle all privilege, then many mostly-default people are going to take some steps down in relative social position. If they really dismantle capitalism, globally, and end inequality, then almost everyone in the UK and USA is going to take several steps downwards relatively, and probably a few in absolute terms too, at least in the short term.

But if it doesn't make that effort and succeed, why should people other than the mostly-default take part in risky, dangerous, and untested revolution to choose who rules them with contempt¹. We already have elections for that.

The assumption is the old socialist-lefty one that classism is so much bigger than every other form of oppression that if you end classism and capitalism the rest will just disappear. It might be necessary to end it, in practice - but it's nowhere near sufficient.

Ambivalence

So, yes, ambivalence. The Occupy movements are well-intentioned and in some cases well-implemented. The power structures they are fighting against are deadly and oppressive, and need to go. But there's a tension there between destroying the power structures and commandeering them - and I don't have confidence that those wishing to destroy them will be able to shape the movements.

They're not going away, for now, and the escalation of violent responses from some governments suggest a panic about where they could go next. But where do they go next? Their very existence is achieving something - but not yet enough. Where they go - and what they do - depends on why they want to do it. Which aspects of privilege do they want to defeat and which do they want to accept? Hopefully the answers will become obvious soon.

Footnote

¹ If the rulers are bad enough, the people can become desperate enough to believe that bringing in a new set of bad rulers on a tide of blood can't possibly make things worse. And often, they're right, especially in the short term. But it can hardly be said to be congruent with the original noble goals of the revolution.

More research on weight

DeeLeigh at Big Fat Blog reports on a Canadian study on weight and health in Manitoba. Full report (PDF).

A few interesting points

Mortality rates

The results - not surprisingly, by now - confirm the previous US, German and Canadian population studies. There is no statistically significant correlation between mortality and BMI - a person with a BMI of 19 and a person with a BMI over 40 have virtually identical chances of dying in any year. (Chapter 6)

There does seem to be some difference in causes of death - respiratory conditions are less common causes of death in "obese" people, and endocrine and metabolic conditions are more common - but as the German study pointed out - that just means we have a better idea of what statistically kills fat people. It doesn't make thin people any less dead.

Health service usage

The study also includes a very interesting look at health service usage by BMI in Chapter 5. Fat people do use more health services than thin people - to a statistically significant degree for some but not all services - but generally not by a very large margin. For instance, for visiting GPs, were the campaigns to get men to visit the doctor to succeed, bringing male GP visit rates up to the same as female GP visit rates, this would increase visits considerably more than if everyone visited the GP as often as a government-approved weight person of their gender.

Comments on the Big Fat Blog piece point out some reasons why correlation may well not be direct causation here - misdiagnosis of fat people necessitating repeat visits and weight gain caused as a side effect of medical treatment - and the German study also notes underdiagnosis in thin people of conditions popularly associated with obesity as another possibility.

The study doesn't cover health care costs directly - but they did do a brief literature review. Emphasis mine.

Studies of health care costs (not analysed in this report) show significant positive associations with BMI level (Andreyeva et al., 2004; Borg et al., 2005; Raebel et al., 2004; Thompson et al., 2001). This is consistent with the higher use of some healthcare services as shown in this report, though the differences appeared to be higher in those studies than results from this study would suggest. Some of this may be due to differences in the context and costs of healthcare, as most of these studies were done in the United States.

Or, paraphrased, if your health system is massively inefficient, expensive to use, and encourages people to only seek treatment in emergencies, you might well have very distorted costs. That doesn't mean that countries with more sensible health provision will have comparable costs.

Arbitrariness

Unlike many previous studies, this one recognises the arbitrariness of the BMI measures. After describing the World Health Organisation categories:

These categories were created by examining relationships between BMI, mortality, and morbidity. However, the cutoffs remain somewhat arbitrary and have changed over time: a BMI of 27 used to separate the low risk from the high risk categories [...]. Furthermore, these groupings may not be equally useful for older adults [...] or different ethnic groups, including Aboriginal peoples [...]. Therefore, analyses in this study used continuous BMI values whenever possible, with summarized data for the standard groups shown above as well.

I've mentioned the "step change" attitude that public health seems to take - it's good to see a study that explicitly takes the opposite approach, and doesn't take the WHO-set boundaries as definitionally accurate.

They also acknowledge many problems with BMI as a measure of weight categories (including assumptions of white European as default) - but note that they need to use something and

[...] it is the only measure available in existing data sources that covers a large and representative sample of the population (excluding residents of First Nations)

Changes over time

There are a couple of graphs in Chapter 2 noting that weight distributions have been basically static since 2000 in Canada (very similar to the situation in the UK). One of the things they note is that "overweight" is more common in men than women.

I suspect that a partial explanation for this may be due to flaws in the BMI measurement. BMI is based on a ratio of weight and height². But that's not a ratio found in nature¹ - scaling something up generally involves a ratio of weight to height^2.5, because of the way circulatory and nervous systems work at small scales.

So the simplification - which makes BMI possible to calculate without a scientific calculator or a log table - means that for people of the same build, BMI will increase with height.

Men tend to be taller than women, so will tend to have higher BMIs for the same build. (Also, there's not actually any reason, given that men and women have statistically different anatomies, that the BMI distributions shouldn't be different)

Afterthoughts

Studies like this leave governmental "obesity" strategy not as "correlation equals causation" but as "lack of correlation equals causation". There's no evidence that heavier weight harms life expectancy (though it may have some statistical effects on cause of death), and the effect on health care costs is likely to be trivial. It will be interesting to see if the Manitoba government, which commissioned this study, changes policy as a result.

Unfortunately the popular belief that "obesity" is both morally disgusting and voluntary² means that research into "how obesity is bad" gets far more attention and support than research into "is obesity actually bad for health?"

Footnote

¹ If you can view images, there's an unintentional "uncanny valley" effect in these images, where simple rescaling of the image of a person gives a slightly unusual effect. The relative sizes of body parts aren't supposed to be identical at each size, so it gives a strange effect.

² Even aside from the studies suggesting that weight and build are to a large part genetic, and that the "diet and exercise" mantra is so oversimplfied it's almost useless, this ignores the concept of constrained choices and so also contains a lot of classism, disablism, and other forms of discrimination.

Eviction of people loosely connected to a riot.

Here's the consultation on eviction of social tenants. Question 1 is perhaps the most important question, which would allow social landlords to evict tenants where they - or a member of their household - was convicted of certain violent crimes anywhere in the UK. Got to keep the tabloids happy.

Wandsworth and Southwark councils are trying to get ahead of the consultation, and are just doing it anyway. An actual law explicitly allowing it would mean that the only practical challenge might be to the European courts - well beyond the financial and legal means of most social tenants.

Here's what they're proposing.

We are therefore proposing to include additional provisions in Ground 2 of Schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1985 and Ground 14 of Schedule 2 to the Housing Act 1988 so that the court may grant possession where a tenant or member of their household has been convicted of violence against property (including criminal damage and offences such as arson), violence against persons at a scene of violent disorder or theft linked to violent disorder. There would in these circumstances be no requirement that the offence had been committed within the locality of the dwelling house, subject to it being committed in the United Kingdom.

Note that violence against persons must be connected to "a scene of violent disorder", but violence against property need not. Well, property is more important than people to the government. We knew that.

So, here's my response to that suggestion.

Question 1: No. The current grounds for possession should not be extended in this way. Where a tenant has been convicted of a serious crime, there already exists legal mechanisms for them to be fined, imprisoned, or given a community sentence - whatever the court believes appropriate in this particular case.

A major problem with eviction as proposed is that it makes all members of the household responsible for the behaviour of all other members of the household. Where the eviction applies to long-standing anti-social or criminal behaviour committed in the immediate locality of the housing, then requiring this mutual responsibility may be justifiable in some cases - other members of the household may have been aware of the anti-social or criminal activity for some time, and been able to discourage or prevent it. However, a de facto requirement for all members of a household to keep a sufficiently close watch on each other so that they cannot possibly commit criminal offences elsewhere is not justifiable.

Forcing someone to lose their tenancy in response to criminal behaviour committed by a fellow tenant completely unrelated to the housing or their own actions seems completely unjust, and would seem to open the landlord to challenges on human rights grounds.

Furthermore, it brings about perverse incentives. Other members of the household who might ordinarily testify against a person accused of criminal offences would in this situation know that doing so could result in them losing their own tenancies! The temptation to help the accused construct an alibi would be very great.

A third problem is that the original power, by applying to criminal or anti-social behaviour in the vicinity of the housing, has an important use in protecting others living in the same housing from this behaviour - though, as paragraph 1.5 of the consultation document points out, it may sometimes only move rather than solve problems.

Where applied to crimes committed a long distance from the housing, this use vanishes. The crime is not connected to the housing, so removing the tenants from the housing cannot affect the crimes. The convicted tenants have to live somewhere, so removing them from their present housing will make little difference.

Imprisonment is already available as an option to the courts where someone needs to be removed from general society to prevent crime, and this is both more appropriate and avoids punishing people who did not commit the crime.

If you have time, please read the consultation document and send in your own response. I know I haven't covered everything that's wrong with the proposals in mine. With the riots falling away into the distance - and the underlying causes ignored to produce more later - the need to do this to appease the reactionary press might be avoided.

Riots and responsibility

[Trigger warning: violence, also applies to most of the links]

So, riots. Some other reading on the subject first:

• Hangbitching: Peckham Monday
• Camila Batmanghelidjh at the Independent: Caring costs – but so do riots
• Melissa McEwan at Shakesville: On UK Riots Part 1 and Part 2
• Andy's Miscellany: Thoughts on riots
• Left Outside: Even Rioters with Blackberrys can be Poor
• Kevin Sampson at the Guardian: Liverpool riots: I remember the buzz of mob mayhem from 1981

And for some idea of the general public response:

• This rapidly-growing petition to remove all benefits from rioters (presumably after they've been released from jail) is by far the most signed petition on the government's new petitions site.
• YouGov polling reports significant majorities in favour of major escalations of force against the riots, and 33% in favour of the use of live ammunition.

My own thoughts...

There are two things that the government needs to do. Immediately, it needs to restore an approximation of order to the affected cities. The people involved in the riots do need to be arrested and tried if possible. The government are taking this - after a shaky start - pretty seriously¹, with a large police presence in city centres at night, and rapid work to arrest the rioters during the day. The rioting isn't going to be completely over for a while - but provided nothing escalates it (see footnote¹ again) then normality should return fairly soon.

As soon as that is done, however, the government needs to do a much more important task - stop this happening again.

Riots could in theory break out at any time. There are nowhere near enough police across the country to stop this. If thousands of people decide at the same time that they want to make a point through violence, it's really difficult for the police to stop this happening.

Generally, they don't, however. Most of the time, people feel they have better choices available to them, or don't co-ordinate their attempts to riot.

The police can maintain a strong presence enough to stop these riots. They cannot maintain that presence indefinitely - already officers have been on duty for much longer than they should have been. Eventually they will need to stand down - and then, if nothing has changed, it will only be one more spark needed for more riots to start.

Unfortunately, the government seems to be determined not to change anything.

Its all too clear that we have a big problem with gangs in our country. For too long there has been a lack of focus and a complete lack of respect shown by these groups of thugs.

I am clear that they are in no way representative of the vast majority of young people in our country who despise them frankly as much as the rest of us do. But there are pockets of our society that are not just broken, but frankly sick.

When we see children as young as 12 and 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society.

For me the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years: it is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society.

People allowed to feel that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and that their actions do not have consequences. Well they do have consequences.

We need to have a clearer code of values and standards that we expect people to live by and stronger penalties if they cross the line. Restoring a stronger sense of responsibility across our society in every town in every street in ever estate is something I am determined to do.

That's David Cameron PM (Conservative) there. But with all that talk about how people should "take responsibility", it could easily have been his Opposition counterpart, Ed Miliband MP (Labour). As the Guardian reports:

He said: "Then we have got to look into the causes, why people are going around doing this. And I think there are a complex number of causes."

He said he thought it was "partly about parental responsibility, partly about gangs and some of that culture".

Pretty similar thoughts from both. In summary, the causes of the riots are that "the rioters are scum, and their parents are scum, and their culture is scum, and we should punish the lot of them".

And with that level of shallow political analysis and responsibility-dodging from our political leadership, there are always going to be people who feel that society is giving them nothing.

Today's rioters can be dealt with. Arrested. Tried. Imprisoned. Tomorrow's rioters are still going to grow up in the same hopeless situations, being blamed by the politicians for being in those situations. And in a few years we'll arrest them too, because that's far easier than trying to figure out what the real underlying problems are and then fixing them. Far easier than treating people as actual people and listening to them and taking them seriously before they get so desperate they take to the streets to loot and destroy because that's all that's left. But no. They're scum, their families are scum, and they deserve what they get. Political consensus acheived, Parliament adjourned.

I think tomorrow's Parliamentary debate will be very reluctant to look "soft on crime" and consider why these riots might be happening. Why decades of social deprivation and institutional racism and cuts to what few bits of social safety net there were might be giving people nothing left to lose by rioting. I hope I'm wrong about that, but if I am it'll have to come from the backbenches.

Footnote

¹ Populist but dangerous and largely useless measures such as water cannon and plastic bullets aside, that is. Because they worked so well in Northern Ireland.

Study shows researchers ignore structural issues

[trigger warning]

The BBC has yet another badly-researched story about "obesity". I'll skip over the unmentioned assumption that "obesity" is such a bad thing it needs to be prevented at all costs, and move on to places where the article fails even in its own terms.

Firstly, the article talks about how average calorie intake has increased significantly in the US since the 1970s. Naturally, because "obesity" is a personal problem with no structural issues whatsoever, the article completely omits that since the 1970s the USA's problems with perverse food-production subsdisies, "food deserts" and so on, in many places it's difficult or impossible to get foods other than the energy-dense ones, and more expensive even when they are available.

This is also something that does not really generalise to the majority of the UK, or other Western European countries, despite the claim in the article that "many of the factors causing the obesity epidemic there are mirrored in the UK".

The recommendations of the researchers - police what people individually eat, rather than making it easier for them to get nutritious food cheaply - are equally predictable.

Secondly, the article in a box-out includes a note that:

The recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 for women, and 2,500 for men (NHS Choices)

If we assume that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, and gender is the only factor that affects energy needs, metabolic rates, digestion efficiency, and so on - but does so with 100% predictive power (which is ridiculous, but is what the recommendation needs to be assumed) then that gives an average recommendation of 2,250 calories daily for each person.

Compare that with the figures from the article on US average - the article doesn't specify if it's mean or median - calorie intake:

• 1977-8: 1,803 calories
• 1994ish (implied): 2,145 calories
• 2003-6: 2,374 calories

So, comparing with the "recommended" average, we can see that it's only in the last decade or so that US residents have stopped being (on average) underfed.

The average hides a lot of rich/poor disparity, of course, and a lot of people in the US are still malnourished - my point is that even in terms of pretending these averages mean anything at all, the conclusion isn't the one that the rest of the article implies.

Of course, this is fairly typical of "anti-obesity" research and campaigning: set an unjustified target for calorie intake - and then claim it's bad when people get anywhere near it. "Pro-malnutrition" might be a better term for them: perhaps if they didn't have the privilege not to remember the effects of widespread malnutrition themselves, they'd think more carefully about what they were saying.

It'll always be next year

Various local papers are reporting that Ed Miliband MP will no longer be attending the Miners' Gala this year. An un-named spokesman for Miliband is quoted as giving two reasons.

• He doesn't want to share a platform with Trades Union leader Bob Crow
• "diary pressures"

He also says that "Ed has said he will come next year."

I predict, very confidently, that he won't come next year either. Nor any other year.

On the "diary pressures" side, the date of the Miners' Gala is hardly a secret. If he's too busy to make it this year - after saying back in March that he would come - the same pressures will probably exist next year, too. (Well, unless he gets replaced as leader, but I expect he won't come then either)

On the "not wanting to share a platform with people who disagree with Labour" side, he's going to be somewhat out of luck at the Miners' Gala in most years. Perhaps if Labour (nationally, rather than the local party) actually cared any more about places like Durham and the people who live and (try to) work there, he wouldn't have so many people criticising his leadership because of it.

Miliband's spokesman denies that it's because of the unpopularity among wealthy Londoners of Bob Crow¹, but it's not a very convincing denial. His earlier speech on "responsibility" showed that he was going for the same upper-middle class swing voters as New Labour: refusing to attend the Miners' Gala because it might play badly with the Telegraph would be part of the same strategy.

Meanwhile, the promise of "next year" is a perfect analogue of the way Labour treats the needs of non-default people. Maybe next year, when there's more time in Parliament and the right-wing have stopped opposing it. (And if you don't re-elect us, there won't be a next year, and you definitely won't get it).

Footnote

¹: Bob Crow in many respects has one of the easiest (which is not the same as easy) Union jobs in the country. The workers he represents carry out a task that is worth millions of pounds a day to London's economy (or at least, when they go on strike, that's what it's claimed to cost), and have sufficient training that they can't easily be replaced. Getting them a reasonable share in those millions is therefore a much easier job than some other Union leaders have.

Of course, it does make him very unpopular with the rich people who think those millions should belong to them. Edit: As Simon Farnsworth points out in comments, I should have explicitly mentioned that those are not the only people who Crow is unpopular with, and I didn't intend to claim that Crow is right either. Crow should be able to get a good deal for his members without aiding other employers in their attacks on their workers.

The moral equivalency of Miliband

So, Ed Miliband MP (Labour, Doncaster North, Leader of the Opposition) gave this speech today on "Responsibility in 21st Century Britain"

The basic theme - and if you read the speech, you'll see that I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here - is that there is a moral equivalence between:

1. fraudulently running a business for years, stealing millions for your own pockets while leaving your vulnerable customers to face abuse; and
2. claiming benefits instead of getting non-existent jobs.

and between

1. causing a global financial crisis while taking millions in remuneration; and
2. having an overgrown and litter-strewn front garden

and that a future Labour government needs to deal with the people who aren't "taking responsibility" for both.

I'm not going to pick apart the entire speech - it's quite long and just about every line involves some sort of confusion, false equivalence, and/or factual error - but a few examples.

The speech opens with:

While out campaigning during the local elections, not for the first time, I met someone who had been on incapacity benefit for a decade. He hadn’t been able to work since he was injured doing his job. It was a real injury, and he was obviously a good man who cared for his children.

But I was convinced that there were other jobs he could do.

And that it’s just not right for the country to be supporting him not to work, when other families on his street are working all hours just to get by.

Lisa and DaveG at Where's the Benefit? have both written on this already.

Misty's post at Shakesville - "Those People" was written days before Miliband's speech, and about a different country - but could easily instead be about Miliband's bizarre belief that there are tens of thousands of job vacancies just waiting to be filled by disabled applicants, if only they'd apply.

The idea that looking after children is work - though not paid work, which is the only real sort, of course - also appears to have passed Miliband by.

In Manchester, as well as helping the most vulnerable with housing, they give priority to those who are giving something back to their communities – for example, people who volunteer or who work.

They also look to reward people who have been good tenants in the past and who have paid their rent on time and have been good neighbours.

This approach means that rather than looking solely at need, priority is also given to those who contribute - who give something back.

In other words, rather than basing benefits decisions on how much you need the benefit, they will in future also be based on how much Ed Miliband MP approves of your life.

Well, no change from the current or previous government's policy there.

For too many people at the last election, we were seen as the party that represented these two types of people.

Those at the top and the bottom, who were not showing responsibility and were shirking their duties. From bankers who caused the global financial crisis to some of those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work – but didn’t.

Labour - a party founded by hard working people for hard working people - was seen, however unfairly, as the party of those ripping off our society.

So: Labour were seen as being "not tough enough" on people on benefits. This is despite them bringing in massive restrictions on benefits over the 13 years they were in power - reducing eligibility, making the forms longer, bringing in the widely-criticised assessments for ESA, introducing an attitude of "better ten eligible people don't get benefits than one ineligible person does" to tackling fraud, and so on.

His solution - despite acknowledging that the perception was unfair - is to do it again, only more so, in the hope that it will work this time.

Well, so much for the claims that Labour under Miliband would be different to Labour under Blair. I suppose we've got several more years of headline-chasing to look forward to. Perhaps if a few more MPs had experience of claiming benefits and being looked down on as "scroungers" they might come up with some decent policies instead.

More bad education policy, more misguided criticism of same

Education funding policy is back in the news again after journalists noticed that David Willetts MP (Conservative, Havant, Minister for Universities and Science) had suggested that in addition to the publicly-funded places, universities should be able to offer unfunded places to UK students, with the fees payable up front.

Cue massive misplaced outrage about the rich being able to buy university places.

The proposals had a lot wrong with them, and they appear to be being either quietly dropped or quietly hidden for a few weeks. That they let the rich buy university places was not one of the problems.

A quick recap

Undergraduate places available to UK applicants are subject to a strict quota, with universities facing harsh penalties to either under- or over-recruiting to that quota¹. Since the universities have to make offers to most potential undergraduates without knowing if those undergraduates would make the grade, this causes a lot of tension among admissions departments, since making the wrong number of offers is a very costly mistake.

On the other hand, if there wasn't a penalty, then the government could be required to pay for far more places than it had budgeted for (yes, they're going to end up doing this anyway)

Places for international undergraduates are not subject to any direct² quota - universities can recruit as many suitably qualified applicants as they can attract. However, there is no UK public funding for these students (though some may obtain grants from their home country's government, of course) and so they must pay the full costs of their degree - which can be whatever the university declares them to be.

The proposal would allow (or rather have allowed) universities to also supply "off-quota" places to UK students, on the same terms. This would quite clearly not have worked.

Why it was (yet another) doomed idea

Students needing these places are the ones who have failed to successfully compete with the other UK undergraduates for the publicly-funded places. That doesn't make them underqualified - universities reject plenty of straight-A students - but it does mean that they're unlikely to do any better competing against the international undergraduates for the off-quota places.

While there's no externally-imposed limit on how many off-quota undergraduates a university can take, there are plenty of internal limits. Lecture theatre capacities, availability of academics to teach, and for some universities the availability of accommodation for students are all limiting factors. Being willing to pay the off-quota fees doesn't avoid competition - it just gives a second chance.

Since the students who go to study abroad tend to be the best a country has to show, getting a place on this second chance is probably going to be even harder than getting one of the publicly-funded places.

The idea was that the fees would be paid from corporate or charity sponsorship, rather than directly by the student - but what company³ is going to sponsor someone to go to university who couldn't get an offer the normal way? Far more cost effective for them to provide some living-cost grants to several students who did get in.

The number of UK students who actually took an off-quota place - and bear in mind anyone rich enough to do this could study abroad instead - would be tiny.

Like many of this government's policy ideas, it seems to be a way to generate controversy, reinforce their reputation (both constituent parties) as a party for the default, and not actually help any of the people they were nominally supporting.

Not buying places for the rich

What this outrage basically ignores is that the ultra-rich can and do already buy university places for their children.

The admissions processes of universities try to be fair and judge each candidate on their merits. This just isn't possible from a few expected grades, a short personal statement, and maybe a 10 minute interview - especially not with the number of applications that need processing - but universities generally do their best.

The problem is that - as with everything else - a context-free equality of treatment just gives the advantage to those who already have privilege. Rich families can give their children many of:

1. A home environment focused on academic learning⁴
2. Private schooling
3. Interview practice (especially for Oxbridge)
4. Private tutors
5. Access to expensive extra-curricular activities, including gap years, that look good on a personal statement

Middle-class families can give their children enough of those privileges to give them a good chance at a place as well, which is why there's not much wider complaint about this arrangement.

Being outraged that the rich would be able to buy their children university places at market rates rather than subsidised rates is rather strange, in that context - I'm sure that if a "left-wing" group had proposed means-testing fees support so that the ultra-rich weren't entitled to any and had to pay up front, there would have been very little complaint⁵.

Footnotes (and extended asides)

¹ The total quota for all UK universities is smaller than the number of people who would like a UK undergraduate place. This is a major reason why the whole "market in higher education" won't work - as can be seen by the vast majority of universities declaring at £9,000 - demand outstrips supply. The threats of "A uni that as an Oxbridge graduate I consider a Third Rate Ex-Poly can't charge £9,000 - students will go elsewhere" that ministers were making were completely empty: applicants have nowhere else to go except "not to university at all".

Then recall that students are effectively not paying the fees with their own money due to the extremely generous loan repayment terms (which resemble a tax more than a loan), for many students the repayments when/if they graduate on a £7,000 a year degree and on a £9,000 a year degree will be exactly identical; for the rest there will be relatively little difference, and earning a salary in excess of £40,000 a year^1a will probably make them uninclined to care.

So demand is higher than supply, and the difference between the low and high prices is negligible. No-one has an incentive to charge a low price, and no-one has any economic reason not to pay. (Fear of debt, because of all the huge numbers being thrown around, is a reasonable but not economically sound reason)

I've actually been quite surprised by how many universities haven't declared £9k fees across the board - I expect by 2014 or thereabouts the fees will have crept up to this.

^1a I'm not saying all graduates will go on to a 40k or above salary - I'm saying that only those who do will notice a difference in repayments between those two costs of degrees.

² The whole "we will cap immigration to a round number whether it's a good idea or not" policy that the government is imposing does provide a national limit. This has already led to conflicts on international student numbers between the government departments responsible for racism ("keep those foreigners out!") and money ("they're willing to pay tens of thousands to UK organisations, let them in!")

³ Of course, a family rich enough to afford the up-front fees can probably also afford a front company to pay the grant, but they can probably also afford to just buy the place the old-fashioned way.

⁴ And because this is something that the rich provide, academic learning becomes morally more valuable than other ways in which a home environment can be good.

⁵ I would have objected to this, because the problem with this means-testing (and it's a problem with the existing set-up too) is that it assumes that the only barrier to all young applicants to university getting financial support from their families is their wealth. Applicants whose families don't want to fund them through university but theoretically could get the short end of this stick.

The NUS LGBT campaign has been pointing out from years that the students they represent are particularly vulnerable to their family refusing financial support; they're not the only un-privileged group of students this applies to.

Kyriarchy for kids

Durham County Council has recently put out this press release, which was reprinted in the local free paper and probably elsewhere.

The search is on for young people in County Durham with an outstanding school attendance record.

Durham County Council is tracking down all final-year primary and secondary school pupils who have never taken a day off.

The council is planning a special celebration to reward young people with a 100 per cent attendance record at either primary or secondary school.

Maureen Clare, Durham County Council’s head of countywide services, said: “Never missing even half a day of primary or secondary school is a fantastic achievement and one we want to reward.”

Unauthorised absence from school is a problem, but there are serious problems with this plan.

[trigger warning]

Pupils spend six or seven years at primary school, and five (optionally seven) at secondary school. School is generally open 5 days a week, 39 weeks a year - so that's an unbroken absence record for over 900 days (primary) or over 750 days (secondary). This includes no absences for the various authorised reasons.

According to the Department for Education, there are just under 36,000 primary-age pupils in County Durham (so probably around 5,500 in their final year), and around 30,000 secondary age pupils (so probably around 6,000 in their final year). I suspect the odds of never missing a day are well over 1 in 12,000.

Managing this is a "fantastic achievement" only in the sense that winning the lottery is a "fantastic achievement". I very much doubt that they'll find anyone. I hope they don't find anyone. Rewarding someone for that combination of luck and privilege sends entirely the wrong message.

A partial list of children who - through no fault of their own - will not be getting the prize.

Health and disability

• Those who were seriously ill for at least one day out of several hundred. Even with a great immune system and full vaccinations that's going to be tricky to achieve. I don't know anyone who didn't miss at least a couple of days of school for general illness - stomach bugs, severe colds, etc.
• Similarly, anyone who's seriously injured. Break an arm? Tough. No prize for them unless they splint it with their school ruler and carry on. Break their arm while playing rugby for the school? Still tough.
• Disability or other condition requiring medical treatment, or making continuous school attendance difficult? Nope. No prize for you.

Yet again we have "being ill is immoral". The same attitude permeates government at all levels, and society in general, with well-documented effects.

Family situations

• Bereavement? Family member terminally ill? No taking time off to visit them in hospital or attend their funeral. They should have the decency to die at a weekend and so not harm productivity. Similarly for happier family occasions.
• Family moves in or out of the county? I suppose the Council might try to chase up attendance records from other education authorities, but I doubt it. In or out of the country? No chance. Similarly for people who were home-educated at any time - it's legal, and rightly so, but that doesn't mean the government likes it.
• Abusive family so they run away from home? Or get placed in care? Not conducive to a perfect attendance record. The Council is fully aware of this

Bullying and other peer abuse

• Bullied to the extent of needing time off to recover from injuries (physical or mental)? See above.
• So (justifiably) terrified of the bullying that they make up an illness to avoid going in, or are ill because they're so worried, or just don't go in without telling their parents¹, or their parents rightly refuse to send them in? No prize for them.
• Sexual violence? Still the victim's fault.

LGB kids, or fat kids, or neuroatypical kids, or really, any kid that doesn't conform to the exact social stereotype, tend to be even bigger targets for bullies, but it can and does happen to anyone and we somehow accept it as largely inevitable; there are no equivalents of Trades Unions to speak up for childrens' rights here, and children who go on strike in protest... well, that's an unauthorised absence.

Even worse, there's nothing in this section to stop the bullies themselves having a perfect attendance record and getting the prize. "Trample those beneath you to raise yourself up" is perhaps not the ethos schools should be trying to instil.

Miscellaneous bad luck

• The last couple of winters have been extremely harsh, with schools closed several days for snow. There will have been days when the school wasn't closed but children living in more isolated parts of the county will have been snowed in anyway. Didn't walk three miles through over a foot of snow? Tough.
• Foot and mouth outbreak causes your farm to be quarantined? As usual, that's no excuse - you should break the law and come in anyway.

The TUC were very critical of the employers who expected their staff to come in, at risk to their life, during the severe weather this winter. Again, apparently this is something that starts early.

Closing thoughts

There's nothing unusual about these proposals. The value of attendance - whether you should be there or not, whether you're productive there or not, whether your attendance causes more problems later or not - is insisted upon by many employers and starts off at school. The idea that people who are ill, or disabled, or victims of assault and bullying, are somehow morally and otherwise inferior, or brought it on themselves - it's an idea probably as old as humanity, but that doesn't make it right.

There's another bit of point-missing, too. The reason that Councils have a legal responsibility to provide education and to require attendance at some form of education, is for the benefit of the children, who will have better chances in life, on average, if they receive education.

The children who attended every day have already, by that logic, received their reward - an education - and don't need an extra reward. The children who were missing are surely the ones who need more attention and help. It's far easier to reward attendance - useful attendance or not - of course.

I've sent the following letter to the Council itself, and to my two local councillors.

I write regarding the scheme described in your April 28, 2011 press release "Search for 100 per cent school attendees".

I fully understand that unauthorised absences from school can be a serious problem, and one which the Council has a legal responsibility to deal with. However, I do not feel that this plan is an appropriate part of that strategy.

Not missing a single day - out of the several hundred that must be attended - is only a "fantastic achievement" in the same sense that a lottery win is a "fantastic achievement". Not only must the winning child - I will be very surprised if you find even one, given the odds - not have had any unauthorised absences, which is quite possible, but they must not also have had any authorised absences either.

Not needing any authorised absences is, however, largely a matter of luck. People get ill. Children, who generally have less well-developed immune systems than adults, get ill even more often. Getting through over 750 days of schooling without being ill even once requires a perfect immune system, which is largely a matter of genetic luck and other factors outside the child's control.

Children with disabilities, chronic health conditions, cancer, or other conditions requiring regular treatment would find it impossible - through no fault of their own - to win the prize being offered. Effectively the Council is declaring that the genetic luck of being in perfect health is "an achievement" - which implies that it is something that the children had a choice in and control over. That is not a pleasant implication.

While luck of birth is one factor the winner or winners of this prize will need, they also need other sorts of luck too. The County's schools all have anti-bullying strategies, but these strategies are not fully effective, and one reason for unauthorised absence can be an entirely justified fear of bullying. (Being bullied can also affect one's physical and mental health, causing authorised health-related absences)

LGBT children, children with disabilities - including learning difficulties or mental health conditions, and children who don't "fit in" for any other reason are more likely to be targets for bullies, again, through no fault of their own.

Not being bullied is not "an achievement" - rare as it is - and to treat it as such is to blame the victims of bullying for the bully's actions. Worse still, the bully could still attend every day and be eligible for the prize while their victims are not!

There are many other good reasons for absence too - a bereavement in the family, being snowed in during the winter's bad weather, road accidents, and many more - for which describing it as "an achievement" to have avoided them is wrong and extremely insensitive. Think of a pupil who had an otherwise "perfect" attendance record, but took a few days off when their father died to grieve and attend the funeral. How will they feel if they hear about this prize?

I understand why the Council wishes to encourage attendance at school, but this is very much the wrong way to go about it, and I urge you to withdraw the scheme.

Yours sincerely

[cim]

Footnote

¹ The only item on this list that actually counts on school records as unauthorised absence, I believe.

The misguided quest for ultimate simplicity

There's a big tendency for politicians especially to say that the simpler something is, the better. Simplicity, above all else, should be the consideration. If they're looking at being elected, a promise to cut red tape - the red tape has now been cut so many times that the next government will be buying special nano-scissors to separate it atom by atom - is inevitable.

Now, I'm not saying that simplicity is a bad thing as such. Any added complexity has to be justified, because the more complex a system is to understand, the fewer people will understand it, and the more likely it is that someone whose life, health, family or livelihood depends on understanding it won't be able to.

Generally this added complexity on average benefits default people - who are more likely to have the spare time, energy and resources to look into it - and harms less privileged people. Most people spend most of their time not interacting with any particular system. The more complex and unintuitive¹ it is, therefore, the harder it'll be to use when they have to.

The process for claiming benefits is designed to be complex to "catch fraud". What's not been acknowledged by government is that - almost by definition - real fraudsters are going to have more time to understand the forms, get the various bits of supporting paperwork together, and so on, than a person who actually needs the benefits and is trying to complete the form while also dealing with the situation that means they need the benefits in the first place.

At a commercial level, companies can offer a confusing range of choices to make it unlikely that their customers will pick the optimal one.

So, simplicity is good. But like a lot of things, not an absolute all-overriding good thing. Added complexity in the form of protective regulations can be helpful - equalities, health and safety, employment law, housing standards, etc. - and yes, it's more complex and costly² to run a business or build a house to those standards, but the benefits received in terms of people being alive, more productive and happier are usually worth the costs.

When mainstream politicians talk about "cutting red tape", though, they don't generally mean "simplifying the benefits process". Instead, they go for the regulations which are probably doing more good than harm to keep. But it's a populist stance, and it's generally supported by the press - whose owners and editors also have a dislike for regulations that prevent them maximising their short-term profit - so it's one of those rarely-questioned truths: "simplicity good, complexity bad".

I was reminded of this recently when some publicity for the coming referendum dropped through the door, for the No campaign. One of the pages had a comparison of the FPTP and AV systems - the FPTP system with a short three sentences describing it, the AV system with a full column of long paragraphs: all accurate, but written in a very expanded form. Above both, a description of why one should vote No for simplicity.

In the spirit of that - and since the No campaign is opposed to spending money on voting:

Which is simpler?

Dictatorship

Democracy

You do what I say.

We divide the country into a number of "constituencies" of approximately equal population size, attempting to make the boundaries between the constituencies follow natural borders, historical divisions, group similar settlements together, and so forth. These boundaries are then reviewed and revised at great expense every few years to account for population migration, new buildings, and so on. Within each constituency, all citizens aged 18 or over (almost all, anyway - see Appendix A for exceptions) will be placed on an electoral register to register their entitlement to vote in elections. Every five years, or sooner if the government wishes or if the government is unable to maintain the confidence of parliament, or later but at the earliest possible opportunity in the event of a major national emergency, parliament will be dissolved. There will then be an election by the following process, with an expected cost of around £100 million. Candidates will then be appointed on payment of a £500 deposit in each constituency, requiring at least ten signatures of residents of that constituency in support of their candidature. All eligible voters will be entitled to be a candidate if they can meet those requirements, and need not be registered within the constituency they are standing for election in. [several pages about postal votes, proxy votes, campaign funding regulations, campaign regulations, vote secrecy, vote security, payment rates for counting staff, the largely honorary role of the Returning Officer, avenues of appeal to the courts, etc. omitted at this stage] The winners of the elections then form the parliament. [several more pages about by-elections, forming of governments, etc. omitted.]

Footnotes

¹ A term that implies that things can be universally "intuitive" despite different people having different intuitions, based on their personal history, culture, neuro[a]typicality, learning, practice, and so on. Still, even if it's not possible for a system to be entirely intuitive, it can be designed so that it isn't needlessly obscure.

² Some types of accessible design are actually either cheaper or no more expensive than the "traditional" inaccessible forms, provided that they're planned for from the start. Fitting them into the design as an afterthought, or on to existing technology or buildings, on the other hand, can be very expensive.

One default man's red tape is another person's necessity.

I've criticised the Equality Act 2010 on several occasions, but, flawed as it is, it still provides more protection than not having anything at all.

So, the government has included it in its "red tape" review, which is currently open for public comment. Heg at Feminist Philosophers has more information.

If you've got a moment, and are a UK citizen or resident, you might want to leave a comment yourself (remember to keep it free of cursing and apolitical, or it will be moderated out). The responses so far are overwhelmingly supportive of keeping the Act, which is good.

On the rest of the regulations, which do appear to be secondary¹ legislation, they say in their FAQ:

Ministers will then have three months to decide which regulations they will scrap, with the presumption that all burdensome regulations will go unless the government departments can justify why they are needed.

It's a rigged consultation. There are a lot of regulations. The vast majority of the population of the country don't need to know about the vast majority of them.

The people who do need to know are the people who - for everyone's good - need to follow them. They, of course, are the mostly likely to think them burdensome and unfair.

The chances of members of the general public being able to look through most of the regulations, find the ones that have affected them, and make a comment is pretty low. I'm fairly experienced at reading government documentation, and I certainly don't have time to look through them all to see what's there.

It's not that there aren't bad regulations in there, and there are certainly plenty that could be simplified, merged, or clarified, but this is a terrible way to gather public opinion on which they are.

Despite this weighting, the balance of comments on a lot of the regulations - for now - is that the regulations are a good thing and should be kept. That's probably not what they're expecting, so Plan B - ignore the comments they disagree with - is likely to be next.

Footnote

Primary legislation is laws passed by Parliament, which can only be amended or repealed by Parliament. Secondary legislation is different - Parliament will pass a law giving Ministers the right to make laws in a particular area.

Major advantages:

• More flexible than primary legislation, since it can be changed without taking up valuable parliamentary time
• More scope for detail about implementation of an Act than could usually be placed in legislation

Major disadvantages:

• Less accountability - Parliament can in theory scrutinise secondary legislation, but the process is very strongly biased towards the changes going ahead.
• Less publicity - primary legislation and planned primary legislation is fairly easily accessible to the public and interested groups. Secondary legislation, again, is easier to sneak in.
• Too easy to reverse - if anything actually important is only in secondary legislation, when the government changes hands, it can be scrapped almost instantly, and without much mention - did you know about these? I'd only heard of a few.

Inevitably, rights need to be defended

Well, it was obvious this was coming sometime during this Parliament. The Telegraph reports that amendments to further restrict access to abortion will be tabled to the Health and Social Care Bill by MPs including Nadine Dorries MP (Conservative, Mid Bedfordshire) and Frank Field MP (Labour, Birkenhead).

[trigger warning]

The amendments haven't yet been filed, but the Telegraph reports that the first will:

[...] create a new precondition for any women having an abortion to receive advice and counselling from an organisation that does not itself carry out terminations.

...and the second will transfer responsibility for setting clinical guidance for abortions to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (away from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists).

The second appears to be more symbolic than anything else, at an initial glance: they don't like the recommendations that the RCOG is likely to produce, so they'll give the job to someone else less specialised. Given that two doctors are required to agree for an abortion to happen - one or two more than any other medical treatment - this may cause problems with finding doctors if the guidelines NIHCE comes up with are significantly more anti-abortion than the ones RCOG would have written, but there will still be plenty of doctors who believe that forcing someone to go through with an unwanted and/or dangerous pregnancy is sufficiently harmful in its own right.

The first comes right out of the USA anti-choice book, though. It's full of typical anti-choice assumptions:

• People in possession of a uterus automatically lose all their critical thinking skills and therefore, by force of law, must be required to be take advice and counselling whether they want or need it or not. No-one ever thinks about whether or not they should have an abortion before they walk into their GP's office.

  Unsurprisingly, this isn't applied to most other life decisions. Perhaps, given that - according to Science! - 99.81% of decisions on who to heterosexually marry are non-optimal, there should be mandatory advice and counselling for anyone wanting to get married. Religious organisations would not be allowed to provide this advice, since that would be a conflict of interest.

• The pro-choice side want to maximise the number of abortions performed. Therefore it's a major conflict of interest for advice to be provided by an organisation (such as the NHS) which also provides abortions.

  Claire Murphy of BPAS is quoted in the Telegraph article for the obvious reality:

  On average, 20 per cent of women who approach BPAS initially seeking an abortion eventually chose not to have a termination, [Murphy] said.

  “The bottom line is that like any other medical procedure, women have to consent before they receive abortion treatment,” she said. “We have no interest in pushing women into procedures they do not want. We are about giving women choices.”

• Reducing the number of abortions, in and of itself, would be a social good. The means taken to do this are irrelevant.

  The social problems resulting from a vast increase in the number of unwanted children - it's not as if our foster care and adoption services are keeping up with demand as it is; the health problems caused by carrying on with unwanted or dangerous pregnancies; the problems caused for families who neither want nor can cope with an extra child - all quietly ignored.

It's unfortunate, because there are several largely uncontroversially good actions which could be taken, one side effect of which would be to reduce the number of abortions. "Cheating" and just making abortions illegal or harder to get¹ doesn't have the same effect.

For instance:

• Researching - and not restricted to one form of reproductive anatomy, either - cheap, fully reliable contraception without side effects or the possibility of sabotage, and making this widely advertised and available to everyone in the country.
• Significantly increasing the level and range of support available to parents - especially those without much money, and those with disabilities, and single parents, and everyone else who differs from society's default parenting model.
• Major improvements in the coverage and availability of sex education for children - and, indeed, if we don't want to take most of a century to catch up, for adults too - especially on coercion issues (which often include coercion over contraception). Dismantling as much of rape culture as possible would help.
• Far more efficiency and effectiveness in dealing with domestic violence and rape.

All of these would - as a side effect - reduce the number of abortions that were needed annually, either by making it less likely that people would become pregnant unexpectely, or by making it more likely that people who became pregnant would be able to support a child for the following decades.

Of course, helping people is not really what these MPs go in for (both are well to the right of their party as a whole) - far easier to punish them for not doing exactly what those MPs would have done.

Aside on Parliamentary Procedure

Votes concerning abortion in the Commons are generally "free" or "conscience" votes on which none of the parties take a particular line. As far as I can tell, none of the major parties currently represented in the Commons have any official policy on abortion.

In practice, most Labour MPs will vote against restrictions, most Conservative MPs and most Northern Ireland MPs will vote for restrictions, and the Lib Dems will split roughly equally on both sides. When there was a Labour majority in the Commons, this wasn't too bad. At the moment, however, the odds are not good (though, with around a third of MPs being new, they may be better than it looks).

It's not clear yet whether the amendments will be submitted at committee stage, report stage, or for third reading, which affects who will be able to vote on them.

Footnote

¹ In Northern Ireland, abortion is almost entirely illegal. Middle-class people who are pregnant there can quietly get on a ferry to Great Britain, have an abortion, and return home. Poorer people need to rely on the services of groups like the Abortion Support Network to cover their travel costs, hotel bills, and so on. (ASN is always in need of donations to cover its costs, if you have some spare cash)

Quite a few of the suggested restrictions are heavily class-based. Outlawing abortion entirely would cause too much opposition from the middle-classes and their swing votes. Restricting it won't inconvenience them too much and "who cares about poor people anyway?".

Coalition: untrained and stressed workers better for the economy

On 6 April 2011, parents of children aged 17 were to be given the right to request flexible working from their employers. Not the right to have flexible working, understand - just the right to request it.

The coalition intends to cancel this regulation before it takes effect.

From that press release.

The Government is committed to extending the right to request flexible working to all employees in due course, as set out in the Coalition Agreement.

The aim behind delaying the extension of flexible working is to allow businesses breathing space in the current economic climate.

Flexible working is currently available for parents with children 16 and under and carers.

Okay. So, let's go through this more slowly.

1. The right to request flexible working is currently available for parents of children 16 or under, and carers. Employees do not have to grant flexible working - ever - but the employee has the right to ask and have their employer consider it, and the employer must have a good reason to say no.
2. On the 6 April, the number "16" in that sentence would have changed to "17".
3. But to reduce red tape by keeping the number and complexity of regulations related to flexible working exactly the same, it now won't.
4. This will save the economy, because rather than worrying about whether all their employees with children aged exactly 17 (many small businesses have exactly zero employees fitting that description) were suddenly going to descend on them and ask for flexible working, employers will be able to ... um ... er ... Profit!
5. Later, if the economy is better, they will increase red tape again by simplifying that regulation even further so that it says "all employees" rather than "all employees meeting conditions X, Y, Z"

No surprises for guessing that this sort of change will harm non-default employees - women, disabled people, working class people especially - far more than it harms the default ones (who weren't going to request flexible working much anyway)

And don't think about developing your skills either

Similarly, the right to request time off to train will be removed for employees of businesses with under 250 people.

Most economists would say that increasing the skill levels of your workforce improved productivity and so led to increased economic growth - but not Vince Cable and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS): they know the truth. Their next step will presumably be to rename themselves to the Department of Business, Stagnation, and Lack of Skills, to better reflect what the country needs right now.

Has DBIS said anything economically sound recently?

Hmm... it was also Cable's department that was responsible for the economically bizarre plans for tuition fees:

1. Make students take out at least a "very large" loan to go to university at all
2. Set the repayment terms such that for most of them (except the ones who get rich enough not to care) the total repayments will be exactly the same for a "very large" loan and a "really very large" loan.
3. Let the universities choose whether their students will need a "very large" or "really very large" loan (but give the universities more money per student in the "really very large" case)
4. Act incredibly shocked when every single university says "really very large".

Perhaps they've already fired all their well-trained economists, and aren't letting their replacements read any textbooks in case they learn something. This would explain rather a lot about their recent policy announcements.