The great Diane Abbott tweetgate scandal of 2012

Here’s the exchange, as reproduced by the BBC:

Bim Adewunmi: I do wish everyone would stop saying 'the black community' though. WHICH ONE?
Bim Adewunmi: Clarifying my 'black community' tweet: I hate the generally lazy thinking behind the use of the term. Same for 'black community leaders'.
Diane Abbott: I understand the cultural point you are making. But you are playing into a "divide and rule" agenda.
Bim Adewunmi: Maybe. I find it frustrating that half the time, these leaders are out of touch with black people they purport to represent.
Diane Abbott: White people love playing "divide & rule" We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism
Bim Adewunmi: I don't advocate 'divide and rule'. But I wish we could deal more effectively with issues without resorting to monolithic view.
Diane Abbott: Ethnic communities that show more public solidarity & unity than black people do much better #dontwashdirtylineninpublic

I should start by declaring that my general opinion of Diane Abbott is pretty low, although my estimation of her importance is also pretty low. I find it hard to get worked up by this.

Still, on the offending phrase: I don’t quite grasp the mental process that starts with wanting a quick and clear way to describe people who seek to weaken black people by turning them against each other, and ends with choosing “white people” rather than “colonialists” or “imperialists” or “racists”.

Nonetheless, I’m sure she knows full well that there are loads of white people who don’t fit that description. My best guess is that she was aiming to be a little cheeky in the vague service of solidarity-building, in the way that Harriet Harman might make some semi-serious unflattering overgeneralisation about men to make the sisters nod along.

If so, it’s still unpleasant and it’s still untrue – I go along with Russell on “the superior virtue of the oppressed”. But the idea that any white person has in any way been harmed by this tweet is just ridiculous. At the very outside you could argue that impressionable young black people might read it and as a result take more of an ‘us vs them’ outlook towards all white people, but I think that’s stretching it well past breaking point.

My real beef with what Abbott said is precisely because of the “context” that she protests her tweet was taken out of. I don’t like the way she rejects Bim Adewunmi’s point.

Questioning the merits of a set of “community leaders” (black or otherwise) is not on any meaningful continuum with the tactics and values of 19th-century colonialism. And the suggestion that black people shouldn’t criticise their so-called “community leaders” for fear of being seen to “wash [their] dirty linen in public” is depressing.

But then, there are far more depressing things to do with race. And yet this is the issue we’re all yelling about this week. Well, it’s easy, isn’t it? We know how to do ‘somebody said something and people say they’re angry at her and other people say they’re angry at them and now I’m going to say something’. We don’t know how to make society more just and people less prejudiced. Well, I don’t, anyway.

My dependency culture

My name is Tom and I live a life of economic dependency.

I depend for my livelihood on all the strokes of luck – most obviously my parents’ dedication, a hefty amount of genetics and a good, free education – that gave me the qualities I have. More immediately, I depend on an economic system that values these qualities, so that there have (mostly) been job vacancies in the right place at the right time, with a level of pay that covers my needs and even my tastes.

On top of that, I’m willing to work to earn this pay; for this, I’ll take some personal credit (although plenty of people worse off than me have stronger work ethics). But apart from that, I’m responsible for none of the circumstances that allow me to convert my willingness into comfort.

My job, while mostly tedious and often frustrating, rarely places too much strain on me – and is occasionally rewarding. Now and then, if I do something particularly well, I might feel proud of what I’ve achieved. But a moment’s reflection tells me that the more pertinent feeling is gladness at a situation where I have the ability to achieve such things and the opportunity to use that ability (and to sell it for a decent price).

I’ll never be rich, but I’m still dazzlingly lucky. What separates me from all the people who’d like to work but can’t, or want decent work but can only find back-breaking, soul-destroying, minimum-wage drudgery, is sheer chance. They may be dependent on benefits to keep the wolf from the door; I’m dependent on the coincidence of supply and demand that happens to define my labour as valuable. The labour market may more or (often) less efficiently rate our merit as employees, but it isn’t a fair judge of our virtues as people.

Moral crusaders against ‘dependency’ need to remember this.

(This train of thought, if you can call it that, was set off by two good posts from Peter Ryley and Paul Sagar.)

How big? Introducing the Societometer

I had a mild rant the other day about the phrase ‘big society’ and how the concept of society’s size makes no sense. But, like a good blogger, I’ve now done some research and it turns out that there is an accepted measure, the Societometer, that gives regular assessments of how big society is.

Historical records show that society was huge in the 1950s, tending to shrink a little in the 1960s and more rapidly in the 1970s. Apparently, due to a small fire at the Office for National Statistics information warehouse five weeks ago, no figures exist for the years 1979-97, so we cannot possibly draw any conclusions about what happened during that period and must never mention it.


But it can clearly be seen that over Labour’s time in office, society hardly increased in size at all, and has even shrunk since 2007 – although the very latest figures show that in the five months leading up to the election, society did grow by 1.7%, as Labour leadership contenders have been quick to seize on. However, Downing Street argues that this increase was due to people expecting a change of government, and so acting so make society bigger in anticipation.

The current Societometer reading, for June, puts society at 33.2 SBU (social bigness units), although this preliminary estimate is subject to revision.

David Cameron has set an ambitious target, aiming to double the size of society in real terms by 2015. He has established the Office for Societal Embiggenment to assess progress towards this aim, although its independence has been called into question after it produced a set of very favourable predictions.

By contrast, the respected think-tank the Institute for Quantifying Woolly Abstractions calculates that policies announced so far will enlarge society by little over a quarter, and that this increase will be concentrated in better-off neighbourhoods where people share the same private security firm and know each other’s interior designers’ names.

There has been speculation that the government may change the way society’s size is calculated, giving less statistical weight to poorer areas on the grounds that they are ‘broken society’ and so appear smaller than they actually are. Furthermore, given the general austerity drive, it would be more efficient to measure fewer parts of society – the larger bits are easier to do – and then extrapolate from them. Critics say that this would be fiddling the figures, but no decisions will be taken until a commission led by maverick Labour MP Mark Meadow has reported.

Turnout, unemployment, safe seats and marginals

Two things that everyone knows: poorer areas have lower voting turnouts than richer areas, and safer seats have lower turnouts than marginals.

I’ve looked at these effects in this general election: they both exist, but one is much bigger than the other. I used data on 2010 election turnout, 2005 election closeness and the April 2010 Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant count for each constituency in Britain.

The JSA numbers are hardly a perfect guide to unemployment, but they’re all I can find available on a constituency basis, and the result is striking:


The dots are mostly grouped pretty closely around a very clear line; the correlation between unemployment and turnout is -0.76. So some of those most affected by government policy are least likely to vote.

As for the safeness or marginality of a seat, here the correlation with turnout is still significant, but a much more modest -0.45:


There’s still a clear tendency, but the dots are mostly a lot farther from the line of best fit than they are in the unemployment chart. (The correlation between turnout and 2010 majority is a even feebler -0.13.)

So to all those electoral reformers who say that abolishing ultra-safe seats would boost turnout: on these figures, abolishing pockets of high unemployment would boost it even more. And it might even be a good thing in itself.

We’re modern – many of our best readers know some gays

The Telegraph, in an editorial about “a way of thinking and talking about the family with which modern Britain should feel comfortable”, says:

some ways of thinking about the family are obsolete. It is no longer acceptable to stigmatise unmarried mothers, divorcees or gay people: in many cases these are literally our children, parents, brothers and sisters.

But not actually us, of course. The Daily Telegraph – the paper for married straight people who may well know some unmarried mothers, divorcees or gays. And the reason one shouldn’t stigmatise the latter is that it’s “obsolete” and can lead to dinner-table awkwardness, not because it’s vicious and leads to anguish.

Still, it’s progress of sorts. I remember a Telegraph editorial from the late 90s that said (if I recall right): “the homosexual lifestyle is a deeply unhappy one”.

Racism and voting

People are aghast at the BNP getting two MEPs. Some are so determined to stop this ever happening again that they’ve taken to throwing eggs. At a party that makes great play of its supposed victimhood. Nice tactic, guys.

But should racists be allowed to vote, and to form political parties? Alas, yes. So: how many racists are there in Britain? The BNP got 6.2% of the vote last week, although this was only 2.1% of the electorate.

It’s hard to find out how many racists there are, because most of them will cunningly say “I’m not a racist”. The fiends.

The British Social Attitudes survey regularly asks: “How would you describe yourself... as very prejudiced against people of other races, a little prejudiced, or not prejudiced at all?”

We can be sure that this question under-records racial prejudice. Nonetheless, the latest survey (2007) found 2.6% of people saying that they were very prejudiced and 29% a little prejudiced. These figures have been pretty consistent through this decade and last.

So if we don’t want racist parties to win votes, then we can: (1) make racists (or people who don’t care about anti-racism – a debatable distinction) less inclined to vote for racist parties; (2) make non-racists more inclined to vote for non-racist parties; (3) make people less racist.

Almost all reaction to the BNP in recent years can be classed as (1) or (2) – which fits with the prevailing cross-party and mainstream media mood that public attitudes are to be responded to rather than changed. Both approaches are worthwhile. (3) is much harder, and slower to work, but much more rewarding because it tackles the problem at root.

Welfare payments don’t kill babies; monstrous people kill babies

I don’t have much to say about the ‘Baby P’ case, mainly because the needless horror of it defies my ability to articulate.

But I want to make a small point about some of the commentary on it. This Times leader, a voice that strives for respectability, is a good example.

But this is not just a story about Haringey, or the child protection system. It is a story about Britain today. … Baby P was not killed by low-paid social workers, but at the hands of adults who were unimaginably depraved. These adults were part of Britain's dependency community.
… The story of Baby P provides a glimpse into the colossal failure of community, in which dependency on the State is a way of life.
…
The story of Baby P is one that will haunt Britain for years to come. But for some, its message is already all too clear: that this has become a country where the State's largesse can be a lifelong livelihood; where parents can have as many children with as many partners as they please without feeling obliged to care for any of them; and where the maximum penalty for a campaign of torture and sadism against a defenceless child is 14 years in prison.

You can find less temperate phrasing in the tabloids, but the basic point, and the sheer wrongness of it, are apparent here.

I’m happy to hear the argument that welfare can breed dependency, sapping both initiative and personal responsibility. Sometimes this case, one-sided as it is, has merits and sometimes not. But this use of it is really beyond the pale. The destruction of Baby P’s life is a crime of a wholly different magnitude from the ‘fecklessness’ that right-wingers denounce among welfare recipients. There is no continuum that slides from fiddling the dole to beating a baby to death.

It is an awful case; it may well be emblematic of the worst in British society and of the worst in human nature; but it is exceptional. That it has happened says far less about us than how we choose to respond.

They say that hard cases make bad laws; they can also make bad ideologies.

(And, with a little more poignancy than usual, it’s this time of year.)

‘Responsibility deals’ and the parable of the bears

The new Tory plan to fight obesity was announced yesterday by Andrew Lansley (whose name I sometimes think is suspiciously close to being Angela Lansbury, but never mind that).

It involves the use of something called a “responsibility deal”:

Participants in Responsibility Deals would be drawn from businesses and business-representative bodies, NGOs and the voluntary sector, academic institutions, regulators, government bodies and investors. They would tackle important societal issues by agreeing on a shared understanding of what the issue is, what needs to be done and who will do what, and by when.

The idea is that these deals will get businesses to do nice things (stop advertising alcohol to teenagers, cut the fat content of food, recycle more, cut carbon emissions, etc.) without the need for government coercion. Regulation will only be a “last resort”.

Good performance within the terms of a deal would be rewarded with “a lighter regulatory touch”.

But companies will get to say what demands – sorry, requests – should reasonably be made of them, and the NGOs and other participants will be pressurised into doing more themselves and demanding – sorry, requesting – less than what they think is right:

The process would be discursive and companies would therefore have the opportunity to argue their case for why certain expectations were realistic or otherwise. The process will also be designed to bring pressure on other parties to play their respective roles and focus on outcomes over ideology.

Involvement will be voluntary, but if businesses don’t want to take part, it will “reflect poorly” on them: they will be asked to “clarify or explain their position should they not wish to contribute”. This obviously sounds very tough indeed.

However:

Business involvement should not be over-complicated, since this would increase costs and the likelihood of non-participation.

And:

Representatives of British communities as a whole would be taking responsibility for ensuring that the right conditions are present to drive change.

You might think that this all seems a bit woolly, that it amounts to getting businesses to specify what the government is allowed to ask them to do, and that if they then do that, they get allowed to do other things that the government previously didn’t want them to do, and if it doesn’t work out then excuses will be preferred to actual blame. It might seem preposterously toothless and designed to let businesses get away with as much as possible while creating the impression that they, and the Tory government that lets them get away with it, are socially responsible.

The finding of our review is that many companies would welcome Responsibility Deals.

No kidding.

But wait! There is, after all, the possibility of regulation if a deal doesn’t work. But this is mentioned only as the “last resort”. Companies may well act more responsibly without regulation, but the threat of it if they don’t play ball must be real – otherwise they’ll not do anything that endangers profits. This threat will be pretty much empty coming from a minister ideologically opposed to regulation, who has personal responsibility for making sure the ‘responsibility deals’ they have brokered work, or at least are seen to be working, or at least are seen in their own narrow terms to be working. The minister will have a strong incentive to negotiate and then monitor and then renegotiate each deal in a way that they allows them to claim success. Regulation will only follow from their public admission of personal failure. Not a credible threat.

But even this provokes fear, or at least the public affectation of fear, from business. Richard Lambert, Director-General of the CBI, has said:

The proper role of government is to create certainty in the market and maintain a clear distinction between compulsory regulation and voluntary action. Where necessary, the government should regulate clearly and enforce the regulations strongly. There is a risk that responsibility deals would confuse this issue, by being almost a form of regulation by proxy, and would lack credibility.

See how even these tame, voluntary, nominal checks on corporate behaviour are received! “Regulation by proxy”! Toothless this may be, but the business lobby will keep punching it in the mouth to make sure no teeth can ever develop.

The parable of the bears

The Minister for Ursine Defecation convenes a group of bears and other forest-dwellers to discuss the issue of bears shitting in the woods. The squirrels voice their dislike of this happening where they’re trying to forage for acorns, and ask for it to stop. The bears listen politely, and then say: “We’re bears. We shit in the woods.” The minister asks if there’s any way the bears might be able to shit somewhere else. The bears growl.

The squirrels nervously suggest that the bears might consider shitting only in certain designated parts of the woods, not right next to where all the oak trees are. The bears flex their claws. The minister thanks the bears for taking on the squirrels’ point of view, and offers the bears the option of being allowed to eat ramblers if they’ll consider not shitting near the oaks where the squirrels are foraging.

The bears um and ah, and say it’s only fair if the squirrels make some concessions too – for instance, that tapping noise they make as they break into the acorns is pretty annoying. The squirrels sigh, and say that they’ll leave their acorns in water overnight to soften them up – the taste will suffer, but it’ll reduce the noise. A responsibility deal is agreed.

Six months later, the group reconvenes (beginning with a minute’s silence in memory of the dead ramblers). The squirrels complain that the bears are still shitting near the oak trees, but the bears protest that most of them – bar a few laggards – have relocated their shitting. Indeed, the red meat from the ramblers is giving them constipation, so there is (in real terms) less shit than in previous years. The minister diplomatically remarks that official figures from Ofshit won’t be published until the end of the year, so it would be premature to make any negative assessments of the deal.

The minister then goes off and cuts down all the oak trees near where the bears live. The squirrels are forced to relocate to a less desirable and increasingly overcrowded part of the woods, but one in which there are no bears. The key outcome of the responsibility deal has been achieved! The bears make a large donation to the Tory Party and, while the minister is promoted to become Secretary of State for Leopard Spot Alteration Prevention, they continue to shit in the woods.

Weighty words

It’s political correctness gone fat:

Parents of primary schoolchildren will start getting letters next month telling them how fat their children are under Government plans to tackle childhood obesity. But however much they weigh, no child will ever be described as “obese”. … The department [of Health] said that research had shown that the term was a turn-off, so instead it will use the term “very overweight” for those children whose body mass index exceeds 30, in an attempt to enlist parents’ support.
…
Tam Fry, of the Child Growth Foundation, said that it was “prissy” and “namby-pamby” not to use the right word. … “I find this particular line from the Government tiptoeing through the daffodils,” he said.

Of course, just the other week, David Cameron was saying: “We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise.” And yet here we are, retreating further still from clear talking. Right? Wrong.

A paper in the BMJ last month looked at people’s perceptions of their own weight – not in terms of measured stones or kilos, but whether they class themselves as underweight, about right, somewhat overweight, etc. – and how these have changed in recent years.

In 1999, 43% of the population had a BMI that put them in the overweight or obese range, of whom 81% perceived themselves to be overweight or very overweight. In 2007, 53% of the population had a BMI in the overweight or obese range, of whom only 75% reported themselves to be overweight, very overweight, or obese.

So, as the incidence of overweight and obesity has increased, the proportion of overweight and obese people who recognise themselves as such has declined.

The researchers (from UCL’s Health Behaviour Research Centre) suggest two explanations:

Social comparison is likely to play an important role in the development of societal weight norms, resulting in the threshold for perceived overweight rising in line with increasing weight in the population. …
Another possible explanation relates to the type of images that often accompany media and health information. Photographic illustrations often depict severely obese people, untypical of the overweight population. This might act as false reassurance for those who are “merely” overweight, implicitly reinforcing a perception that messages about healthy eating and exercise are not aimed at them.

The same misperception, we may assume, also prevents many parents from recognising that their children qualify as obese. So giving them hard information could – in some cases – be a useful eye-opener.

But why insist on using the word ‘obese’? The definition of obesity is having a height in metres at least 30 times greater than the square of one’s weight in kilograms – not an immediately meaningful concept. Is there no easier way of communicating that your child is so very overweight that there’s a health risk? Yes: just say that.

Britain’s divided cities – nothing to do with us, guv

The Tories say:

New evidence has revealed the true scale of the social divide between rich and poor in Britain's cities.
…in Westminster, there are pockets of 100% child poverty right next to areas where no children live in poverty at all.

Hmm, something is faintly ringing a bell in the back of my head. Something to do with the Tories, Westminster Council, housing policy and relocating poor people. But it’s probably nothing. What matters now is that we build stable communities.

Opposing states of mind

There are people on the right who accuse the left of thinking that things have to be done either under a government aegis or not at all – that official, state reality is the only reality that matters, whereas actually normal life carries on informally under the bureaucratic and ministerial radar.

On the other hand, though, there’s an equivalent, opposing blind spot that many of the same right-wingers have.

Today, Harriet Harman is plugging positive discrimination – letting employers prefer female or ethnic-minority candidates ‘of equal ability’. I’m a bit doubtful about this (declaration of interest: I’m a white man), but what occurs to me is this:

When the commentators of the right leap in to criticise this, many will be ignoring the unmeasured, unofficial, informal discrimination that goes the other way, and that policies like this are intended to counter.

It is ludicrous, as ludicrous as thinking that all good flows from the state, to think that all restrictions on freedom and opportunity come from the state. I doubt anybody actually believes either of these things, but all too many often talk – and make policy – as if they did.

Relatedly, Richard Reeves has an interesting piece out: “Cameronism is… critical of state initiatives to solve underlying social problems, lambasting Labour for nationalising social problems. … Cameron is quite right that Labour is very often guilty of a knee-jerk statism, but he is equally at risk of following an unthinking anti-statism.”

A lot of the reason that I dislike (Cameronite) conservatism comes out when I hear talk about “the economy”, “the state” and “society” as if they’re utterly distinct entities with pretty straightforward relationships: Thatcher fixed the economy by rolling back the state, and now Labour’s overuse of the state has broken society (the society–economy link appears to depend on which party growth happens under). But the three have intimate and complex interconnections.

‘Dear big business, please stop trying to make so much profit and be nicer, or else I’ll be forced to ask you again’

I pretty much agree with David Cameron about this:

For many parents, today's world can seem incredibly hostile. There are times when each shopping trip, advert break, magazine, film, TV programme or music video seems to conspire against you. If it's not enticing your children with the latest toy, it's introducing youngsters to sex, violence and adult emotional dilemmas at an incredibly early age.
So we - government, parents and society - have got to stand together and demand that all our businesses accept the influence they have over children and behave accordingly. I believe social pressure, not regulation, is the best way to do this.

All apart from the last sentence, a non sequitur that leaps from simple observation and common concern to ideological insistence. That lacuna dooms the whole enterprise. He goes on:

So yes, I will keep criticising irresponsible marketing for instance that gauntlet you have to run at the checkout with endless pushing of chocolate and sweets so parents cannot help but be pestered by their children when they're queuing. And I will speak out against any other commercial pressures that make life difficult for parents.

Cameron is sometimes said to be a 1980s free-market fundamentalist in sheep’s clothing. He isn’t: he truly believes, I’m sure, that there should be more restraints on the activities of business. But his deep-seated dislike of the state means that he wants this restraint to be voluntary: moral rather than legal. I really can’t see that working, though.

I suppose you could make an analogy with the public pressure on multinationals to observe better labour standards in developing countries than they strictly need to. Maybe. But that’s a case of giving these companies another relatively cheap way to sell themselves to their Western customers (‘look – we’re ethical! And if you wear our clothes, people will know you are too!’). It’s also had limited success.

But for the things Cameron’s talking about, I think there’s even less scope for voluntary, reputation-based change. The reason is that what he wants restrained is not the way products are produced but they way they’re sold; breaking the nexus between company and consumer in this way will mean fewer sales and nothing else – what business will go for that?

Cultural change would definitely be good to have here; I think children are too commercialised. But it’s not enough, and I doubt Government can drive it by exhortation, and without restricting what business and particularly the media can do, it just won’t happen.

[A while ago, Cassilis criticised those who claim that the changes under Cameron have been purely superficial. He’s right, and I keep meaning to respond (this isn’t a response, just an aside). I think the Tories have changed more than just their PR, but – if this makes much sense – the change is more in terms of how the party thinks of itself than it is an upheaval in policies. Yes, they talk more compassionately than ten or even five years ago, but I think they also feel, in themselves, more compassionate about social issues (or at least some of them do). This has led to policy change in some cases – although these are often at least as much a matter of expediently accepting the Labour agenda, as with the minimum wage and NHS spending – but the bigger effect is that often-familiar right-wing policies now get justified in different ways. Thus biasing the tax and benefit system towards marriage is a way to help families out of poverty, not a way to stop irresponsible single mothers sponging off the state. Or, in this case, a refusal to regulate business isn’t about slashing red tape but part of a desire to encourage “responsibility” by focusing on persuasion and cultural change. Just a thought.]

20 weeks… later?

How would a Conservative-majority Commons have voted on the proposed 20-week abortion limit that was heavily defeated yesterday?

It was a free vote, but there are nonetheless huge party differences:

• 62% of Tory MPs voted for 20 weeks and 18% against.
• 12% of Labour MPs voted for 20 weeks and 70% against.
• 21% of Lib Dem MPs voted for 20 weeks and 67% against.

If we assume that the Tories make gains at the next election off Labour and the Lib Dems in proportion to how many seat those two parties currently hold, assume the other parties stay the same, take into account boundary changes, and assume that party MPs continue to split in the same proportions on the issue…

A Tory majority of 38 will mean more MPs backing 20 weeks than opposing it.

Cameron’s unsure start

David Cameron has come up with a great ‘family-friendly’ policy: redistribution to new babies and away from slightly older children. He says:

Labour are planning an increase in outreach workers at Surestart centres, as one way of supporting parents with young children. That's their idea. But money is tight and we've got to make choices. So I believe that instead of more untrained outreach workers, we need more trained professionals who really know what they're doing. They exist already. They're called health visitors.

He proposes more health visits for families, focused most regularly in the first few months of a child’s life. No doubt at all: that would be a good thing. But, as he says, money is tight, and so he wants to cut the extension of outreach services, focused across a wider age range, that will have been implemented by the time he gets to fight an election.

No doubt at all: that cut would be a bad thing.

He cavalierly waves that away as not really important, insinuating that these outreach workers aren’t “trained professionals who really know what they're doing”. Certainly, they’re not trained as health visitors, but that’s not their purpose. Their role is to make home visits to parents of young children, offering information about services available and families’ entitlements, as well as advice, advocacy and support in navigating the system. They can also refer families to more specialised professionals – such as health visitors.

A report [PDF] assessing Sure Start outreach services gives lie to the insult that these workers are bumbling amateurs:

The components of training for outreach staff are extensive, since these workers need to be prepared to respond to a whole variety of questions and needs. Typical ingredients include courses on domestic violence, child protection, first aid, confidence building, peer support/breast feeding, drugs, Islam awareness training, child and adolescent mental health, early childhood and learning, baby massage, baby yoga, speech and language, signs and symptoms of postnatal depression and general mental health.

Some of this I admit I roll my lefty eyes at: baby yoga the world could surely live without. Most of the rest seems reasonable, though – including, to my distaste, Islam awareness. But to imply that outreach staff are little use is as dishonest as would be claiming that health visitors know about nothing other than health issues.

Cameron claims that his plans to divert resources into health visiting are popular: “it's not surprising that overwhelmingly, parents say it's this kind of help and support they want”. It’s not surprising that a politician claims public support for his plans. But the truth may not be so straightforward, according to the assessment:

there are local variations in what is acceptable in the way services are delivered. Some areas report that non-professional home visitors are not acceptable, whilst professionally qualified staff are. In others the reverse is reported. In some areas professionals are considered threatening (especially if there is an association with Social Services Departments) and paraprofessionals from the local community are welcomed. Particular sensitivity is required in understanding the local context and preferences…

Exactly: letting local people shape the public services they want is what Cameron so regularly emotes about. And yet, here he is, saying that it all should work his way.

The report notes the different approaches that local programmes take:

Where local Health Visitor managers joined the Sure Start partnership at the planning stage, it was likely that the health visiting service would be the structure on which the Outreach and Home Visiting service was built. … When this happened there was unlikely to be a major input from para-professional home visitors, other than as a support resource for this health team.
Where SSLPs [Sure Start Local Providers] had a strong community development ethos the opposite model was more likely, with the outreach and home-visiting work spearheaded by community workers and para-professionals, many of them local parents, with health and other practitioners called upon where specialist input was requested by visiting parents or considered necessary by home visitors.

Why insist that that the form where the “community development ethos” predominates, and in which parents themselves play a greater role, is wrong?

Cameron claims:

Health visitors are the kind of support that parents want. Not laissez-faire: just leaving parents to get on with it. Not nanny-state: some bureaucratic system telling parents what to do. Just sensible, practical, personal support that people trust.

And yet he can’t see that he himself is being too directing and top-down in his approach. Nor does he realise that he’s not bringing any new principles to the table. Compare the sentiments in his quote with those of this, from a training pack for the Sure Start outreach workers that he wants to cut:

It is not our role to take over a family’s problems and issues. We are there to support them in doing for themselves, to present families with choices and to respect and abide by the decision made by the family.

That’s not a lofty ministerial soundbite; it’s what the front-line workers are having drilled into them.

One other thought: specialist health visitors are good, and so is the support from more generalist outreach workers. But the latter more disproportionately benefits the most socially excluded families, less aware of and able to navigate the system than the well-educated, better-off middle class. So Cameron’s policy, as well as redistributing support from youngish children to new babies, will tend to redistribute away from poorer families.

If “money is tight and we've got to make choices”, why not choose to forsake some of that inheritance tax cut?

Correction: child mortality

My reach has exceeded my grasp. In a post in December I noted with dismay a government report apparently recording that child mortality had worsened under Labour.

It seems that I misunderstood. In that report, an indicator called ‘infant mortality’ was being used as one of many measures of deprivation. But it appears that - in line with the view of poverty as relative rather than absolute - what was actually being looked at was the difference in child mortality rates between socioeconomic groups.

A new report yesterday gives a clearer picture. Since Labour came to power, child mortality per 1000 live births has fallen, from 5.6 to 4.8 across the whole population. Among the ‘routine and manual’ socioeconomic group, the rate also fell, from 6.3 to 5.6.

The fall among the poorer group is a little less than the overall fall: so inequality in child mortality rates has increased since 1997 (although since 2002, it’s fallen).

That’ll teach me to speed-read fat PDFs. It’s something I’m happy to have been wrong about, though.

Deafness and the availability of options

I’ve been thinking more during the week about the deaf couple who want to use IVF to select a deaf baby (they have already had one naturally). The father, Tomato Lichy, was interviewed by John Humphrys on Monday. Here’s a chunk of it:

JH: I don't think anybody would say - no sensible person would say - that deaf people are inferior to hearing people, but the fact is that they have a disability: a pretty serious disability. They cannot hear. Surely you have no right to effectively impose that disability on another child? The child doesn't belong to you; the child is a person in its own right.
TL: You say it's a serious disability. I disagree with that. We have an interpreter here for you to be able to understand me. If I go to a deaf club or a deaf academic conference with thousands of deaf people, you would be lost. You're the one with the disability, because you can't use sign language.
JH: Isn't that a slightly perverse point? I, after all, don't need, somebody to sign for me. I can hear the music of Beethoven or listen to a play by Shakespeare or pop music or whatever it happens to be - you can't. So therefore you have a disability. Surely that's simply a fact?
TL: Well, I feel sorry for you, because you haven't acquired sign language, you can't appreciate deaf plays, you can't appreciate deaf poetry, you can't appreciate the joy of being part of the deaf community, the jokes that go on. I feel sorry for you.
JH: But I could learn sign language if I set myself to it - at least I assume that I could. You can't learn to hear.
TL: Yes, but now it's recognised that deaf people do have a culture, a community of their own. You know, in the old days people used to say that deaf people were certainly inferior to hearing people, but recently Baroness Deech said in Parliament: "I hope that your Lordships will be pleased that the deliberate choice of an embryo that is, for example, likely to be deaf, will be prevented by Clause 14". So in saying that, the government is saying quite clearly that deaf people are inferior to hearing people, and it should be that deaf people should never have been born. She's basically saying that she wants deaf people to be stopped from existing.
JH: Well, no, she isn't saying that, is she? What she's saying is that deaf people have the right to exist because they have been born. It would be utterly absurd to suggest otherwise. But there is a great difference between that and making a positive selection so that somebody is born who is not able to hear, as opposed to somebody who is able to hear.
TL: Again, we're talking about different perspectives about what disability means. I don't see myself as disabled. You're not deaf, but you're labelling me as disabled. I could say "Oh, well, black people are disabled. Deaf people have to struggle to achieve equal rights, and gay people could be regarded as being disabled - let's put them into hospitals and make sure that they're cured, make sure they're not born". That's not the case - we do accept that black people and gay people are equal. Why can't you do the same with deaf people?
JH: But we do. I accept entirely that you are equal to me, but I would not presume - and many people I think listening to this programme would not presume - to make a decision on behalf of somebody else. That's the crucial aspect here, isn't it? On behalf of somebody else, an unborn child, that they should have what I said was a disability, and I repeat that.
TL: But that seems to be somewhat contradictory, because you say that deaf people are equal, but then you say, well, it's better not to be born deaf. That seems a contradictory statement. Really, it's up to us as deaf people to decide whether we're disabled or not.

Two things strike me from this: first, the words ‘disabled’ and ‘disability’ are of absolutely no use here; they are loaded and contentious, generating more heat than light. Second, Mr Lichy has some fair points but his argument evaporates round about the words “yes, but” in his third reply here. Pretty much everything that follows is irrelevant to his case.

His remark that “you say that deaf people are equal, but then you say, well, it's better not to be born deaf” is contradictory illustrates the key failure of logic.

It seems that in fighting the prejudice ‘deaf people cannot do certain things, so they are inferior human beings’, there’s been more focus on rejecting the premise than on rejecting the implication. The premise has certainly been exaggerated, but the implication is the really nasty bit: ability does not determine personal worth. Nor does misfortune.

It’s better not to be born with sickle-cell anaemia. It’s better not to lose your leg in an accident. It’s better not to develop arthritis. But being in these situations – or being born deaf – does not mean that you have less than equal worth as a human being.

It does, though, restrict your options.

It’s useful to be able to speak Spanish. This is a skill that will reduce your chances of finding yourself in a situation where you can’t communicate. But if you can’t speak Spanish, that needn’t reflect badly on you: maybe you’ve not had the chance to learn. Or maybe you think the benefits aren’t worth the effort and expense; fair enough, that’s your call.

If you can’t speak Spanish, it’s still useful to be able to learn – even if you currently don’t want to. Facing a closed door is better than facing a locked door. But if you can’t learn Spanish, that needn’t reflect badly on you either: maybe you’re just no good at languages. That’s unfortunate, but you shouldn’t be blamed nor sneered at for that.

So, by analogy: it’s useful to be able to use sign language. This is a skill that will reduce your chances of finding yourself in a situation whereyou can’t communicate. And if you don’t know sign language, it’s useful to be able to learn it – although if you can’t get you head round it, that’s unfortunate – but you shouldn’t be blamed nor sneered at for it.

It’s also useful to be able to hear. This is a skill that will reduce your chances of finding yourself in a situation where you can’t communicate (among other things). And if you can’t hear… well, the category of people who can’t hear but can develop the ability to is limited to cases of temporary deafness (a far more trivial issue) and deaf people who may choose to have cochlear implants – although these are of variable efficacy and not risk-free. So if you permanently can’t hear, that doesn’t reflect badly on you: you shouldn’t be blamed nor sneered at for it.

Being able to hear doesn’t render you unable to use or learn sign language; but being permanently deaf does of necessity restrict your options for communicating. The asymmetry is undeniable. No amount of well-designed infrastructure or accommodating social attitudes will eliminate situations in which being able to hear would be useful.

Deliberately intending that your child should lack certain communicative options can’t be a good idea. Acknowledging that should pose no threat to your cultural identity and self-confidence.

Deafness, IVF and cultural freedom

I don’t really write about either disability or human fertilisation much at all, so I’m very alert to the possibility of putting my foot in it here. Informed criticism will be even more welcome than usual.

The Observer carries a story today about two deaf parents with a deaf child. The mother is in her early 40s now, and so they may well need IVF to have another child.

Now the couple are hoping to have a second child, one they also wish to be deaf - and that desire has brought them into a sharp confrontation with Parliament. The government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) bill, scheduled to go through the Commons this spring, will block any attempt by couples… to use modern medical techniques to ensure their children are deaf.

There is nothing even remotely wrong, or diminishing of personal worth, with being deaf. Infinitely better to live in a society in which deaf people love the way they are rather than being made to feel sub-standard (alas, there’s still far too much of the latter). As the father says:

Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete - it's about being part of a linguistic minority. We're proud, not of the medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community we live in.

I agree that it makes no sense to be proud of “medical aspects” of one’s life: the hand you’re dealt counts far less than how you play it. I also don’t like the lazy, dismissive way that ‘disability’ is often understood – as mere bodily defect. A fully fleshed-out concept of disability has to be defined relative to a given aim, a method, a physical situation and a social context.

The question that brings this couple into conflict with the HFE bill is whether they should be allowed to stack the deck in favour of a new child’s deafness.

The father says:

It is a cornerstone of modern society and law that deaf and hearing people have equal rights. If hearing people were to have the right to throw away a deaf embryo, then we as deaf people should also have the right to throw away a hearing embryo.

I don’t think this contrast is properly set up, though. Hearing and deaf people, under this bill, would equally have the right to prefer hearing embryos to deaf ones; neither hearing nor deaf people would have the right to prefer deaf embryos to hearing ones. The people here have the same rights – unless, of course, you take the view that all embryos are people with human rights. But such a view would play havoc with most existing and proposed law in this area, and I presume it’s not being advanced here.

But there is a double standard in what any parents – hearing or deaf – can favour in IVF. Why? Once we accept that deafness doesn’t impair worth, why not allow parents to pick either way? (There’s another argument that parents shouldn’t be allowed to pick at all; I won’t address that here.)

Think back to the comment – which I think is representative of many deaf people’s opinion – about taking pride in “the language we use and the community we live in”. But why can a hearing child not grow up to become part of that linguistic community? Surely BSL-spoken English bilinguals don’t get cast out by their own parents?

That last remark is somewhat flippant and rhetorical, I confess. It is a very obvious practical fact that being hearing reduces one’s motive to learn sign language. If one has deaf parents, it can also introduce a tension to do with the forms of language available to learn, and how they might be taught. There’s significant scope for difficulty in communication within the family, which is no small concern.

So, while being born deaf presents a certain set of challenges, being born hearing to deaf parents presents another set: we shouldn’t presume the benefits are all on one side and the costs all on the other.

But. I still can’t conceive that the difficulties of growing up hearing with deaf parents match those of growing up deaf. However we shape society so that deaf people are empowered – which we must – there is a real disparity in the opportunities lost in these two situations. As I type, I’m listening to Renée Fleming sing Verdi. I’m certainly not proud that I can do so, but I am glad of it. Other people can’t do this, and that’s nothing to be held against them, but I don’t believe such a condition should be positively sought on someone else’s behalf.

Deaf culture is far richer than most hearing people appreciate, but surely its survival does not depend on the deliberate antenatal recruitment of members via selective IVF? And surely membership is not exclusive – being hearing doesn’t prevent you from enjoying, say, a play in BSL – nor even from writing or acting in one. As Amartya Sen puts it, none of us is ‘monocultural’; and:

The importance of cultural freedom, central to the dignity of all people, must be distinguished from the celebration and championing of every form of cultural inheritance, irrespective of whether the people involved would choose those particular practices given the opportunity of critical scrutiny, and given an adequate knowledge of other options and of the choices that actually exist in the society in which they live.

I’m very suspicious of a cultural group that maintains itself by conscription or by blocking the exit. I hope that such an attitude is in the minority among deaf people.

The Observer piece opens by noting that the deaf couple, of course, love their deaf daughter. Would they have loved her any less had she been hearing? I like to believe that they would not.

Cohesion and diversity

Last week, Chris Dillow mentioned a research paper suggesting that diversity within a community could theoretically improve social cohesion.

I’ve just discover a more concrete study to back that up, analysing data from the Department for Communities and Local Government’s biannual Citizenship Surveys.

It’s often been suggested that ethnically diverse areas are less cohesive, but one response to this has been that such areas tend to be poorer, and that it may be poverty that erodes cohesion.

The research directly addresses this, using as its measure of community cohesion people’s answers to the question “to what extent do you agree or disagree that this local area (within 15/20 minutes walking distance) is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together?” Here are a few findings:

• Once other factors are accounted for ethnic diversity is, in most cases, positively associated with community cohesion.
• However, the relationship between diversity and cohesion is complicated and the nature of this relationship is dependent on the type of ethnic mix in an area.
• Living in an area which has a broad mix of residents from different ethnic groups was consistently shown to be a positive predictor of cohesion. However, having an increasing percentage of in-migrants born outside of the UK, is a negative predictor.
• Irrespective of the level of ethnic diversity in a community, disadvantage consistently undermines perceptions of cohesion and operates in a similar fashion for all communities.
• However, not all deprived areas have low cohesion.
• Deprived, diverse areas have higher average cohesion scores than deprived, homogeneous White areas. It is thus deprivation that undermines cohesion, not diversity.

So: deprivation is bad for cohesion; ethnic diversity is not bad nor even neutral, but positively good; but increasing local immigration is not good.

This fits quite well with Chris’s take:

the existence of immigration throws the very question of social cohesion and social norms into open discussion. The questions "what does it mean to be British?" and "how can we increase social cohesion?" are responses to mass migration. And the effect of discussing these questions might be to increase trust among people by making hitherto implicit, tacit social norms more explicit.
It's possible, therefore, that immigration might actually be a force for social cohesion, at least in the long-run. Could it be then that the lack of social cohesion as a result of immigration is (just?) a temporary disequilibrium?

I agree that the visible fact of immigration serves to raise the questions about identity and cohesion. But these were questions that would have needed asking anyway, even if there’d be no postwar immigration and increase in ethnic diversity.

Following the rise of social liberalism since the 1960s and the economic liberalisation from the 1980s, British society has, very simply, become more diverse. People’s lifestyles have diverged, and there are fewer shared assumptions. White Britons have become, if you like, more multicultural. There’s been comparatively little discussion of this in itself, so the advent of new racial and religious minorities may have been very helpful indeed in getting us thinking about what can bind us all together.

State size and active citizenship

Does a big state crowd out the space for a thriving voluntary sector, sap citizens’ engagement and erode ‘social responsibility’ (as that nice man on the telly puts it)?

Apparently not, according to the Demos paper I mentioned last week. The think-tank’s new ‘Everyday Democracy Index’ looks at “how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family”.

It’s quite interesting:

The primary problem with our political institutions is… that they have become cast adrift from the rest of our lives. That’s why attempting to solve our current democratic malaise through institutional reengineering, without due concern for the cultures that surround and support those institutions, will not work. … So we would do well to pay much more attention to which particular patterns and arrangements of everyday life tend to give rise to democratic habits, and which do not. …
If we want to renew democracy, we need to reconnect representative politics and the informal sphere of people’s everyday lives, so that the two support and sustain each other. No model of democracy can succeed in the long term if the effect of its nominal success is to anaesthetise its citizens from the awareness of collective possibility that made it possible in the first place.

One of the strands of their index is called ‘Activism and Civic Participation’, which they measure across the countries of the EU using four indicators, based on whether survey respondents had recently (a) signed a petition, (b) joined a boycott or (c) taken part in a legal demonstration, as well as (d) the average number of civic groups people were members of or volunteered for.

Demos’s international comparison yields this:

One interesting question… is about the controversial relationship between the size of government and the vibrancy of the civic sphere. Some on the right… have blamed the expansion of government for the oft-noted decline in associational life and other forms of social capital. The theory is that as government gets bigger it ‘crowds out’ active citizenship, community spirit and voluntary initiative. What do the results for the Activism and Participation dimension add to the evidence about these claims? Broadly… this relationship is nowhere near so clear cut, and that in fact bigger government is associated – although probably not causally – with a higher degree of active citizenship. Figure 5 plots countries’ score on the EDI Activism and Participation dimension against their government’s tax take as a share of GDP. The relationship is positive, if only moderately consistent: bigger governments have more, not less, active citizens. To reiterate, this does not mean that legislating for bigger government will lead to a more vibrant civil society. But it does suggest that simply legislating for smaller government probably will not.

That nice man off the telly also says that there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state – which is true enough. But that doesn’t mean that ‘rolling back the state’ will leading to the ‘rolling forward’ of society – it’s not a zero-sum game.

The two are utterly interdependent. The state (at least, the democratic state) can’t exist without reflecting the views and needs of society, and a free society can’t survive without the state to guarantee some level of order and support the position of the vulnerable.

(Likewise, to add the third face of the indivisible trinity, the market can’t function without the framework of rules and institutions provided by the state, nor without the values and customs prevalent in society; and the state can’t function, nor can society flourish, without the economic growth provided by the market.)

The lump-of-freedom fallacy: gay rights and the right

While reading a post by Sunny (plus the comments) over at Liberal Conspiracy, I suddenly realised something.

It’s intermittently puzzled me why many on the right (certainly not all) object to legal equality for gay people. I mean, assuming that they have a clear ideological reason rather than just a prejudice shrouded in rhetoric. Because one thing that seems to epitomise the right is their yearning that the state not take freedoms away from private individuals – freedom to drive a 4x4, freedom to keep one’s own money, freedom to hunt foxes, freedom to offer employees a pittance to work in dangerous conditions for long hours…

But there may be some semblance of a reason. If so, it’s a bad reason.

A quick detour: the lump-of-labour fallacy is the idea that there’s only a certain quantity of employment available, and so technological automation or economic immigration will produce unemployment. But the truth is that, through positive effects such as higher productivity and lower inflation, such changes can benefit the economy and lead to higher employment.

What about gay rights, then? Well, if you listen to those (more prominent in the ‘land of the free’ than the UK) who campaign against gay marriage, you’ll hear the charge that such a thing would threaten the institution of marriage, as enjoyed by ordinary straight-talking straight folk. And, on this side of the pond, there are similar complaints about gay adoption rights damaging ‘the family’ or, this week, that making it easier for lesbian couples to use IVF would undermine fatherhood.

No. Letting a gay couple marry does not reduce the ability of any straight couple to get or stay married. Letting a gay couple raise children does not reduce the quality of parent-child relationships in any other family. There is no ‘lump of freedom’ that malicious lefties wish to redistribute from straight to gay. Following the little logic of the argument through, the fallacy is embarrassingly obvious. Perhaps it’s just prejudice after all.

The only ‘freedom’ lost by extending gay rights is the freedom of homophobes to live in a country with laws different from those passed by elected representatives – in other words, the selective, privileged freedom to control others. But true liberalism has to be egalitarian.

So, I’m with JFK – freedom is not diminished for some by granting it to others. Quite the reverse:

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.