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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
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It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
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As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams .
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
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10simonhoggart
| 1Society
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Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart .
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Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
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There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
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0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett .
|
Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
|
3jonathanfreedland
| 1Society
|
By now, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need. No one can seriously be against it. Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing "child poverty". The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all like kids. Except maybe we don't. For there is too much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not look after, and perhaps does not even like, children. At its mildest, it's the shock any visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we give to kids here. It can be formal: the "Sorry, no children" signs that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent. At its most extreme, there is the staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer - and what lies beneath. For even in those places far away from the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their childhood. Of course it is essential that British kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play, draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom, as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them. We can hardly blame the schools; they are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the same game - depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a Stars in their Eyes "kids special" where the sight of a hair-gelled nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their child to victory - and to imagined riches for their own pockets. But let's not be snobbish about this. Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would doubtless cite "irony" in defence of its Little Friends comedy show, which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them about their sex lives and beginning one question, "My Dad says he'd bet his cock... " This horrible little programme is queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a childish need - to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks - and exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them as old before their years. Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist provide healthy, valuable sex education - but which look sleazy and pressuring to the naked eye. "Why don't you have a boyfriend," nags Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful instructive tale: "He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to lose him." And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys and its "seven ways to make him come back for more". The advice inside may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having it - but these magazines are making good money out of that angst. Or it can be the new US-made Bratz dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are miniature J-Los and Beyoncs. They are sexualised, and so cannot help but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror "a society in which we're treating really young children as if they were much older". It's hard to work out what's behind this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose, mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces "Fuckface" or "Two-Faced Cunt" seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual objects. For artists and magazine editors, this doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos, unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites, neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need - of a society that will care for them properly.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Jonathan Freedland .
|
By now, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need. No one can seriously be against it. Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing "child poverty". The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all like kids. Except maybe we don't. For there is too much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not look after, and perhaps does not even like, children. At its mildest, it's the shock any visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we give to kids here. It can be formal: the "Sorry, no children" signs that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent. At its most extreme, there is the staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer - and what lies beneath. For even in those places far away from the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their childhood. Of course it is essential that British kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play, draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom, as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them. We can hardly blame the schools; they are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the same game - depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a Stars in their Eyes "kids special" where the sight of a hair-gelled nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their child to victory - and to imagined riches for their own pockets. But let's not be snobbish about this. Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would doubtless cite "irony" in defence of its Little Friends comedy show, which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them about their sex lives and beginning one question, "My Dad says he'd bet his cock... " This horrible little programme is queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a childish need - to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks - and exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them as old before their years. Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist provide healthy, valuable sex education - but which look sleazy and pressuring to the naked eye. "Why don't you have a boyfriend," nags Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful instructive tale: "He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to lose him." And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys and its "seven ways to make him come back for more". The advice inside may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having it - but these magazines are making good money out of that angst. Or it can be the new US-made Bratz dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are miniature J-Los and Beyoncs. They are sexualised, and so cannot help but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror "a society in which we're treating really young children as if they were much older". It's hard to work out what's behind this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose, mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces "Fuckface" or "Two-Faced Cunt" seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual objects. For artists and magazine editors, this doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos, unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites, neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need - of a society that will care for them properly.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
There are two risks that every reader of this column runs. The certain risk is that you will grow old. The contingent risk is that you may suffer some catastrophic accident that renders you disabled or incapable. This may happen before you are old though it is much more likely when you are already old. A fifth of Britain's pensioners are incapable of looking after themselves; injury as much as infirmity is the cause. The philosophic and political question is how should society respond. The conservative view is that such risks should be each individual's responsibility, and that the only intervention by the state should be to underwrite the circumstances of the very poorest who simply do not have the wherewithal to look after themselves. The liberal view is that because old age is certain and the consequences of a catastrophic and unpredictable accident are just that - catastrophic and realistically uninsurable - then these are definitive areas where the responsibility should be collective. The division is decisive; it defines a crucial difference between Left and Right. In Britain the conservative view has held sway for 20 years. The large moral proposition about the superiority of individual responsibility has been supported by two important sub-propositions. The first is that the delivery of support for the elderly by the state is often inefficient, and is better performed by the private sector; even the state's 'promise' about providing a good pension is fragile and better respected by the private sector. The second is that the state cannot afford - given an increasingly ageing population - to undertake collective responsibility for personal care and guarantee the value of the basic state pension even if it wanted. We must abandon universal provision and substitute targeted, means-tested provision only for the very needy. Thus the state pension has been allowed to become worth progressively less, indexed only to the growth of prices generally rather than wages. A safety net, the Minimum Income Retirement Guarantee, is de facto replacing the universal provision element of the state pension, meaning that individuals, from young disabled to elderly, who need personal care have been means tested to ensure only the poor get their care paid for. But last Thursday came a crucial dent in the conservative consensus. Liberal Democrat members of the Scottish Executive, under pressure from their party in the Scottish Parliament, forced the Labour leader of the Executive and Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish, into an extraordinary U-turn. Scotland is now committed to the universal provision of free personal care for the elderly, and a study group is to report by August on how to proceed. Scotland is demonstrating that it belongs to the European liberal mainstream, and is declaring independence from conservative England. More ominously for New Labour, it is yet more evidence that the custodianship of Britain's progressive tradition is passing from them. For New Labour strongly and passionately disagrees with universal and collective provision for old age and its consequences. It is readier to build a stronger safety-net for low-income groups than the Tories would consider, but its position is conservative even if at the liberal end of that spectrum. It has refused to consider the central recommendation of the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the elderly that it set up after the election: that personal care for the elderly should be provided by the state free of charge with only living or 'hotel' costs to be means-tested. Instead, in its new Health and Social Care Bill, New Labour wants to standardise nationally the current lottery of means-tested charging, currently varying between local authorities, and wind down a worthwhile universal basic state pension. In this area, Labour is becoming the party of One Nation conservatism. The Liberal Democrats are assuming the mantle of championing the liberal and centre-Left propositions on collective responsibility. The case for universal provision of free personal care for the elderly was made eloquently by the Royal Commission. 'Long term care,' it reported, 'is a contingency not a probability. Neither its incidence nor the scale of care needed are predictable. It is equitable and proper for the state to meet at least one element of the catastrophic costs for everyone. And the costs in the future in relation to people's likely means will remain catastrophic.' It rejected outright the notion that individuals could take responsibility for the cost of personal care that might follow a catastrophe, because this was not a risk the mainstream insurance industry was prepared to accept. Indeed, standard insurance for personal care in old age is prohibitively expensive. As for the argument about open-ended public expense with an ageing population, the Commission was simply scornful. It dismissed the widespread notion that the country is labouring under a demographic time bomb; Britain's pensioner population is growing, but not greatly in relation to the numbers of people of working age. In any case, the costs of providing long-term care for pensioners and the disabled are not great (800 million to 1,200m), and affordable if we choose. The report was completed before the emergence of a structural budget surplus, which further weakens the argument about unaffordability. The moral and practical imperative, the Commission felt, was to offer personal care free, with individuals still paying for living and housing costs while means-testing protected the poorest. In short, the key conservative arguments - individual responsibility, the relative efficiency of the private sector, the ageing population and the cost to the Exchequer - cut no ice. In this area the balance of the argument was to act collectively. Yet apart from some concessions on lifting the threshold of wealth before the means test applies, the Government has been stoutly opposed to any reform. But now it confronts the move in Scotland, which if it isn't fudged, is a direct challenge to its stance. In my view, the argument extends to the basic old-age pension. The state 'pension promise' has not been solid. But then the private sector-pension 'promise' is a lot less solid than the propaganda assumes, being subject to the vagaries of stock-market performance, annuity rates and, as 900,000 holders of Equitable Life pension plans found out, to pension fund mismanagement. What future pensioners need is neither to be wholly reliant on the state nor on the market, but to have their risks balanced. Just as everyone has the right to free universal personal care, so everyone has the right to a solid universal state pension whose level is automatically linked to the rise in general living standards. We should rely on a combination of our savings, our employers' pension scheme and a good state pension for income in old age - and not try to pretend that the private sector provides a free option. Because it doesn't. The Government may boast about healthy public finances, but if the consequence is to displace risk on to those incapable of accepting it then the boast is hollow. Universal personal care and a universal state pension are hallmarks of a society that understands the limits of individual responsibility. Congratulations to Scotland's Liberal Democrats. Without them the proposition would be dead. And welcome devolution.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
|
There are two risks that every reader of this column runs. The certain risk is that you will grow old. The contingent risk is that you may suffer some catastrophic accident that renders you disabled or incapable. This may happen before you are old though it is much more likely when you are already old. A fifth of Britain's pensioners are incapable of looking after themselves; injury as much as infirmity is the cause. The philosophic and political question is how should society respond. The conservative view is that such risks should be each individual's responsibility, and that the only intervention by the state should be to underwrite the circumstances of the very poorest who simply do not have the wherewithal to look after themselves. The liberal view is that because old age is certain and the consequences of a catastrophic and unpredictable accident are just that - catastrophic and realistically uninsurable - then these are definitive areas where the responsibility should be collective. The division is decisive; it defines a crucial difference between Left and Right. In Britain the conservative view has held sway for 20 years. The large moral proposition about the superiority of individual responsibility has been supported by two important sub-propositions. The first is that the delivery of support for the elderly by the state is often inefficient, and is better performed by the private sector; even the state's 'promise' about providing a good pension is fragile and better respected by the private sector. The second is that the state cannot afford - given an increasingly ageing population - to undertake collective responsibility for personal care and guarantee the value of the basic state pension even if it wanted. We must abandon universal provision and substitute targeted, means-tested provision only for the very needy. Thus the state pension has been allowed to become worth progressively less, indexed only to the growth of prices generally rather than wages. A safety net, the Minimum Income Retirement Guarantee, is de facto replacing the universal provision element of the state pension, meaning that individuals, from young disabled to elderly, who need personal care have been means tested to ensure only the poor get their care paid for. But last Thursday came a crucial dent in the conservative consensus. Liberal Democrat members of the Scottish Executive, under pressure from their party in the Scottish Parliament, forced the Labour leader of the Executive and Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish, into an extraordinary U-turn. Scotland is now committed to the universal provision of free personal care for the elderly, and a study group is to report by August on how to proceed. Scotland is demonstrating that it belongs to the European liberal mainstream, and is declaring independence from conservative England. More ominously for New Labour, it is yet more evidence that the custodianship of Britain's progressive tradition is passing from them. For New Labour strongly and passionately disagrees with universal and collective provision for old age and its consequences. It is readier to build a stronger safety-net for low-income groups than the Tories would consider, but its position is conservative even if at the liberal end of that spectrum. It has refused to consider the central recommendation of the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the elderly that it set up after the election: that personal care for the elderly should be provided by the state free of charge with only living or 'hotel' costs to be means-tested. Instead, in its new Health and Social Care Bill, New Labour wants to standardise nationally the current lottery of means-tested charging, currently varying between local authorities, and wind down a worthwhile universal basic state pension. In this area, Labour is becoming the party of One Nation conservatism. The Liberal Democrats are assuming the mantle of championing the liberal and centre-Left propositions on collective responsibility. The case for universal provision of free personal care for the elderly was made eloquently by the Royal Commission. 'Long term care,' it reported, 'is a contingency not a probability. Neither its incidence nor the scale of care needed are predictable. It is equitable and proper for the state to meet at least one element of the catastrophic costs for everyone. And the costs in the future in relation to people's likely means will remain catastrophic.' It rejected outright the notion that individuals could take responsibility for the cost of personal care that might follow a catastrophe, because this was not a risk the mainstream insurance industry was prepared to accept. Indeed, standard insurance for personal care in old age is prohibitively expensive. As for the argument about open-ended public expense with an ageing population, the Commission was simply scornful. It dismissed the widespread notion that the country is labouring under a demographic time bomb; Britain's pensioner population is growing, but not greatly in relation to the numbers of people of working age. In any case, the costs of providing long-term care for pensioners and the disabled are not great (800 million to 1,200m), and affordable if we choose. The report was completed before the emergence of a structural budget surplus, which further weakens the argument about unaffordability. The moral and practical imperative, the Commission felt, was to offer personal care free, with individuals still paying for living and housing costs while means-testing protected the poorest. In short, the key conservative arguments - individual responsibility, the relative efficiency of the private sector, the ageing population and the cost to the Exchequer - cut no ice. In this area the balance of the argument was to act collectively. Yet apart from some concessions on lifting the threshold of wealth before the means test applies, the Government has been stoutly opposed to any reform. But now it confronts the move in Scotland, which if it isn't fudged, is a direct challenge to its stance. In my view, the argument extends to the basic old-age pension. The state 'pension promise' has not been solid. But then the private sector-pension 'promise' is a lot less solid than the propaganda assumes, being subject to the vagaries of stock-market performance, annuity rates and, as 900,000 holders of Equitable Life pension plans found out, to pension fund mismanagement. What future pensioners need is neither to be wholly reliant on the state nor on the market, but to have their risks balanced. Just as everyone has the right to free universal personal care, so everyone has the right to a solid universal state pension whose level is automatically linked to the rise in general living standards. We should rely on a combination of our savings, our employers' pension scheme and a good state pension for income in old age - and not try to pretend that the private sector provides a free option. Because it doesn't. The Government may boast about healthy public finances, but if the consequence is to displace risk on to those incapable of accepting it then the boast is hollow. Universal personal care and a universal state pension are hallmarks of a society that understands the limits of individual responsibility. Congratulations to Scotland's Liberal Democrats. Without them the proposition would be dead. And welcome devolution.
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11willhutton
| 1Society
|
When I was a child, I was perplexed by the story of the emperor with no clothes. It was so obvious that he was naked I couldn't imagine why everybody colluded in the pretence he wasn't, and why any emperor should want to sustain the pretence, anyway. The spell was always broken by somebody artless blurting out the truth, but I never understood why it fell to the artless to say what should have been obvious to all. Last week, I was reminded of my childhood perplexities by another set of impossibilities that seem impervious to the intrusion of reality, the belief in the face of all evidence that the private sector is necessarily and always more efficient than the public sector. This emperor is also stark naked, but the Labour party and senior British officials, along with the reflex instincts of the opinion-forming classes, refuse to acknowledge what is staring them in the face. Nor do you have to be artless to draw attention to the nudity. You just have to read the business pages assiduously. For one of the great postwar financial and industrial scandals is continuing to work itself out before our eyes. Had it happened in the public sector, it would have been proof positive of its endemic hopelessness, but so far it has attracted little outrage. It's a private sector affair, after all. The financial losses, waste and emerging cases of massive fraud in the wake of the telecoms bubble, with almost nothing to show for it in terms of technological innovation or creation of a broadband optic-fibre network, are some of the greatest calamities of industrial policy ever witnessed. The inefficiency exceeds by many multiples the losses in the former nationalised industries, yet this reality has left the conventional wisdom wholly unaffected. The Treasury blithely continues to justify public private partnerships by loading on to the public sector assumptions that it will be hopeless in any economic endeavour, while building in parallel assumptions that the private sector will be super-efficient. Yet the recent evidence is that the equation should be the other way round, certainly in those sectors which, for compelling reasons of public interest or natural economies, have to be performed as monopolies. Last week's news that another former high-flying telecoms company, Energis, is fighting for its life together with the crisis in the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) allow for no other conclusion. The story, hard now to believe, was that the inefficient state should not stand in the way of the efficient private sector's ambitions to exploit the digital revolution. As a result, all the old rules about telephone and cable networks being natural monopolies should be suspended. Lusty entrepreneurial companies would exploit a multiplicity of old and new networks to carry the expected boom in internet traffic. Some would use the electricity network (Energis); some would build new optic-fibre cable networks (NTL and Global Crossing); others would deploy a mixture of mobile phone and existing cable (BT). There was an orgy of roads being dug up at the behest of the companies (local authorities were forbidden to refuse their applications, whatever the consequences of traffic gridlock), but the result would be many high-tech networks offering the consumer choice and access to cheap state-of-the-art technology. Private good; public bad. What we have instead is a monumental dbcle and a discovery that old rules hold. The companies themselves borrowed hugely, promising their backers that their existing traffic would be followed by even more growth. But now it is emerging that some falsified their claims, especially those with US interests; blocks of alleged traffic were swapped to boost their profits, now the subject of a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. There never was enough traffic to justify so much network building and as reality has dawned the companies are left with debt they cannot service. Global Crossing has already gone bust; Energis has been fighting off the same fate; NTL, a byword for high prices and inefficiency, is a 50-50 call; Cable and Wireless is under investigation by the US Sec... and so it goes on. As for the acquisitions and deals made at the height of the boom, most have proved no less disastrous. KPMG Consulting estimates that more than a third of the international deals (most of them in telecoms) are now being unwound, and the chief executives involved have all moved on, doubtless handsomely enriched, as are their investment bankers. Yet the wider community is immeasurably poorer. It is our pension-fund savings that have been ransacked; we end up having to pay high prices for poor cable service and the country, despite billions being spent, is little closer to having a national optic-fibre network than it was five years ago. Put all that into an evaluation of private sector strengths in any proposed public private partnership computation and the public sector would win hands down. Logic dictated that we only ever needed one network. Because this, perforce, would be a monopoly, and because the public interest in it being cheap and universal is so overwhelming, necessarily it had to financed and owned by the state. Access to the network should, of course, be wholly liberalised; cable companies could transmit their programmes through it as could anybody else. It would be a public asset serving a multitude of private interests, but which private interests could not themselves build, anathema to the current conventional wisdom now proved so devastatingly wrong. The same elementary mistake has been made over air traffic control. The partial privatisation of Nats to seven British airlines was hailed last summer as a major breakthrough. Nats under public management was plainly incapable of managing large projects as well as the private sector, so that once under private control it would be able to lower its fees charged to the airlines by 5 per cent a year because of the consequent efficiency savings. But after 11 September, Nats has plunged from projected profits into projected losses as airline traffic has fallen away. Conventional wisdom once again is shown to be wrong. The much vaunted private sector has proved incapable of sustaining Nats' finances to allow it to continue with its investment programme upon which the safe and efficient use of British airspace depends. Neither the airlines nor the banks have put up extra cash; they are not in a position to do so because of the economic downturn. It has fallen to the Government, which alone has injected 30 million of extra cash. But on top, Nats will have to raise prices by 5 per cent a year rather than cut them. Nor is it certain, as we report in the Business Section today, that the Civil Aviation Authority will permit the price rises, in which case the Government will have to step in again. Under public ownership, the management of British airspace was independent from the vagaries of the business cycle; under even partial private ownership, it has been indissolubly linked to it, an act of palpable madness. The safe management of our airspace, like the provision of a single, universal cable network, is a public good that cannot be privatised. Inevitably, the Government has had to intervene to secure the public interest. It is not the private sector's fault that there is a mess; it should never have been asked or allowed to assume these responsibilities in the first place. Whatever operational efficiencies it might offer are overwhelmed by the wider public interest demands of the sector in which it is operating. The ideological belief that the private sector is inevitably better cannot be challenged, for all its nudity. In middle age, I finally understand what the child could not. Collective lunacy does descend on groups of people with no one capable of exposing the charade. The tragedy is that is what is happening to our airspace and our telecommunications companies is no fairy tale. It is for real.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
|
When I was a child, I was perplexed by the story of the emperor with no clothes. It was so obvious that he was naked I couldn't imagine why everybody colluded in the pretence he wasn't, and why any emperor should want to sustain the pretence, anyway. The spell was always broken by somebody artless blurting out the truth, but I never understood why it fell to the artless to say what should have been obvious to all. Last week, I was reminded of my childhood perplexities by another set of impossibilities that seem impervious to the intrusion of reality, the belief in the face of all evidence that the private sector is necessarily and always more efficient than the public sector. This emperor is also stark naked, but the Labour party and senior British officials, along with the reflex instincts of the opinion-forming classes, refuse to acknowledge what is staring them in the face. Nor do you have to be artless to draw attention to the nudity. You just have to read the business pages assiduously. For one of the great postwar financial and industrial scandals is continuing to work itself out before our eyes. Had it happened in the public sector, it would have been proof positive of its endemic hopelessness, but so far it has attracted little outrage. It's a private sector affair, after all. The financial losses, waste and emerging cases of massive fraud in the wake of the telecoms bubble, with almost nothing to show for it in terms of technological innovation or creation of a broadband optic-fibre network, are some of the greatest calamities of industrial policy ever witnessed. The inefficiency exceeds by many multiples the losses in the former nationalised industries, yet this reality has left the conventional wisdom wholly unaffected. The Treasury blithely continues to justify public private partnerships by loading on to the public sector assumptions that it will be hopeless in any economic endeavour, while building in parallel assumptions that the private sector will be super-efficient. Yet the recent evidence is that the equation should be the other way round, certainly in those sectors which, for compelling reasons of public interest or natural economies, have to be performed as monopolies. Last week's news that another former high-flying telecoms company, Energis, is fighting for its life together with the crisis in the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) allow for no other conclusion. The story, hard now to believe, was that the inefficient state should not stand in the way of the efficient private sector's ambitions to exploit the digital revolution. As a result, all the old rules about telephone and cable networks being natural monopolies should be suspended. Lusty entrepreneurial companies would exploit a multiplicity of old and new networks to carry the expected boom in internet traffic. Some would use the electricity network (Energis); some would build new optic-fibre cable networks (NTL and Global Crossing); others would deploy a mixture of mobile phone and existing cable (BT). There was an orgy of roads being dug up at the behest of the companies (local authorities were forbidden to refuse their applications, whatever the consequences of traffic gridlock), but the result would be many high-tech networks offering the consumer choice and access to cheap state-of-the-art technology. Private good; public bad. What we have instead is a monumental dbcle and a discovery that old rules hold. The companies themselves borrowed hugely, promising their backers that their existing traffic would be followed by even more growth. But now it is emerging that some falsified their claims, especially those with US interests; blocks of alleged traffic were swapped to boost their profits, now the subject of a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. There never was enough traffic to justify so much network building and as reality has dawned the companies are left with debt they cannot service. Global Crossing has already gone bust; Energis has been fighting off the same fate; NTL, a byword for high prices and inefficiency, is a 50-50 call; Cable and Wireless is under investigation by the US Sec... and so it goes on. As for the acquisitions and deals made at the height of the boom, most have proved no less disastrous. KPMG Consulting estimates that more than a third of the international deals (most of them in telecoms) are now being unwound, and the chief executives involved have all moved on, doubtless handsomely enriched, as are their investment bankers. Yet the wider community is immeasurably poorer. It is our pension-fund savings that have been ransacked; we end up having to pay high prices for poor cable service and the country, despite billions being spent, is little closer to having a national optic-fibre network than it was five years ago. Put all that into an evaluation of private sector strengths in any proposed public private partnership computation and the public sector would win hands down. Logic dictated that we only ever needed one network. Because this, perforce, would be a monopoly, and because the public interest in it being cheap and universal is so overwhelming, necessarily it had to financed and owned by the state. Access to the network should, of course, be wholly liberalised; cable companies could transmit their programmes through it as could anybody else. It would be a public asset serving a multitude of private interests, but which private interests could not themselves build, anathema to the current conventional wisdom now proved so devastatingly wrong. The same elementary mistake has been made over air traffic control. The partial privatisation of Nats to seven British airlines was hailed last summer as a major breakthrough. Nats under public management was plainly incapable of managing large projects as well as the private sector, so that once under private control it would be able to lower its fees charged to the airlines by 5 per cent a year because of the consequent efficiency savings. But after 11 September, Nats has plunged from projected profits into projected losses as airline traffic has fallen away. Conventional wisdom once again is shown to be wrong. The much vaunted private sector has proved incapable of sustaining Nats' finances to allow it to continue with its investment programme upon which the safe and efficient use of British airspace depends. Neither the airlines nor the banks have put up extra cash; they are not in a position to do so because of the economic downturn. It has fallen to the Government, which alone has injected 30 million of extra cash. But on top, Nats will have to raise prices by 5 per cent a year rather than cut them. Nor is it certain, as we report in the Business Section today, that the Civil Aviation Authority will permit the price rises, in which case the Government will have to step in again. Under public ownership, the management of British airspace was independent from the vagaries of the business cycle; under even partial private ownership, it has been indissolubly linked to it, an act of palpable madness. The safe management of our airspace, like the provision of a single, universal cable network, is a public good that cannot be privatised. Inevitably, the Government has had to intervene to secure the public interest. It is not the private sector's fault that there is a mess; it should never have been asked or allowed to assume these responsibilities in the first place. Whatever operational efficiencies it might offer are overwhelmed by the wider public interest demands of the sector in which it is operating. The ideological belief that the private sector is inevitably better cannot be challenged, for all its nudity. In middle age, I finally understand what the child could not. Collective lunacy does descend on groups of people with no one capable of exposing the charade. The tragedy is that is what is happening to our airspace and our telecommunications companies is no fairy tale. It is for real.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
If there is one golden thread connecting Old and New Labour, it is the commitment to the National Health Service. There is no member of the Cabinet who does not believe in the Bevanite conception of the NHS - a service providing equality of treatment free to every Briton, regardless of age, race, class, gender or geography. Despite New Labour's temporising elsewhere, we should take it at its word on the NHS. The problem is not the shared goal, it is the means. And here the Government's lack of an overarching philosophy and political coherence is undermining its capacity to achieve the end that it wants. Promises of more spending, shorter waiting-lists and a tougher regime for consultants are all welcome as far as they go, but the problems are much more deep-seated. The NHS is suffering a gathering crisis of legitimacy. Patients and the public at large want a voice and a systematic framework in which they can trust that high quality health care is assured over time. Yet what is on offer is an increasingly politicised service where effective decision-making is still tightly held at the centre and where some of the policies, notably the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as it operates in health, are undermining the equality and evenness of provision that the Government seeks. Three recent events underline the problem; more lie ahead. There is the exercise in public consultation - the so-called health census - to inform the National Plan for Health that has been exposed as little more than a PR stunt. There is the extraordinary fight to prevent the downgrading of Kidderminster General Hospital (part of a larger PFI deal for the nearby Worcester Royal Infirmary), where 19 out of 42 seats on the local district council are held by independent, newly elected councillors who, as members of 'Health Concern', are pledged to fight the plans and are bringing their protest to London next week in a street march. And there is the growing public dismay at medical incompetence, highlighted again by last week's Ritchie Report into Rodney Ledward, the Kent consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician who, over a 16-year career, maimed and harmed any number of women through botched operations. At first glance, these cases might seem unconnected, yet what binds them together is the great accountability gap that sits in the NHS as a brooding cancer. As long as it remains unaddressed, it will expose the contradictions that beset the Government's NHS policies. The unprecedented scale of the consultation exercise being mounted before the publication of the National Plan for Health in July is a tacit recognition of the accountability gap. The country's surgeries and supermarkets have been flooded by 12 million leaflets inviting us to identify the three key things we want from the NHS. These have to be completed and sent back by Monday at the latest, a week from start to finish. However, as Mori's Bob Worcester has said, this is not a serious exercise in finding out what the public wants or the trade-offs it might make between varying claims on NHS resources; that would require intense quantitative and qualitative research. Rather, it is a high-profile exercise in trying to demonstrate that the Government is 'listening', even though it knows the results will be unrepresentative and profoundly compromised by the tight time-scale. But it needs to show that readiness because nothing less will do in today's democratic climate. Automatic deference to authority is steadily weakening. We live in more democratic times, where everybody believes their voice should be heard. Legitimacy, by government, line manager or NHS consultant has to be earned. The Ledward case, together with the palpable weakness of both NHS managers and the General Medical Council alike in dealing with this rogue consultant, is another nail in that coffin. Ledward, like Harold Shipman, may be an exception, but the reality is that the system did not catch either early enough and in today's climate such deficiencies are no longer acceptable. The Ritchie Report assembles an impressive list of reforms, bolstering NHS complaints procedures which should be extended to the private sector and calling for beefed-up powers for the General Medical Council. And the Government has responded by saying either reform is in train or it will be. But as with the census, the larger democratic point is missed. The reason why the health ombudsman is weak, complaints procedures are feeble and regulation is delegated to the medical profession in the shape of the General Medical Council is not some accident - it is because the British doctrine is that accountability lies with the Minister in Parliament and that any other mechanism might challenge that ultimate authority. Thus the ombudsman is kept weak because he or she might challenge the authority of the Minister. There is a linear connection between British constitutional arrangements and Ledward's capacity to practise. This doctrine is not going to be challenged by New Labour. Instead, the party rel ishes the control it confers; the centre can thus control the terms of the health debate while offering a patina of accountability through consultation exercises like the national census or patients' focus groups. This allows polices like the PFI to be protected, which would not otherwise survive the scrutiny of the democratic rough house. Yet Kidderminster gives the lie even to this proposition. To scale down Kidderminster General so that it no longer offers in-patient beds, and diverting patients to Worcester, whose Royal Infirmary is being replaced with a PFI hospital that can only afford three-fifths of the existing acute beds, is outrageous. This is not a plan to improve Worcester's health provision that has been driven by Worcester's health needs, settled by open argument. Rather, it is a top-down scheme imposed upon the county by the exigencies of offering private contractors their appropriate financial returns within impossibly tight public-sector expenditure constraints. Yet the democratic voice cannot be suppressed. Alan Milburn dares not visit Worcester for fear the cameras might catch him with the protesters; next week, the stakes will be higher again as they carry their protest to London. And this is not the Socialist Workers Party; this is middle England in force. The Government really does want to deliver a better NHS. New money, new schemes and renegotiating the deal with consultants are helpful, but they will not crack the problem. To do that it must close the accountability deficit, with all that implies - delegating power, toughening up regulations, offering elections to health boards and accepting that if the PFI changes the fundamental character of the hospital service, then it must be reformed. It means nothing less than a democratic constitution for the health service, the case the commission I chaired recommended six weeks ago. Our case gets stronger by the day.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
|
If there is one golden thread connecting Old and New Labour, it is the commitment to the National Health Service. There is no member of the Cabinet who does not believe in the Bevanite conception of the NHS - a service providing equality of treatment free to every Briton, regardless of age, race, class, gender or geography. Despite New Labour's temporising elsewhere, we should take it at its word on the NHS. The problem is not the shared goal, it is the means. And here the Government's lack of an overarching philosophy and political coherence is undermining its capacity to achieve the end that it wants. Promises of more spending, shorter waiting-lists and a tougher regime for consultants are all welcome as far as they go, but the problems are much more deep-seated. The NHS is suffering a gathering crisis of legitimacy. Patients and the public at large want a voice and a systematic framework in which they can trust that high quality health care is assured over time. Yet what is on offer is an increasingly politicised service where effective decision-making is still tightly held at the centre and where some of the policies, notably the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as it operates in health, are undermining the equality and evenness of provision that the Government seeks. Three recent events underline the problem; more lie ahead. There is the exercise in public consultation - the so-called health census - to inform the National Plan for Health that has been exposed as little more than a PR stunt. There is the extraordinary fight to prevent the downgrading of Kidderminster General Hospital (part of a larger PFI deal for the nearby Worcester Royal Infirmary), where 19 out of 42 seats on the local district council are held by independent, newly elected councillors who, as members of 'Health Concern', are pledged to fight the plans and are bringing their protest to London next week in a street march. And there is the growing public dismay at medical incompetence, highlighted again by last week's Ritchie Report into Rodney Ledward, the Kent consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician who, over a 16-year career, maimed and harmed any number of women through botched operations. At first glance, these cases might seem unconnected, yet what binds them together is the great accountability gap that sits in the NHS as a brooding cancer. As long as it remains unaddressed, it will expose the contradictions that beset the Government's NHS policies. The unprecedented scale of the consultation exercise being mounted before the publication of the National Plan for Health in July is a tacit recognition of the accountability gap. The country's surgeries and supermarkets have been flooded by 12 million leaflets inviting us to identify the three key things we want from the NHS. These have to be completed and sent back by Monday at the latest, a week from start to finish. However, as Mori's Bob Worcester has said, this is not a serious exercise in finding out what the public wants or the trade-offs it might make between varying claims on NHS resources; that would require intense quantitative and qualitative research. Rather, it is a high-profile exercise in trying to demonstrate that the Government is 'listening', even though it knows the results will be unrepresentative and profoundly compromised by the tight time-scale. But it needs to show that readiness because nothing less will do in today's democratic climate. Automatic deference to authority is steadily weakening. We live in more democratic times, where everybody believes their voice should be heard. Legitimacy, by government, line manager or NHS consultant has to be earned. The Ledward case, together with the palpable weakness of both NHS managers and the General Medical Council alike in dealing with this rogue consultant, is another nail in that coffin. Ledward, like Harold Shipman, may be an exception, but the reality is that the system did not catch either early enough and in today's climate such deficiencies are no longer acceptable. The Ritchie Report assembles an impressive list of reforms, bolstering NHS complaints procedures which should be extended to the private sector and calling for beefed-up powers for the General Medical Council. And the Government has responded by saying either reform is in train or it will be. But as with the census, the larger democratic point is missed. The reason why the health ombudsman is weak, complaints procedures are feeble and regulation is delegated to the medical profession in the shape of the General Medical Council is not some accident - it is because the British doctrine is that accountability lies with the Minister in Parliament and that any other mechanism might challenge that ultimate authority. Thus the ombudsman is kept weak because he or she might challenge the authority of the Minister. There is a linear connection between British constitutional arrangements and Ledward's capacity to practise. This doctrine is not going to be challenged by New Labour. Instead, the party rel ishes the control it confers; the centre can thus control the terms of the health debate while offering a patina of accountability through consultation exercises like the national census or patients' focus groups. This allows polices like the PFI to be protected, which would not otherwise survive the scrutiny of the democratic rough house. Yet Kidderminster gives the lie even to this proposition. To scale down Kidderminster General so that it no longer offers in-patient beds, and diverting patients to Worcester, whose Royal Infirmary is being replaced with a PFI hospital that can only afford three-fifths of the existing acute beds, is outrageous. This is not a plan to improve Worcester's health provision that has been driven by Worcester's health needs, settled by open argument. Rather, it is a top-down scheme imposed upon the county by the exigencies of offering private contractors their appropriate financial returns within impossibly tight public-sector expenditure constraints. Yet the democratic voice cannot be suppressed. Alan Milburn dares not visit Worcester for fear the cameras might catch him with the protesters; next week, the stakes will be higher again as they carry their protest to London. And this is not the Socialist Workers Party; this is middle England in force. The Government really does want to deliver a better NHS. New money, new schemes and renegotiating the deal with consultants are helpful, but they will not crack the problem. To do that it must close the accountability deficit, with all that implies - delegating power, toughening up regulations, offering elections to health boards and accepting that if the PFI changes the fundamental character of the hospital service, then it must be reformed. It means nothing less than a democratic constitution for the health service, the case the commission I chaired recommended six weeks ago. Our case gets stronger by the day.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
It is a telling comment on our times that it was a very rich American that gave the very rich British a lesson in philanthropy. The super-rich have done well from the Eighties and Nineties but they have not reciprocated in kind in Britain. As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civic engagement and philanthropy by the rich. If anything, the opposite is true. Sir Paul Getty's life was a tribute to the futility of regarding personal wealth as an end in itself. Riches literally killed him - his death at 70 last Thursday was largely the result of having broken his health in the 1960s and 1970s by using heroin and cocaine without limit because he could and because he needed to. When your living needs are met many times over for the rest of your life without your having to lift a finger, then any sentient body starts to ponder what it is all about. And, after 20 years of answering the question by being out of his head, Sir Paul in the later stages of his life came up with a different answer. It was to give. He described himself as a professional philanthropist, and last week's obituaries lavishly named him as probably Britain's greatest of the breed. Whether it was the 50 million to the National Gallery or his last gift to St Paul's Cathedral, the list of his beneficiaries is impressive. Over 20 years he gave away some 120m. But in the context of a fortune worth an estimated 1.6 billion and an annual income of around 80m, he probably gave away no more, on average, than 10 per cent of his income every year. That's 10 per cent more than many other very rich people, and enough to make an enormous difference to the institutions who received it - but it was a level of giving that made only the slightest dent on his fortune. His philanthropy gave him a sense of purpose without seriously damaging his wealth, and it oiled the wheels of a lot of worthy causes and left the country culturally the better. We should expect all our rich to behave the same. That Sir Paul was so unusual is an indictment of both the way in which the rich define themselves in relation to society and of our diminished expectation of what that relationship should be. Sir Paul should be the norm, not the fted exception. But Sir Paul also gives a clue as to why this should be. He was an American who loved England, and carried the best American attitudes to giving to his adopted country. The American rich expect to be celebrated as being rich - it's a sign of industriousness, hard work and guile - but equally they expect to give some of their wealth away as part of the bargain with the society of which they are part. In Britain, the rich want to be able to enjoy their wealth with the same lack of guilt and even approbation - but they have no intention of putting anything back except under duress. Charitable giving runs at half the rate it does in the US, and is sustained by ordinary people in their millions; the British rich are scarcely in evidence. What has happened is that simultaneously with the collapse of religion has come the refusal of the rich to champion liberal and social democratic values. The result has been that we end up with the worst of both worlds. Christianity has very specific claims to make of the rich. God gave the world to all humanity, and every human being is equal in his eyes; Christ died to save everyone - the heart of the Easter message - and we can all expect to find life after death provided we try (even if we fail) to live up to Christian precepts. The rich are not a race apart. They must live by the same Christian values as all of us, including charity to their fellow men and women. This Christian egalitarianism was the hallmark of the early Church. The wealthy were expected to contribute more to the common good and they did - the idea of noblesse oblige which underpinned feudalism. It is an egalitarianism and commitment to fairness which surfaces again and again - in the medieval idea of the just wage or successive Papal encyclicals. After the English Civil War the Leveller movement famously invoked biblical texts to justify universal suffrage and redistribution of income - demands for which they were crushed by Cromwell. Yet when the English puritan tradition migrated to America and made exactly the same demands, the founding fathers responded with the American constitution and, as John Adams said, the promise of enough land in the New World for all without having to redistribute from rich to poor. The rich instead would give back of their own volition in a universe in which everybody was held to have a chance of being similarly rich - the American social bargain that excuses gross inequality even today. It took the rise of socialism to drive home a social bargain in Britain, but the rich never accepted its legitimacy. They resented progressive taxation of income and wealth to finance their contribution to the commonweal as an illegitimate confiscation of what their families owned by right. Yet for the majority in the country it was the long overdue assertion of what should always have been their obligation, and thus made what the rich kept for themselves - still substantial - legitimate. One-nation Tories insisted on the same basic bargain, while the rich smouldered in revolt fathering elaborate tax avoidance and evasion industries. Socialism was its own worst enemy; it preferred to characterise progressive taxation as a half-way house to full socialism rather than the new social bargain that it really was, thus fatally undermining the principle. A social bargain was defensible while a levelled-down society was not and Britain's rich have fought off all claims on their purse with righteous indignation. The substitution of the Labour party's Clause 4 with another that does not argue for the explicit public interest of a social bargain represented their most complete victory. So we arrive at today; executives clamouring for American levels of remuneration but not accepting either an American approach to giving or a European approach to taxation and with no live values based political coalition to fight back. Sir Paul loved England and its civilities - the ritual of a cricket match or the beauty of its long tended countryside. Yet what lies behind that has been a bitterly fought-for social bargain sustained by three traditions now in decline - Christianity, one-nation Toryism and socialism. It would be comforting to hope that we might produce some British philanthropists with Sir Paul's readiness to give, but until our society can find a legitimate way of talking the language of social bargains there is little chance. The country that Sir Paul loved is in peril.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
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It is a telling comment on our times that it was a very rich American that gave the very rich British a lesson in philanthropy. The super-rich have done well from the Eighties and Nineties but they have not reciprocated in kind in Britain. As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civic engagement and philanthropy by the rich. If anything, the opposite is true. Sir Paul Getty's life was a tribute to the futility of regarding personal wealth as an end in itself. Riches literally killed him - his death at 70 last Thursday was largely the result of having broken his health in the 1960s and 1970s by using heroin and cocaine without limit because he could and because he needed to. When your living needs are met many times over for the rest of your life without your having to lift a finger, then any sentient body starts to ponder what it is all about. And, after 20 years of answering the question by being out of his head, Sir Paul in the later stages of his life came up with a different answer. It was to give. He described himself as a professional philanthropist, and last week's obituaries lavishly named him as probably Britain's greatest of the breed. Whether it was the 50 million to the National Gallery or his last gift to St Paul's Cathedral, the list of his beneficiaries is impressive. Over 20 years he gave away some 120m. But in the context of a fortune worth an estimated 1.6 billion and an annual income of around 80m, he probably gave away no more, on average, than 10 per cent of his income every year. That's 10 per cent more than many other very rich people, and enough to make an enormous difference to the institutions who received it - but it was a level of giving that made only the slightest dent on his fortune. His philanthropy gave him a sense of purpose without seriously damaging his wealth, and it oiled the wheels of a lot of worthy causes and left the country culturally the better. We should expect all our rich to behave the same. That Sir Paul was so unusual is an indictment of both the way in which the rich define themselves in relation to society and of our diminished expectation of what that relationship should be. Sir Paul should be the norm, not the fted exception. But Sir Paul also gives a clue as to why this should be. He was an American who loved England, and carried the best American attitudes to giving to his adopted country. The American rich expect to be celebrated as being rich - it's a sign of industriousness, hard work and guile - but equally they expect to give some of their wealth away as part of the bargain with the society of which they are part. In Britain, the rich want to be able to enjoy their wealth with the same lack of guilt and even approbation - but they have no intention of putting anything back except under duress. Charitable giving runs at half the rate it does in the US, and is sustained by ordinary people in their millions; the British rich are scarcely in evidence. What has happened is that simultaneously with the collapse of religion has come the refusal of the rich to champion liberal and social democratic values. The result has been that we end up with the worst of both worlds. Christianity has very specific claims to make of the rich. God gave the world to all humanity, and every human being is equal in his eyes; Christ died to save everyone - the heart of the Easter message - and we can all expect to find life after death provided we try (even if we fail) to live up to Christian precepts. The rich are not a race apart. They must live by the same Christian values as all of us, including charity to their fellow men and women. This Christian egalitarianism was the hallmark of the early Church. The wealthy were expected to contribute more to the common good and they did - the idea of noblesse oblige which underpinned feudalism. It is an egalitarianism and commitment to fairness which surfaces again and again - in the medieval idea of the just wage or successive Papal encyclicals. After the English Civil War the Leveller movement famously invoked biblical texts to justify universal suffrage and redistribution of income - demands for which they were crushed by Cromwell. Yet when the English puritan tradition migrated to America and made exactly the same demands, the founding fathers responded with the American constitution and, as John Adams said, the promise of enough land in the New World for all without having to redistribute from rich to poor. The rich instead would give back of their own volition in a universe in which everybody was held to have a chance of being similarly rich - the American social bargain that excuses gross inequality even today. It took the rise of socialism to drive home a social bargain in Britain, but the rich never accepted its legitimacy. They resented progressive taxation of income and wealth to finance their contribution to the commonweal as an illegitimate confiscation of what their families owned by right. Yet for the majority in the country it was the long overdue assertion of what should always have been their obligation, and thus made what the rich kept for themselves - still substantial - legitimate. One-nation Tories insisted on the same basic bargain, while the rich smouldered in revolt fathering elaborate tax avoidance and evasion industries. Socialism was its own worst enemy; it preferred to characterise progressive taxation as a half-way house to full socialism rather than the new social bargain that it really was, thus fatally undermining the principle. A social bargain was defensible while a levelled-down society was not and Britain's rich have fought off all claims on their purse with righteous indignation. The substitution of the Labour party's Clause 4 with another that does not argue for the explicit public interest of a social bargain represented their most complete victory. So we arrive at today; executives clamouring for American levels of remuneration but not accepting either an American approach to giving or a European approach to taxation and with no live values based political coalition to fight back. Sir Paul loved England and its civilities - the ritual of a cricket match or the beauty of its long tended countryside. Yet what lies behind that has been a bitterly fought-for social bargain sustained by three traditions now in decline - Christianity, one-nation Toryism and socialism. It would be comforting to hope that we might produce some British philanthropists with Sir Paul's readiness to give, but until our society can find a legitimate way of talking the language of social bargains there is little chance. The country that Sir Paul loved is in peril.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
The NHS is under-resourced. Every user knows it. Its staff know it. The political establishment accepts it. The Prime Minister has admitted as much. Britain has fewer doctors and hospital beds per head than almost any other country in Europe. More needs to be spent, so when Blair committed himself last week to raising health expenditure to the European average by the end of the next parliament there should have been a national sense of relief. Instead it was an occasion for hand-wringing, Prime Ministerial wobble and general disbelief. It couldn't be done, it was said. There isn't and there won't be enough money. Blair was dodging difficult choices about which taxes to raise. The Conservatives insisted that the only means to this end was to allow the private sector to lead the charge, urging the reintroduction of tax relief for private health insurance. And then Number 10 seemed to get windy, briefing on Monday that it was only an aspiration - and conditional in any case on the economy doing well. But for once beleaguered liberal Britain should not look a gift horse in the mouth; this is an occasion for a cheer. The Prime Minister, despite his partial retreat, has set an important benchmark for the desirable growth of NHS spending, and by implication other key programmes such as education and transport. He has also put down a marker that the extraordinarily large Treasury surpluses projected in the years ahead will be spent on improving public services and not given away in tax cuts. And he has put the Tories on the spot; they have to match his commitment or demonstrate that private health insurance can achieve the same result - a demonstration that is beyond them. In the new politics of how to spend the budget surpluses, Blair - panicked perhaps by the hysterical reaction to the comparatively small rise in flu cases and media overkill - has set the political agenda. It is an important moment. The scale of the implied increase in NHS spending is vast. The 50 billion (in round numbers) spent on the NHS in Britain at the moment is 5.7 per cent of GDP; another 9bn - or 1 per cent of GDP - is spent on health privately. The crude European average is 8 per cent of GDP, but that is simply arrived at by adding up each country's average and dividing it by the total, so that Luxembourg's spending has the same importance as Germany's. If you weight the calculation by size of country, the real average of European health spending, according to the King's Fund, is 8.6 per cent of GDP. Because the Blair Government does not plan to expand the private health sector, it will have to pay to close the gap of 1.9 per cent of GDP itself - 17bn at today's prices. If it wants to do that over the next six years, health spending will have to rise by just under 8 per cent a year in real terms to 2006; if spending grows at only 5 per cent annum in real terms - the figure the Prime Minister cited - then it will take a full 12 years to reach the true European average. And if the Europeans further increase spending, then it will take longer still. It takes time to redress a generation of neglect. Can 8 per cent growth in NHS spending until 2006 be achieved without raising taxes? The straight answer is yes, even though it would push Gordon Brown's demanding framework for spending and borrowing to the limit. But spending in every other department could only grow in line with the growth of GDP, the reason for Cabinet restiveness last week. If this is a surprise, it is because almost nobody seems to have come to terms with the transformation in public finances under New Labour. The combination of Brown's 'stealth' taxes, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of GDP, sticking to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years of this parliament, economic growth of close to 2 per cent instead of recession in 1999, the fall in unemployment and continuing low inflation has been stunning. The current budget surplus last year was 7bn; it will more than double by 2003. Indeed if the long run economic growth rate is the 2.5 per cent now assumed by the Treasury, then as the TUC calculated in its submission to the Treasury's Spending Review last week, public spending could be raised another 12bn by 2004 and, on my calculations, to the necessary 17bn for the NHS by 2006 - and still leave the 7bn safety margin Brown had last year. If growth turns out lower, then the NHS budget can be protected by running down the safety margin; and in an economic downturn borrowing is allowed even under Brown's rules. A European class health service is ours for the having - and without raising taxes. The Conservative proposition that the alternative can be achieved through private insurance is for the birds and, while New Labour retreats and tem porises in so many areas of policy, it is good to see some iron in its soul over private medical insurance. It is expensive, focused on those who are good medical risks, and rarely extends to the over-75s who are most in need. Worse, even if it worked in building up the private sector, it would have the perverse result of driving up the NHS's cost as private contractors bid up wages to attract the limited number of trained staff. But the proof is in the pudding. Tax relief on medical insurance for the over-60s was introduced in 1990; but by 1997, when Labour abolished it, only 1 per cent more of the over-60s had taken advantage of the tax break. Moreover as the human genome project is completed, we will soon know each individual's DNA structure and predicted health experience; in this emerging world private insurance is madness, because those known to be poor risks will simply not be able to insure themselves at a reasonable premium. Poor Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, is stuck with a ludicrous, provenly unworkable policy that is out of kilter with the times - the mirror image of Labour's 1983 far-fetched commitment to extend nationalisation to promote economic efficiency. The only way to fund the NHS is through general taxation or comprehensive social insurance; the hypothecated health tax is another blind alley. If all NHS spending is dependent on a stand-alone or hypothecated tax, then its revenues will go up and down with the economic cycle; if only part is hypothecated, then by the second or third year it becomes impossible to disentangle what is new and what is old money. On the NHS New Labour is making a stand. What it needs to do next is to drop building privately financed hospitals with fewer beds, genuinely end the internal market and redress the system's disgraceful lack accountability - and we really could start cheering.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
|
The NHS is under-resourced. Every user knows it. Its staff know it. The political establishment accepts it. The Prime Minister has admitted as much. Britain has fewer doctors and hospital beds per head than almost any other country in Europe. More needs to be spent, so when Blair committed himself last week to raising health expenditure to the European average by the end of the next parliament there should have been a national sense of relief. Instead it was an occasion for hand-wringing, Prime Ministerial wobble and general disbelief. It couldn't be done, it was said. There isn't and there won't be enough money. Blair was dodging difficult choices about which taxes to raise. The Conservatives insisted that the only means to this end was to allow the private sector to lead the charge, urging the reintroduction of tax relief for private health insurance. And then Number 10 seemed to get windy, briefing on Monday that it was only an aspiration - and conditional in any case on the economy doing well. But for once beleaguered liberal Britain should not look a gift horse in the mouth; this is an occasion for a cheer. The Prime Minister, despite his partial retreat, has set an important benchmark for the desirable growth of NHS spending, and by implication other key programmes such as education and transport. He has also put down a marker that the extraordinarily large Treasury surpluses projected in the years ahead will be spent on improving public services and not given away in tax cuts. And he has put the Tories on the spot; they have to match his commitment or demonstrate that private health insurance can achieve the same result - a demonstration that is beyond them. In the new politics of how to spend the budget surpluses, Blair - panicked perhaps by the hysterical reaction to the comparatively small rise in flu cases and media overkill - has set the political agenda. It is an important moment. The scale of the implied increase in NHS spending is vast. The 50 billion (in round numbers) spent on the NHS in Britain at the moment is 5.7 per cent of GDP; another 9bn - or 1 per cent of GDP - is spent on health privately. The crude European average is 8 per cent of GDP, but that is simply arrived at by adding up each country's average and dividing it by the total, so that Luxembourg's spending has the same importance as Germany's. If you weight the calculation by size of country, the real average of European health spending, according to the King's Fund, is 8.6 per cent of GDP. Because the Blair Government does not plan to expand the private health sector, it will have to pay to close the gap of 1.9 per cent of GDP itself - 17bn at today's prices. If it wants to do that over the next six years, health spending will have to rise by just under 8 per cent a year in real terms to 2006; if spending grows at only 5 per cent annum in real terms - the figure the Prime Minister cited - then it will take a full 12 years to reach the true European average. And if the Europeans further increase spending, then it will take longer still. It takes time to redress a generation of neglect. Can 8 per cent growth in NHS spending until 2006 be achieved without raising taxes? The straight answer is yes, even though it would push Gordon Brown's demanding framework for spending and borrowing to the limit. But spending in every other department could only grow in line with the growth of GDP, the reason for Cabinet restiveness last week. If this is a surprise, it is because almost nobody seems to have come to terms with the transformation in public finances under New Labour. The combination of Brown's 'stealth' taxes, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of GDP, sticking to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years of this parliament, economic growth of close to 2 per cent instead of recession in 1999, the fall in unemployment and continuing low inflation has been stunning. The current budget surplus last year was 7bn; it will more than double by 2003. Indeed if the long run economic growth rate is the 2.5 per cent now assumed by the Treasury, then as the TUC calculated in its submission to the Treasury's Spending Review last week, public spending could be raised another 12bn by 2004 and, on my calculations, to the necessary 17bn for the NHS by 2006 - and still leave the 7bn safety margin Brown had last year. If growth turns out lower, then the NHS budget can be protected by running down the safety margin; and in an economic downturn borrowing is allowed even under Brown's rules. A European class health service is ours for the having - and without raising taxes. The Conservative proposition that the alternative can be achieved through private insurance is for the birds and, while New Labour retreats and tem porises in so many areas of policy, it is good to see some iron in its soul over private medical insurance. It is expensive, focused on those who are good medical risks, and rarely extends to the over-75s who are most in need. Worse, even if it worked in building up the private sector, it would have the perverse result of driving up the NHS's cost as private contractors bid up wages to attract the limited number of trained staff. But the proof is in the pudding. Tax relief on medical insurance for the over-60s was introduced in 1990; but by 1997, when Labour abolished it, only 1 per cent more of the over-60s had taken advantage of the tax break. Moreover as the human genome project is completed, we will soon know each individual's DNA structure and predicted health experience; in this emerging world private insurance is madness, because those known to be poor risks will simply not be able to insure themselves at a reasonable premium. Poor Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, is stuck with a ludicrous, provenly unworkable policy that is out of kilter with the times - the mirror image of Labour's 1983 far-fetched commitment to extend nationalisation to promote economic efficiency. The only way to fund the NHS is through general taxation or comprehensive social insurance; the hypothecated health tax is another blind alley. If all NHS spending is dependent on a stand-alone or hypothecated tax, then its revenues will go up and down with the economic cycle; if only part is hypothecated, then by the second or third year it becomes impossible to disentangle what is new and what is old money. On the NHS New Labour is making a stand. What it needs to do next is to drop building privately financed hospitals with fewer beds, genuinely end the internal market and redress the system's disgraceful lack accountability - and we really could start cheering.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
Nothing more betrays the hollowness of New Labour's claim to be 'new' than its attitude towards reforming the state and its equivocation about democracy and the sanctity of the public realm. It just doesn't get it. Beyond a group of disillusioned intellectuals, it thinks, nobody cares about voting, accountability or the shape of the constitution. The national belly-laugh at the House of Lords' Appointments Commission's announcement of 15 new peers should begin to disabuse it. The patronising view that ordinary people have no interest in the hows and whys of their constitution has been punctured. These aren't people's peers; they are from exactly the same pool of great and good who have been occupying the red benches as life peers for the past 40 years. It wasn't meant to be like this. The commission is independent. It canvassed the country for applications. It has five criteria for selection for a peerage - independence, commitment to high standards in public life, a record of achievement, capacity to contribute to debates and the spare time to attend them - that seem reasonable. The peers to be produced by this rational process would be obviously superior either to the old hereditaries or party hacks. But the ill-judged aside of Lord Stevenson, chairman of the commission, that 'the human being should feel comfortable in the House of Lords', gave the game away. What is at issue, as Tom Paine, writing 200 years ago, saw more clearly than any other critic of the British constitution, is a structure and culture in which our governors still function as a class above the governed. As Paine put it, the invading Normans constructed a constitution that allowed the new French-speaking barons to deliberate and then do what they wanted to the subject English. That was the way the system essentially operated in 1800. Universal suffrage and the veneer of modern democracy have been bolted on to the same structures, so that much of what Paine inveighed against is still alive. For excellence and career achievement, along with feeling at home on the red benches, are utterly inadequate criteria for becoming a national legislator. I'm sure that Sir John Browne, chief executive of BP, or Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, will make wise and considered interventions in those debates where their expertise will be welcome. But the Lords could have availed itself of their wisdom without making them full-time legislators. It could easily and simply have asked them to become full-time members of its select committees or to give evidence on legislation. But the solution that has been adopted means that because the newly appointed peers have a track record of achievement in one area, they have the right of voting and speaking in all areas - from asylum-seekers to fox-hunting - despite the fact they are accountable to nobody for how they vote. This is an impossible principle to defend. Arguments that elections might be dangerous because turnout could be low, that the intake might be unpredictable, that the Lords will gain a legitimacy to rival the Commons and that party point-scoring will replace the considered tone of the Lords are spurious. They are dangers that have to be guarded against, but they cannot obstruct the basic position. In a democracy, legislators must be accountable to the people. Indeed, the proposition is even larger than that, a point well understood by Paine and his contemporaries in enlightenment Europe, who were delightedly shrugging off centuries of rule by monarch and church. Any community needs a functioning and efficient public realm where argument can be freely made, political support marshalled and those who make decisions can be held to account by those for whom they are made. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitution builders in Europe and the US did no more than try to construct a political architecture that could permit the expression of an accountable public realm, in which democracy and citizenship were key components. Britain has never tried self-consciously to build a constitution that entrenched and succoured the public interest. The political class has always taken the view that the constitution, designed by the Normans and amended by successive generations, is pretty much unimprovable. But the consequences of this failure are all around. We may not care much that we have the fewest elected officials per thousand of population of most democracies, but more worrying is our lack of commitment to the principle of voting and, beyond that, to an idea of a public sphere. Our spatchcock constitutional arrangements suffuse our public culture, and that culture itself is compromised by our lack of faith in a conception of 'publicness'. So it is that 3,166 people filled in the form to become a peer, thinking that nothing could be more normal than becoming a legislator via a university-type admissions system. So it is that we do not have the constitutional template properly to entrench the independence of a public corporation like the BBC. In our constitutional system, the public realm is the Crown in Parliament which controls all it surveys; there can be no true independence for anything within its embrace. So it is that the Government has constructed Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships without ever, until being challenged by Ken Livingstone, thinking carefully what the constitution of such arrangements might be that would entrench and safeguard the public interest. And even the concession that a PPP might have public-interest 'partnership' directors has been squeezed grudgingly from a disinterested Government. And so it is that even the principle of universal taxation has just been breached, with the Government conceding that business can choose what tax it pays instead of local authorities having the right to charge a supplementary business rate. We are back to pre-Civil War England. The hope was that when New Labour took office and launched its constitutional reform programme that it understood this was the means to the greater end, renewing and so reclaiming Britain's battered public realm. We were wrong. New Labour had no such ambition. But as the laughter over people's peers reverberates, maybe it will learn. If it wants fewer such cock-ups, it should understand the spirit of the times.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton .
|
Nothing more betrays the hollowness of New Labour's claim to be 'new' than its attitude towards reforming the state and its equivocation about democracy and the sanctity of the public realm. It just doesn't get it. Beyond a group of disillusioned intellectuals, it thinks, nobody cares about voting, accountability or the shape of the constitution. The national belly-laugh at the House of Lords' Appointments Commission's announcement of 15 new peers should begin to disabuse it. The patronising view that ordinary people have no interest in the hows and whys of their constitution has been punctured. These aren't people's peers; they are from exactly the same pool of great and good who have been occupying the red benches as life peers for the past 40 years. It wasn't meant to be like this. The commission is independent. It canvassed the country for applications. It has five criteria for selection for a peerage - independence, commitment to high standards in public life, a record of achievement, capacity to contribute to debates and the spare time to attend them - that seem reasonable. The peers to be produced by this rational process would be obviously superior either to the old hereditaries or party hacks. But the ill-judged aside of Lord Stevenson, chairman of the commission, that 'the human being should feel comfortable in the House of Lords', gave the game away. What is at issue, as Tom Paine, writing 200 years ago, saw more clearly than any other critic of the British constitution, is a structure and culture in which our governors still function as a class above the governed. As Paine put it, the invading Normans constructed a constitution that allowed the new French-speaking barons to deliberate and then do what they wanted to the subject English. That was the way the system essentially operated in 1800. Universal suffrage and the veneer of modern democracy have been bolted on to the same structures, so that much of what Paine inveighed against is still alive. For excellence and career achievement, along with feeling at home on the red benches, are utterly inadequate criteria for becoming a national legislator. I'm sure that Sir John Browne, chief executive of BP, or Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, will make wise and considered interventions in those debates where their expertise will be welcome. But the Lords could have availed itself of their wisdom without making them full-time legislators. It could easily and simply have asked them to become full-time members of its select committees or to give evidence on legislation. But the solution that has been adopted means that because the newly appointed peers have a track record of achievement in one area, they have the right of voting and speaking in all areas - from asylum-seekers to fox-hunting - despite the fact they are accountable to nobody for how they vote. This is an impossible principle to defend. Arguments that elections might be dangerous because turnout could be low, that the intake might be unpredictable, that the Lords will gain a legitimacy to rival the Commons and that party point-scoring will replace the considered tone of the Lords are spurious. They are dangers that have to be guarded against, but they cannot obstruct the basic position. In a democracy, legislators must be accountable to the people. Indeed, the proposition is even larger than that, a point well understood by Paine and his contemporaries in enlightenment Europe, who were delightedly shrugging off centuries of rule by monarch and church. Any community needs a functioning and efficient public realm where argument can be freely made, political support marshalled and those who make decisions can be held to account by those for whom they are made. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitution builders in Europe and the US did no more than try to construct a political architecture that could permit the expression of an accountable public realm, in which democracy and citizenship were key components. Britain has never tried self-consciously to build a constitution that entrenched and succoured the public interest. The political class has always taken the view that the constitution, designed by the Normans and amended by successive generations, is pretty much unimprovable. But the consequences of this failure are all around. We may not care much that we have the fewest elected officials per thousand of population of most democracies, but more worrying is our lack of commitment to the principle of voting and, beyond that, to an idea of a public sphere. Our spatchcock constitutional arrangements suffuse our public culture, and that culture itself is compromised by our lack of faith in a conception of 'publicness'. So it is that 3,166 people filled in the form to become a peer, thinking that nothing could be more normal than becoming a legislator via a university-type admissions system. So it is that we do not have the constitutional template properly to entrench the independence of a public corporation like the BBC. In our constitutional system, the public realm is the Crown in Parliament which controls all it surveys; there can be no true independence for anything within its embrace. So it is that the Government has constructed Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships without ever, until being challenged by Ken Livingstone, thinking carefully what the constitution of such arrangements might be that would entrench and safeguard the public interest. And even the concession that a PPP might have public-interest 'partnership' directors has been squeezed grudgingly from a disinterested Government. And so it is that even the principle of universal taxation has just been breached, with the Government conceding that business can choose what tax it pays instead of local authorities having the right to charge a supplementary business rate. We are back to pre-Civil War England. The hope was that when New Labour took office and launched its constitutional reform programme that it understood this was the means to the greater end, renewing and so reclaiming Britain's battered public realm. We were wrong. New Labour had no such ambition. But as the laughter over people's peers reverberates, maybe it will learn. If it wants fewer such cock-ups, it should understand the spirit of the times.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
New Year and the flying prime minister falls back to earth in Westminster. Now in the cold grey light of dismal January, Labour's second term begins in earnest. A tottering in-tray awaits, with transport at the top, the NHS just beneath and a score of pressing questions awaiting answers. As he examines the pile of paper, where is his route map through it all? What is his guiding principle? The old answer, what works, does not take him far when high profile bits of it are patently not working well. As the fog starts to clear, however, some new governing principles emerge, at the instigation and certainly with the approval of the prime minister himself. Rumblings of change are in the air. To left-of-centre critics Tony Blair used to say, tapping the side of his nose, "Wait for the second term. Mrs Thatcher didn't discover Thatcherism until well into hers." But disappointingly, the first months after a lack-lustre election ambled along in directionless confusion, saved only by September 11. It is since then that there have been startling changes of direction. Somewhere on his desk Tony Blair will come across Where Now for New Labour? by Anthony Giddens (published this week by the Fabians, the Policy Network and Polity Press). He will find it interesting reading, not because it gives him the answer to the question it poses. Quite the contrary. Inadvertently, it shows how far the government has already travelled since 1997. Five years is a very long time in politics. The world has moved on since the heyday of the third way, but its progenitor, Professor Giddens, is now urging Blair to slam on the brakes. Giddens was a founding father of New Labour: his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right shaped the third way path to victory. Drawing on Clinton's triumphant rebranding of the Democrats, he erected Tony Blair's big tent, stealing the Conservatives' prime turf. The third way was a beacon for left-of-centre parties around Europe. All had similar baggage to shed - heavy-handed statism, trade union producer interests and inflexibility in the face of new problems. The third way was a magic carpet for transporting the left into power: not tax and spend, not soft on crime, not hostile to business. It buried old ghosts and Giddens deserves much of the credit. It generated wide support, but its neutral message never struck deep roots. Now Giddens is warning against any departure from those original winning mantras - most of all on tax and spend. He attacks Gordon Brown's plans to raise tax to pay for public services. Denouncing "the myth of taxation", he describes how more money flows into the Treasury through the fruits of high employment and economic success than through raising tax rates. Raising rates to 50% for those earning over 100,000 would only bring in 3bn (actually a considerable sum). He points out that the top 1% of earners already contribute 20% of all income tax - an interesting fact. But stop and contemplate what it really reveals: the rich are not taxed through the nose, but they earn staggering sums of money compared to the rest. This thought, though, is illegitimate in third way thinking. Third wayers are never jealous of success. Third wayers believe in equality of opportunity: redistribution is only to pull the very poorest over the poverty threshold. Giddens's vision of a successful economy relies on large numbers in minimum wage jobs. Britain's employment record is better than most of Europe because of easy access to flexible, low-paid work. He does say that there needs to be more in-work training to help these people up ladders (currently few ever climb out of marginal work). True, people are better off in work but while a third of people, in and out of work, live beneath what most people regard as a decent standard of living, that does require any social democrat to consider the depth of British inequality. Somewhere at the heart of the third way was a fundamental unwillingness to face this unpalatable fact. While Giddens rightly attacks the old left for its mindless refusal to give the government credit for anything, he is himself too dismissive of other European countries' social polices that deliver fairer societies. Third way orthodoxy does not address an electorate now less tax-phobic than angry about public services. But Giddens sees the voter as an immutable beast: everything "must fall within the bounds of what is electorally feasible" as if leaders never shift the political climate. Yet those who voted for Thatcherism in election after election are not the same people who voted Blair back last year: people change, reacting to past errors, pursuing new goals. When Mrs Thatcher in her first budget cut top rates of income tax by a swingeing 38%, she knew the power of political symbolism. Sending out strong signals and sweeping the people along in her train, she changed the national mood in ways third wayers never dared try. That is why the third way is history. The government is daring to try. Third way bounds are everywhere being burst at last as Labour begins to believe in the reality of its own power. The tax taboo is broken, cannabis decriminalised, student fees rethought, gross fat cat salaries at least a little checked by shareholder votes, art galleries and museums free, Railtrack turned into a non-profit company, asylum seekers vouchers rescinded. None of these is an act of outrageous radicalism but all were once so unthinkable that any minister whispering the words was forced to humiliating public apology. The ice is cracking and in the thaw ministers are starting to think for themselves. Those who do so most, like Charles Clarke, are emerging as the winners over clones still mouthing dead mantras. Originality pays because ministers need to think aloud about serious problems. What is the emerging story? Good government was what New Labour promised, non-ideological, technocratic, what works. That is developing now into something more coherent: government is good. To make the case for higher taxes and better services, that key idea needs to lead the way. The market delivers prosperity best, the voluntary sector can refresh and inspire around the margins, but in the end the goods that only government can deliver are what everyone wants now. Well-managed and efficient, always room for improvement, public service is indispensable and precious. These are still only the green shoots of an ideology that profoundly divides right from left - but once it was a third way taboo. So as the PM ploughs through his in-tray he has an emerging progressive idea for the next decisions he must take. The third way was Bill Clinton's emblem - an election winner that left a tragically empty legacy: there is no "Clintonism". Blairism already deserves a place in the dictionary for his global vision: now he has to establish its meaning at home.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
New Year and the flying prime minister falls back to earth in Westminster. Now in the cold grey light of dismal January, Labour's second term begins in earnest. A tottering in-tray awaits, with transport at the top, the NHS just beneath and a score of pressing questions awaiting answers. As he examines the pile of paper, where is his route map through it all? What is his guiding principle? The old answer, what works, does not take him far when high profile bits of it are patently not working well. As the fog starts to clear, however, some new governing principles emerge, at the instigation and certainly with the approval of the prime minister himself. Rumblings of change are in the air. To left-of-centre critics Tony Blair used to say, tapping the side of his nose, "Wait for the second term. Mrs Thatcher didn't discover Thatcherism until well into hers." But disappointingly, the first months after a lack-lustre election ambled along in directionless confusion, saved only by September 11. It is since then that there have been startling changes of direction. Somewhere on his desk Tony Blair will come across Where Now for New Labour? by Anthony Giddens (published this week by the Fabians, the Policy Network and Polity Press). He will find it interesting reading, not because it gives him the answer to the question it poses. Quite the contrary. Inadvertently, it shows how far the government has already travelled since 1997. Five years is a very long time in politics. The world has moved on since the heyday of the third way, but its progenitor, Professor Giddens, is now urging Blair to slam on the brakes. Giddens was a founding father of New Labour: his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right shaped the third way path to victory. Drawing on Clinton's triumphant rebranding of the Democrats, he erected Tony Blair's big tent, stealing the Conservatives' prime turf. The third way was a beacon for left-of-centre parties around Europe. All had similar baggage to shed - heavy-handed statism, trade union producer interests and inflexibility in the face of new problems. The third way was a magic carpet for transporting the left into power: not tax and spend, not soft on crime, not hostile to business. It buried old ghosts and Giddens deserves much of the credit. It generated wide support, but its neutral message never struck deep roots. Now Giddens is warning against any departure from those original winning mantras - most of all on tax and spend. He attacks Gordon Brown's plans to raise tax to pay for public services. Denouncing "the myth of taxation", he describes how more money flows into the Treasury through the fruits of high employment and economic success than through raising tax rates. Raising rates to 50% for those earning over 100,000 would only bring in 3bn (actually a considerable sum). He points out that the top 1% of earners already contribute 20% of all income tax - an interesting fact. But stop and contemplate what it really reveals: the rich are not taxed through the nose, but they earn staggering sums of money compared to the rest. This thought, though, is illegitimate in third way thinking. Third wayers are never jealous of success. Third wayers believe in equality of opportunity: redistribution is only to pull the very poorest over the poverty threshold. Giddens's vision of a successful economy relies on large numbers in minimum wage jobs. Britain's employment record is better than most of Europe because of easy access to flexible, low-paid work. He does say that there needs to be more in-work training to help these people up ladders (currently few ever climb out of marginal work). True, people are better off in work but while a third of people, in and out of work, live beneath what most people regard as a decent standard of living, that does require any social democrat to consider the depth of British inequality. Somewhere at the heart of the third way was a fundamental unwillingness to face this unpalatable fact. While Giddens rightly attacks the old left for its mindless refusal to give the government credit for anything, he is himself too dismissive of other European countries' social polices that deliver fairer societies. Third way orthodoxy does not address an electorate now less tax-phobic than angry about public services. But Giddens sees the voter as an immutable beast: everything "must fall within the bounds of what is electorally feasible" as if leaders never shift the political climate. Yet those who voted for Thatcherism in election after election are not the same people who voted Blair back last year: people change, reacting to past errors, pursuing new goals. When Mrs Thatcher in her first budget cut top rates of income tax by a swingeing 38%, she knew the power of political symbolism. Sending out strong signals and sweeping the people along in her train, she changed the national mood in ways third wayers never dared try. That is why the third way is history. The government is daring to try. Third way bounds are everywhere being burst at last as Labour begins to believe in the reality of its own power. The tax taboo is broken, cannabis decriminalised, student fees rethought, gross fat cat salaries at least a little checked by shareholder votes, art galleries and museums free, Railtrack turned into a non-profit company, asylum seekers vouchers rescinded. None of these is an act of outrageous radicalism but all were once so unthinkable that any minister whispering the words was forced to humiliating public apology. The ice is cracking and in the thaw ministers are starting to think for themselves. Those who do so most, like Charles Clarke, are emerging as the winners over clones still mouthing dead mantras. Originality pays because ministers need to think aloud about serious problems. What is the emerging story? Good government was what New Labour promised, non-ideological, technocratic, what works. That is developing now into something more coherent: government is good. To make the case for higher taxes and better services, that key idea needs to lead the way. The market delivers prosperity best, the voluntary sector can refresh and inspire around the margins, but in the end the goods that only government can deliver are what everyone wants now. Well-managed and efficient, always room for improvement, public service is indispensable and precious. These are still only the green shoots of an ideology that profoundly divides right from left - but once it was a third way taboo. So as the PM ploughs through his in-tray he has an emerging progressive idea for the next decisions he must take. The third way was Bill Clinton's emblem - an election winner that left a tragically empty legacy: there is no "Clintonism". Blairism already deserves a place in the dictionary for his global vision: now he has to establish its meaning at home.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
The National Lottery plants its golden footprints up and down the land. And 12bn of good has been done so far: the Angel of the North spreads its iron wings, athletes hold gold medals aloft hailing the lottery that made them possible, the Eden project gleams within its glass domes, while hundreds of new community centres start thriving local activities. Decayed parks in towns everywhere are restored to Victorian municipal glory. A playgroup arises in an area with none. And, yes, asylum seekers get a little too. But the lottery always had enemies. On the left puritans complain it is a regressive tax on the poor (though they don't propose banning Ladrokes). The moral right are uneasy at state-sponsored sin, but mainly loathe do-gooders. The result is sour sniping at everything the lottery does, emphasising the errors - the dome and the Churchill papers. But the latest war over grants to asylum seekers is doing real damage, destroying pride in its great benefits. This is a story of folly and also of wickedness. Start with the folly: the Community Fund, one of the six boards distributing lottery largesse, gave money to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCACD), a Birmingham group counselling asylum seekers on their rights, fighting deportations and getting many decisions successfully reversed. This is unpopular but necessary work: people should be helped to use what rights they have. They also campaign against the asylum laws, but that is not against charity law. All well and good. However, had the Community Fund glanced at the group's website, they would have found some wild, abusive stuff unbefitting lottery recipients. One group compared Bush to Hitler. The NCACD accused Blunkett of "colluding with fascism". Unwise. When Blunkett learned of a relatively small story on page 5 in the Mail about this grant, he went nuclear. He could have picked up the telephone for a private word with Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary who oversees the lottery. Together they could have limited the damage quietly by calling the Community Fund and requesting them to ask the NCACD to clean up their language and their website. If the NCACD had two ounces of sense and hoped for future grants, it would have spontaneously issued a correction/apology and a polite press release describing the good work they do. But with the Mail on their doorstep, they were embattled. What happened instead is that David Blunkett and his special adviser saw their chance for yet another of their regular nasty-story-for-the-Sundays slot. They constructed an inflammatory press release denouncing the grant. Tessa Jowell managed to get her hands on it in time and soften its language a bit, promising to review the grant. But Blunkett fanned the flames into a firestorm led by the Daily Mail, which day after day attacked the Community Fund with incendiary and racist ferocity. The Daily Mail gave a statement to Radio 4's World at One this week claiming that it was "highlighting the activities of the Community Fund with the wholehearted support of the home secretary". David Blunkett hotly denies this. The Daily Mail's campaign against the Community Fund has on four days urged readers: "Please vent your anger" against Diana Brittan (wife of Sir Leon), head of the fund. Staff have been forced to open 4,000 abusive letters wearing gloves, since some contained excrement, reading "I'm going to kill you", "fucking bitch", "fucking arsehole" and more. The Midland office has had a bomb threat. Falkland's hero Simon Weston joined in with an anti-lottery diatribe at the Tory party conference, complaining veterans had been refused money. Why was he helping slaughter the golden goose, when his own charity, the Weston Spirit, has had 2m of lottery money with another three applications pending? Not surprisingly, the fund went into meltdown and took too long to respond. Only 5% of its money goes to asylum seekers, 11% to ethnic minorities, and 5% to the third world, but yes, their remit is to give to less cuddly causes neglected by traditional giving. Their instructions are to fill the gaps, not follow popular sentiment. Any fund giving to smaller community groups makes some mistakes. One such was to give money to a man rescuing criminal youth from the streets: alas he was recruiting them to his own criminal gang. Was it the fund's fault? No. The man was an adviser to the police - if even the police didn't know, how could they? Worse is to come. Next week it is likely the fund will be forced to announce that the NCACD grant will go ahead. Dearly though some might regret it, unless evidence emerges of law-breaking, the promised cash cannot be rescinded. Expect mushroom clouds. Camelot, itself is in trouble after the abysmal failure of their chief executive Diane Thompson's relaunch of new games, had the cheek last week to add petrol on the flames by claiming this asylum seekers' grant had cut lottery sales by 500,000 a week. (She said nothing about Camelot's own foundation's grants to asylum seekers). Camelot has yet to produce figures proving they are not disguising their own failures: Thompson's "you'd be lucky to win a tenner" Ratner remark, about the negligible chance of winning, didn't help. Now every lottery hater has proclaimed the lottery undemocratic, demanding the right of lottery players to tick a box on their ticket to say where the money should go. October 31 is the closing date for a public consultation on the lottery. Radical change is needed to repair its reputation, to make it trusted and loved. Jowell is seriously considering nationalisation: the fiasco of the last contract proved that no outsider can ever beat the incumbent. Where there is no competition, it would be wise to make it into a national institution, with no profits lost. The six distribution boards will be amalgamated into one, with a single national lottery plaque emblazoned on every project that gets money, so people can see where the money is spent. Areas that have had too little funding - too deprived to apply - may get local referenda on how to spend lump sums. Democratic local citizens panels, (already in place for the Heritage Fund) may distribute money more accountably, gaining expertise as they go. When under fire, they would be better trusted to explain their spending decisions. But big grants over 1m must still be taken centrally. It should not all flow to kittens and cancer at the behest of the tabloids. If the government gave in to pressure for tick boxes, it might temporarily stop tabloid insults about "the liberal, lentil-chomping lefties who hand out Lotto cash". But granting funds at public whim would be a wicked abdication of the elected politicians' duty to see that all money is as wisely and justly spent as possible - give or take the odd inevitable mistake.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
The National Lottery plants its golden footprints up and down the land. And 12bn of good has been done so far: the Angel of the North spreads its iron wings, athletes hold gold medals aloft hailing the lottery that made them possible, the Eden project gleams within its glass domes, while hundreds of new community centres start thriving local activities. Decayed parks in towns everywhere are restored to Victorian municipal glory. A playgroup arises in an area with none. And, yes, asylum seekers get a little too. But the lottery always had enemies. On the left puritans complain it is a regressive tax on the poor (though they don't propose banning Ladrokes). The moral right are uneasy at state-sponsored sin, but mainly loathe do-gooders. The result is sour sniping at everything the lottery does, emphasising the errors - the dome and the Churchill papers. But the latest war over grants to asylum seekers is doing real damage, destroying pride in its great benefits. This is a story of folly and also of wickedness. Start with the folly: the Community Fund, one of the six boards distributing lottery largesse, gave money to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCACD), a Birmingham group counselling asylum seekers on their rights, fighting deportations and getting many decisions successfully reversed. This is unpopular but necessary work: people should be helped to use what rights they have. They also campaign against the asylum laws, but that is not against charity law. All well and good. However, had the Community Fund glanced at the group's website, they would have found some wild, abusive stuff unbefitting lottery recipients. One group compared Bush to Hitler. The NCACD accused Blunkett of "colluding with fascism". Unwise. When Blunkett learned of a relatively small story on page 5 in the Mail about this grant, he went nuclear. He could have picked up the telephone for a private word with Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary who oversees the lottery. Together they could have limited the damage quietly by calling the Community Fund and requesting them to ask the NCACD to clean up their language and their website. If the NCACD had two ounces of sense and hoped for future grants, it would have spontaneously issued a correction/apology and a polite press release describing the good work they do. But with the Mail on their doorstep, they were embattled. What happened instead is that David Blunkett and his special adviser saw their chance for yet another of their regular nasty-story-for-the-Sundays slot. They constructed an inflammatory press release denouncing the grant. Tessa Jowell managed to get her hands on it in time and soften its language a bit, promising to review the grant. But Blunkett fanned the flames into a firestorm led by the Daily Mail, which day after day attacked the Community Fund with incendiary and racist ferocity. The Daily Mail gave a statement to Radio 4's World at One this week claiming that it was "highlighting the activities of the Community Fund with the wholehearted support of the home secretary". David Blunkett hotly denies this. The Daily Mail's campaign against the Community Fund has on four days urged readers: "Please vent your anger" against Diana Brittan (wife of Sir Leon), head of the fund. Staff have been forced to open 4,000 abusive letters wearing gloves, since some contained excrement, reading "I'm going to kill you", "fucking bitch", "fucking arsehole" and more. The Midland office has had a bomb threat. Falkland's hero Simon Weston joined in with an anti-lottery diatribe at the Tory party conference, complaining veterans had been refused money. Why was he helping slaughter the golden goose, when his own charity, the Weston Spirit, has had 2m of lottery money with another three applications pending? Not surprisingly, the fund went into meltdown and took too long to respond. Only 5% of its money goes to asylum seekers, 11% to ethnic minorities, and 5% to the third world, but yes, their remit is to give to less cuddly causes neglected by traditional giving. Their instructions are to fill the gaps, not follow popular sentiment. Any fund giving to smaller community groups makes some mistakes. One such was to give money to a man rescuing criminal youth from the streets: alas he was recruiting them to his own criminal gang. Was it the fund's fault? No. The man was an adviser to the police - if even the police didn't know, how could they? Worse is to come. Next week it is likely the fund will be forced to announce that the NCACD grant will go ahead. Dearly though some might regret it, unless evidence emerges of law-breaking, the promised cash cannot be rescinded. Expect mushroom clouds. Camelot, itself is in trouble after the abysmal failure of their chief executive Diane Thompson's relaunch of new games, had the cheek last week to add petrol on the flames by claiming this asylum seekers' grant had cut lottery sales by 500,000 a week. (She said nothing about Camelot's own foundation's grants to asylum seekers). Camelot has yet to produce figures proving they are not disguising their own failures: Thompson's "you'd be lucky to win a tenner" Ratner remark, about the negligible chance of winning, didn't help. Now every lottery hater has proclaimed the lottery undemocratic, demanding the right of lottery players to tick a box on their ticket to say where the money should go. October 31 is the closing date for a public consultation on the lottery. Radical change is needed to repair its reputation, to make it trusted and loved. Jowell is seriously considering nationalisation: the fiasco of the last contract proved that no outsider can ever beat the incumbent. Where there is no competition, it would be wise to make it into a national institution, with no profits lost. The six distribution boards will be amalgamated into one, with a single national lottery plaque emblazoned on every project that gets money, so people can see where the money is spent. Areas that have had too little funding - too deprived to apply - may get local referenda on how to spend lump sums. Democratic local citizens panels, (already in place for the Heritage Fund) may distribute money more accountably, gaining expertise as they go. When under fire, they would be better trusted to explain their spending decisions. But big grants over 1m must still be taken centrally. It should not all flow to kittens and cancer at the behest of the tabloids. If the government gave in to pressure for tick boxes, it might temporarily stop tabloid insults about "the liberal, lentil-chomping lefties who hand out Lotto cash". But granting funds at public whim would be a wicked abdication of the elected politicians' duty to see that all money is as wisely and justly spent as possible - give or take the odd inevitable mistake.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Occasionally a new piece of research demolishes a myth with one fell blow. It does not happen often (social research tends to run along familiar tracks), but once in a while an iconoclastic study changes ideas. No one reading Self-Esteem - The Costs and Causes of Low Self-Worth by Professor Nicholas Emler of the LSE, should feel quite at ease again using a modern piece of psychobabble that has infused the language of sociology, criminology and education without real scrutiny until now. The accepted view has been that self-esteem - or the lack of it - lies at the root of almost every disorder from delinquency and drug abuse to violence and child abuse. One standard text after another takes this as a given fact without any scientific evidence, repeated as gospel from right to left, from Melanie Phillips to Oprah Winfrey. More than 2,000 books currently in print offer self-help prescriptions for raising self-esteem. A vast array of expensive social programmes in Europe and the US designed to solve drug dependency or delinquency are based on attempts to raise self-esteem. Some have tried to raise the self-esteem of whole schools or even an entire citizenry, describing self-esteem as a "social vaccine" against anti-social behaviour. Low self-esteem is the zeitgeist social disease. It has many useful attributes: it elevates self-love and sanctifies self-satisfaction. It justifies the introspection of the therapy addict. It excuses bad behaviour, turning perpetrator into victim. For teachers, it makes dealing with bullying, arrogant and disruptive pupils almost impossible, if beneath the insufferable exterior there is supposed to be a whimpering, self-loathing child in need of affirmation and praise. Professor Emler turns all this on its head. Scrutinising all the available research on both sides of the Atlantic, he finds no evidence that low self-esteem causes anti-social behaviour. Quite the reverse. Those who think highly of themselves are the ones most prone to violence and most likely to take risks, believing themselves invulnerable. They are more likely to commit crimes, drive dangerously, risk their health with drugs and alcohol. Exceptionally low self-esteem is indeed damaging - but only to the victim, not to anyone else. Those with low self-esteem are more likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, to become victims of bullying, domestic violence, loneliness and social ostracism. There ought to be a collective sigh of relief among many professionals on reading this eye-opening work. It is one of those moments when the blindingly obvious suddenly emerges from a fog of unquestioned nonsense. Teachers, social workers and probation officers do not have to massage the already inflated egos of bullies with unwarranted praise. Asserting his own superiority over his classmates, over-confident of abilities he does not have, it will do no harm to try to bring him down a peg. Emler looks at the relation between self-esteem and academic success. Does competition in school cause damaging failure? Most surprisingly he concludes that academic success or failure has very little impact on pupils' self-esteem. High self-esteem pupils will explain away failure to suit their previous high opinions of themselves: they make excuses that they were unlucky, suffered some bias or that they didn't try. Odder still, those with low self-esteem will not be buoyed up by academic success either. Sadly, they will regard it as a fluke and continue with their previous low estimation of their abilities. He concludes that it is exceedingly difficult to shift people's pre-existing view of themselves, even with tangible success. Nor is self- esteem any predictor of how well or badly someone will do academically. Even if confidence boosting worked (which he doubts) it would have no effect on exam results. So where does self-esteem come from? Looking at studies of twins, Emler concludes that genetic predisposition has the single strongest effect. Less surprisingly, after that it is parental attitudes. If they love, reinforce, praise and respect a young child, the effect lasts for life. Physical and above all sexual abuse of children is devastatingly and permanently damaging to self-esteem. Beyond these early influences, everything else that might be done to increase/ decrease self-esteem has virtually no effect. (This is bad news for the therapy business.) An interesting example: it was assumed that to belong to an outcast ethnic minority would harm self-esteem, but Emler finds it has no effect. People draw self-esteem from the good opinions of their own group and reject abuse from outsiders as the fault of others, not their own. Men have slightly more self-esteem than women. Low self-esteem in young women does increase the risk of teenage pregnancy, while low self-esteem in boys increases the risk of unemployment later in life. Anxiety about appearance does undermine women's self-esteem. But Emler's more curious finding is that there is very little correlation between how people think they look and how they actually look: their perceptions about their appearance are shaped by their level of self-esteem. Altogether Emler finds people have profoundly unrealistic views of how others see them, both negative and positive. How we think we are perceived is shaped by self-esteem. His conclusion is that all the myriad programmes designed to cure anti-social behaviour by raising self-esteem are wasting their time. Better by far to concentrate on the particular drug or crime problem and not on an imagined self-esteem deficit: self-esteem enhancing programmes he describes as "snake-oil remedies". This research deserves to cause a stir. It was always a kindly liberal notion that inside the anti-social bully was a timorous, tender soul waiting to be released. Emler is not suggesting that the violent are not damaged or might not be cured, but he has conclusively dismissed the intellectually woolly concept that lack of "self-esteem" is the root of all evil.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
Occasionally a new piece of research demolishes a myth with one fell blow. It does not happen often (social research tends to run along familiar tracks), but once in a while an iconoclastic study changes ideas. No one reading Self-Esteem - The Costs and Causes of Low Self-Worth by Professor Nicholas Emler of the LSE, should feel quite at ease again using a modern piece of psychobabble that has infused the language of sociology, criminology and education without real scrutiny until now. The accepted view has been that self-esteem - or the lack of it - lies at the root of almost every disorder from delinquency and drug abuse to violence and child abuse. One standard text after another takes this as a given fact without any scientific evidence, repeated as gospel from right to left, from Melanie Phillips to Oprah Winfrey. More than 2,000 books currently in print offer self-help prescriptions for raising self-esteem. A vast array of expensive social programmes in Europe and the US designed to solve drug dependency or delinquency are based on attempts to raise self-esteem. Some have tried to raise the self-esteem of whole schools or even an entire citizenry, describing self-esteem as a "social vaccine" against anti-social behaviour. Low self-esteem is the zeitgeist social disease. It has many useful attributes: it elevates self-love and sanctifies self-satisfaction. It justifies the introspection of the therapy addict. It excuses bad behaviour, turning perpetrator into victim. For teachers, it makes dealing with bullying, arrogant and disruptive pupils almost impossible, if beneath the insufferable exterior there is supposed to be a whimpering, self-loathing child in need of affirmation and praise. Professor Emler turns all this on its head. Scrutinising all the available research on both sides of the Atlantic, he finds no evidence that low self-esteem causes anti-social behaviour. Quite the reverse. Those who think highly of themselves are the ones most prone to violence and most likely to take risks, believing themselves invulnerable. They are more likely to commit crimes, drive dangerously, risk their health with drugs and alcohol. Exceptionally low self-esteem is indeed damaging - but only to the victim, not to anyone else. Those with low self-esteem are more likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, to become victims of bullying, domestic violence, loneliness and social ostracism. There ought to be a collective sigh of relief among many professionals on reading this eye-opening work. It is one of those moments when the blindingly obvious suddenly emerges from a fog of unquestioned nonsense. Teachers, social workers and probation officers do not have to massage the already inflated egos of bullies with unwarranted praise. Asserting his own superiority over his classmates, over-confident of abilities he does not have, it will do no harm to try to bring him down a peg. Emler looks at the relation between self-esteem and academic success. Does competition in school cause damaging failure? Most surprisingly he concludes that academic success or failure has very little impact on pupils' self-esteem. High self-esteem pupils will explain away failure to suit their previous high opinions of themselves: they make excuses that they were unlucky, suffered some bias or that they didn't try. Odder still, those with low self-esteem will not be buoyed up by academic success either. Sadly, they will regard it as a fluke and continue with their previous low estimation of their abilities. He concludes that it is exceedingly difficult to shift people's pre-existing view of themselves, even with tangible success. Nor is self- esteem any predictor of how well or badly someone will do academically. Even if confidence boosting worked (which he doubts) it would have no effect on exam results. So where does self-esteem come from? Looking at studies of twins, Emler concludes that genetic predisposition has the single strongest effect. Less surprisingly, after that it is parental attitudes. If they love, reinforce, praise and respect a young child, the effect lasts for life. Physical and above all sexual abuse of children is devastatingly and permanently damaging to self-esteem. Beyond these early influences, everything else that might be done to increase/ decrease self-esteem has virtually no effect. (This is bad news for the therapy business.) An interesting example: it was assumed that to belong to an outcast ethnic minority would harm self-esteem, but Emler finds it has no effect. People draw self-esteem from the good opinions of their own group and reject abuse from outsiders as the fault of others, not their own. Men have slightly more self-esteem than women. Low self-esteem in young women does increase the risk of teenage pregnancy, while low self-esteem in boys increases the risk of unemployment later in life. Anxiety about appearance does undermine women's self-esteem. But Emler's more curious finding is that there is very little correlation between how people think they look and how they actually look: their perceptions about their appearance are shaped by their level of self-esteem. Altogether Emler finds people have profoundly unrealistic views of how others see them, both negative and positive. How we think we are perceived is shaped by self-esteem. His conclusion is that all the myriad programmes designed to cure anti-social behaviour by raising self-esteem are wasting their time. Better by far to concentrate on the particular drug or crime problem and not on an imagined self-esteem deficit: self-esteem enhancing programmes he describes as "snake-oil remedies". This research deserves to cause a stir. It was always a kindly liberal notion that inside the anti-social bully was a timorous, tender soul waiting to be released. Emler is not suggesting that the violent are not damaged or might not be cured, but he has conclusively dismissed the intellectually woolly concept that lack of "self-esteem" is the root of all evil.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
What is fair pay? How jobs are rewarded may always be irrational - an unruly muddle of tradition and notional markets - but the unfairness of low pay in Britain defies any rational or moral justification. Income inequality is the worst in Europe, the minimum wage virtually the lowest. My book on low pay, Hard Work, is timed to pitch at the low pay commission: next month its new head, Adair Turner, will publish his first recommendation on the next minimum wage rise. The government has kept the minimum wage exceedingly low, at 4.20 an hour. It acts as little more than a backstop against the grossest exploitation. In real terms it is lower than the lowest rate set by any wages council before they were abolished by Mrs Thatcher. It is far less than John Smith's promise of half male median earnings, which would now pay 5.38 an hour. It is not even earnings-linked to guarantee it never falls back. Fairer pay is not part of the plan for achieving Labour's astonishing pledge to abolish child poverty, though without far more radical redistribution in pay as well as tax and benefits, it is unclear how it can be done. Since poverty is a relative measure, reducing inequality is a mathematical necessity. Plotting on a graph all EU countries' levels of inequality and social security rates shows how countries with similar economies make very different decisions about wealth distribution. There is no iron economic rule that determines how people should be rewarded or wealth shared. Fairer countries (Scandinavia, Holland) tend to do better than the unfairest - Britain. The graph shows that equality is not a matter of ineluctable economics but of long-term politics: decades of social democracy have delivered fairer and more successful economies. It requires voters to want it and political leaders to offer it. Labour does want fairer shares; as Tony Blair said, Labour would have failed if it didn't achieve it. But they also say pay doesn't matter and tax credit subsidies are the best way to redistribute. As long as low pay is topped up by the taxpayer, wages are unimportant: the lower the better, if it creates jobs. But pay matters a great deal. Ask FTSE 100 directors why their median pay is now 1.5m a year. They admit frankly that it is not the second yacht, but a matter of respect and status. What's true at the top is just as true at the bottom: pay signifies personal worth. It is of primary emotional and social importance. There is no justification for paying a care assistant, a nursery nurse or a hospital cleaner less than they can live on for work that society depends on. If you eat in a restaurant where the dishwashers cannot survive on their wages, you are paying too little for that meal: why should the state subsidise such meals by handing out credits to the dishwasher? The biggest single group of the poor are now in work and their only social problem is that they are not paid enough to live on. The argument against raising the minimum wage is fear of job loss. At some level jobs would be lost, but no sensible economist can predict at what level or in which sectors. All dire predictions on introducing the minimum wage were wrong. There is little risk of jobs going abroad: low-paid jobs are virtually all in service work and old folk can't be cared for from India. These are mainly essential jobs and have already been squeezed and downsized to their bare bones. If the government wants to raise the minimum to the maximum sustainable it could bring back wages councils, setting rates to fit not only different industries but different areas, with extra weighting for the south-east. They could fix a far higher "living wage" rate for all state employees and those jobs contracted out by the state. (This lifts the going rate without ordering every local hairdresser to pay the same.) The gap between men and women's wages actually grew last year, despite government pledges to end it: as women form 70% of the low paid, revaluing the work women do would make all the difference. Catering, caring or cleaning is only low paid because women traditionally do it. All this will cost money in taxes and in prices and no one suggests it can be done at once: it took Sweden decades of steady social democratic endeavour. But the huge task of abolishing child poverty can't be done by stealth. So far tax credits are the government's chosen mechanism. They are a brilliant political device, silently shunting significant state funds to low-paid families - 40-50 a week - without upsetting the CBI, while also making a large chunk of the social security budget disappear into the impenetrable maw of the Inland Revenue. Credits are so complicated that no one understands them, thus conveniently not alerting the rightwing press. Yet increasingly they warp the market, even if that is hard to measure. For example, if they were withdrawn, all low-paid workers would quit work at once and go on to social security, and employers would have to up their pay rates steeply to entice them back again. Tax credits make low pay possible and they subsidise bad employers. If the minimum wage rose and drove some marginal small companies out of business, their work would largely be taken up by bigger, better-run companies. Topping up low pay for many will always be needed. But as the primary means of abolishing poverty, it is already starting to make pay packets look distinctly bizarre. A typical single mother now draws 65% of her money in credit, only 35% in earned pay, however valuable her work. If credits are to rise enough to abolish all poverty, the distortion of both the labour market and individual pay packets will become extreme. Topping up pay has other serious defects, some of which the government tried to hide. Without notifying anyone, they sneaked out on a website on December 23 figures eagerly demanded for months - the take-up rate for the working family tax credits. These show that a third of entitled families were not claiming. Some 600,000 families were losing an average of 42 a week, resulting in a Treasury saving of 1.4 bn last year. (Since it can't be claimed in arrears, that cash should be used exclusively as a bonus for poor families: it could build and maintain many high-quality children's centres.) Experts reckon it extraordinary if any means-tested benefit ever reaches 80%. Families depending on child tax credits will find their incomes fall off a cliff when their youngest reaches 18 (most children still cost after 18). Families depending on credits will never build up any pension entitlement, which comes with better pay, not better benefits. Wives have been forced to stay home, as their low-paid husbands' credits make it impossible for them to earn. That is bad news, since one in three marriages fail and women who have never worked have trouble supporting themselves later. Above all, the blunt fact is that it is unfair to pay people less than they are worth, less than they can live on. What they are worth is not set by the market - the market is set by the social security system. But if none of these methods convince, then find others. Not even the right is comfortable with the idea that social progress is at an end and care assistants are destined to live on sub-survivable pay.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
What is fair pay? How jobs are rewarded may always be irrational - an unruly muddle of tradition and notional markets - but the unfairness of low pay in Britain defies any rational or moral justification. Income inequality is the worst in Europe, the minimum wage virtually the lowest. My book on low pay, Hard Work, is timed to pitch at the low pay commission: next month its new head, Adair Turner, will publish his first recommendation on the next minimum wage rise. The government has kept the minimum wage exceedingly low, at 4.20 an hour. It acts as little more than a backstop against the grossest exploitation. In real terms it is lower than the lowest rate set by any wages council before they were abolished by Mrs Thatcher. It is far less than John Smith's promise of half male median earnings, which would now pay 5.38 an hour. It is not even earnings-linked to guarantee it never falls back. Fairer pay is not part of the plan for achieving Labour's astonishing pledge to abolish child poverty, though without far more radical redistribution in pay as well as tax and benefits, it is unclear how it can be done. Since poverty is a relative measure, reducing inequality is a mathematical necessity. Plotting on a graph all EU countries' levels of inequality and social security rates shows how countries with similar economies make very different decisions about wealth distribution. There is no iron economic rule that determines how people should be rewarded or wealth shared. Fairer countries (Scandinavia, Holland) tend to do better than the unfairest - Britain. The graph shows that equality is not a matter of ineluctable economics but of long-term politics: decades of social democracy have delivered fairer and more successful economies. It requires voters to want it and political leaders to offer it. Labour does want fairer shares; as Tony Blair said, Labour would have failed if it didn't achieve it. But they also say pay doesn't matter and tax credit subsidies are the best way to redistribute. As long as low pay is topped up by the taxpayer, wages are unimportant: the lower the better, if it creates jobs. But pay matters a great deal. Ask FTSE 100 directors why their median pay is now 1.5m a year. They admit frankly that it is not the second yacht, but a matter of respect and status. What's true at the top is just as true at the bottom: pay signifies personal worth. It is of primary emotional and social importance. There is no justification for paying a care assistant, a nursery nurse or a hospital cleaner less than they can live on for work that society depends on. If you eat in a restaurant where the dishwashers cannot survive on their wages, you are paying too little for that meal: why should the state subsidise such meals by handing out credits to the dishwasher? The biggest single group of the poor are now in work and their only social problem is that they are not paid enough to live on. The argument against raising the minimum wage is fear of job loss. At some level jobs would be lost, but no sensible economist can predict at what level or in which sectors. All dire predictions on introducing the minimum wage were wrong. There is little risk of jobs going abroad: low-paid jobs are virtually all in service work and old folk can't be cared for from India. These are mainly essential jobs and have already been squeezed and downsized to their bare bones. If the government wants to raise the minimum to the maximum sustainable it could bring back wages councils, setting rates to fit not only different industries but different areas, with extra weighting for the south-east. They could fix a far higher "living wage" rate for all state employees and those jobs contracted out by the state. (This lifts the going rate without ordering every local hairdresser to pay the same.) The gap between men and women's wages actually grew last year, despite government pledges to end it: as women form 70% of the low paid, revaluing the work women do would make all the difference. Catering, caring or cleaning is only low paid because women traditionally do it. All this will cost money in taxes and in prices and no one suggests it can be done at once: it took Sweden decades of steady social democratic endeavour. But the huge task of abolishing child poverty can't be done by stealth. So far tax credits are the government's chosen mechanism. They are a brilliant political device, silently shunting significant state funds to low-paid families - 40-50 a week - without upsetting the CBI, while also making a large chunk of the social security budget disappear into the impenetrable maw of the Inland Revenue. Credits are so complicated that no one understands them, thus conveniently not alerting the rightwing press. Yet increasingly they warp the market, even if that is hard to measure. For example, if they were withdrawn, all low-paid workers would quit work at once and go on to social security, and employers would have to up their pay rates steeply to entice them back again. Tax credits make low pay possible and they subsidise bad employers. If the minimum wage rose and drove some marginal small companies out of business, their work would largely be taken up by bigger, better-run companies. Topping up low pay for many will always be needed. But as the primary means of abolishing poverty, it is already starting to make pay packets look distinctly bizarre. A typical single mother now draws 65% of her money in credit, only 35% in earned pay, however valuable her work. If credits are to rise enough to abolish all poverty, the distortion of both the labour market and individual pay packets will become extreme. Topping up pay has other serious defects, some of which the government tried to hide. Without notifying anyone, they sneaked out on a website on December 23 figures eagerly demanded for months - the take-up rate for the working family tax credits. These show that a third of entitled families were not claiming. Some 600,000 families were losing an average of 42 a week, resulting in a Treasury saving of 1.4 bn last year. (Since it can't be claimed in arrears, that cash should be used exclusively as a bonus for poor families: it could build and maintain many high-quality children's centres.) Experts reckon it extraordinary if any means-tested benefit ever reaches 80%. Families depending on child tax credits will find their incomes fall off a cliff when their youngest reaches 18 (most children still cost after 18). Families depending on credits will never build up any pension entitlement, which comes with better pay, not better benefits. Wives have been forced to stay home, as their low-paid husbands' credits make it impossible for them to earn. That is bad news, since one in three marriages fail and women who have never worked have trouble supporting themselves later. Above all, the blunt fact is that it is unfair to pay people less than they are worth, less than they can live on. What they are worth is not set by the market - the market is set by the social security system. But if none of these methods convince, then find others. Not even the right is comfortable with the idea that social progress is at an end and care assistants are destined to live on sub-survivable pay.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT), Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18 years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the long night of Tory opposition? Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the bellow of Crow. The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership or carry on declining. Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them. To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary: they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection to fight another day. But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves. This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a safety issue, sympathy may wane. Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her cooks, cleaners and carers settled for 5 an hour, less than half what firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant, breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and, frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some shook their heads. Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner. Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals. Their present 21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median, so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not everyone? The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates. Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be seen off. Times have changed. But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it gets difficult. Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively. Awkward truth.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT), Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18 years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the long night of Tory opposition? Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the bellow of Crow. The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership or carry on declining. Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them. To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary: they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection to fight another day. But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves. This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a safety issue, sympathy may wane. Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her cooks, cleaners and carers settled for 5 an hour, less than half what firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant, breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and, frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some shook their heads. Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner. Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals. Their present 21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median, so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not everyone? The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates. Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be seen off. Times have changed. But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it gets difficult. Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively. Awkward truth.
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8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Choice? What choice? The residents of Clapham Park Estate might be asking themselves that as they head off to the polls within a couple of weeks. People who live in what was judged Lambeth's worst housing estate will be voting on whether to transfer their homes from Lambeth council to a new community-led housing association. Since 1997, 142 estates have voted yes in housing-transfer votes, while only 25 have voted no. A wise decision, since this is a gun-to-the-head choice. Here's what confronts them: vote yes and in exchange for selling off some land you get your estate repaired and large parts of it rebuilt with new homes with larger rooms, a new park, new play areas, a new school and improvements all round - or else. Else what? Nothing, or almost nothing. If they vote no, eventually the estate will be repaired to the standards of the government's "decent homes" target - but that is a pretty basic improvement. In most of Clapham Park, a decent homes makeover would mean hardly more than a bit of damp-proofing and a lick of paint, and perhaps not for years. It would not include central heating, insulation, new kitchens or bathrooms, entry phones on front doors or lifts - all of which will be provided under the stock transfer plan if they vote yes. So where is the choice? A gleaming refurbished estate with lots of new housing and an extra 225 social homes, or carrying on much the same? It's a no-brainer: opinion poll samples taken so far suggest the residents will vote for the change. And yet now that can't be taken for granted. Over the last years, I have been observing meetings where the plans have been drawn up with tenants in the driving seat of the board that runs the estate. There have been extensive consultations and public meetings. But at the last moment, the Defend Council Housing group has moved to mount a campaign for a no vote. A war of leaflets and meetings has broken out. Insults are flying to and fro, roughly translated as "a bunch of Trots" versus "a bunch of pocket-liners bent on doing down the tenants for profit". This is typical of the pattern of the debate that has raged over these ballots. Defend Council Housing is wrong on this stock transfer. And they are very wrong to frighten tenants with - to put it politely - misleading stories about what the plan will mean. They have been telling tenants that they will lose their security of tenure (false: it will get written back in) and that they will pay higher rents (false: true in the past but Labour has put council and housing association rents on a par, by law). Worst of all is the charge that they will be permanently decanted but no one knows to where. This last is the most powerful fear. But tenants have been given a firm guarantee that they can all stay on exactly the same part of the rebuilt estate, which is strongly divided between the east and west sides. (A false rumour said all the social housing was to be squeezed into the east, while the lush west would be new, private homes). What makes these ideological battles hard is that, despite its fear-mongering tactics, many agree that Defend Council Housing is not altogether wrong. This government keeps boasting about giving choice to public-service users - but choice, it seems, does not extend to council tenants. Alan Milburn uses the council estate of his youth as an example of the need for choice, recalling how the council painted all the doors the same colour, but the tenants' right to choose their landlord is rather more important than door colour. Local authorities only transfer homes to housing associations because of Treasury rules and political dogma allowing housing associations but not councils to borrow money on future development. A stroke of the pen could let councils do likewise. However, now is no time to tamper with how the public sector borrowing requirement is calculated, in the middle of an election fought over a so-called "black hole" in government finances. Stock transfer opponents are right to object to selling off council-owned land for private development, when expensive land in the south-east is needed for more social and key-worker homes in London. Lambeth, which is short of school places, already regrets sales of old schools converted into loft apartments. So how should the tenants on Clapham Park vote? The danger is that some will be swayed by scare tactics and false rumours spread by the anti campaign. People are easily frightened and a tenancy can feel precarious: this is their home, their neighbours, their future. However, in weighing it up, Lambeth council tenants know they have had nothing to be grateful for in the past 30 years from a council landlord who has mismanaged and neglected them and is still deep in debt. When Camden tenants voted against stock transfer, they wanted to stay with a beacon council with an "excellent" rating as a landlord: but voting no left them stranded without new money. Housing experts say the government should give the best councils the same powers as housing associations. But Lambeth is no Camden. This vote matters more here: it is a vote of confidence in the residents themselves, who have been helping to run the estate for the past five years. Clapham Park is one of the 39 New Deal for Communities (NDCs) - a remarkable experiment in handing more power to tenants elected to chair and sit on the board that runs it. It is they who oversaw the masterplan. Given 56m to spend over 10 years, NDCs are one of Labour's most radical regeneration ideas, closely monitored, a regeneration testbed for all kinds of social enterprise, and their success matters. So when Defend Council Housing puts out leaflets claiming "Regeneration isn't about our needs, it's about other people making money out of our misery", it is a direct attack on Clapham Park residents elected by other residents. This is no place to play out politics. The management board of local tenants gives up a phenomenal amount of unpaid time and has done well, hitting most targets for improvement. New community support officers patrol the estate, scores of crack houses have been closed, prostitution is less aggressive, there are CCTV cameras in the worst zones, crime is down and the number of residents feeling unsafe after dark has dropped from 78% to 43%. After paying for extra teachers for schools and after-school clubs, exam results have improved - above target in English, despite the many non-English speakers. There may be too little choice in how to vote, but Clapham Park residents should block their ears to those who tell them that their own elected New Deal board has done anything but what's best in drawing up this plan. Defend Council Housing's campaign of fear could put it all at risk: it has already left many estates without a future after a no vote. It should argue this out with the national politicians, not jeopardise the best chances of local people.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
Choice? What choice? The residents of Clapham Park Estate might be asking themselves that as they head off to the polls within a couple of weeks. People who live in what was judged Lambeth's worst housing estate will be voting on whether to transfer their homes from Lambeth council to a new community-led housing association. Since 1997, 142 estates have voted yes in housing-transfer votes, while only 25 have voted no. A wise decision, since this is a gun-to-the-head choice. Here's what confronts them: vote yes and in exchange for selling off some land you get your estate repaired and large parts of it rebuilt with new homes with larger rooms, a new park, new play areas, a new school and improvements all round - or else. Else what? Nothing, or almost nothing. If they vote no, eventually the estate will be repaired to the standards of the government's "decent homes" target - but that is a pretty basic improvement. In most of Clapham Park, a decent homes makeover would mean hardly more than a bit of damp-proofing and a lick of paint, and perhaps not for years. It would not include central heating, insulation, new kitchens or bathrooms, entry phones on front doors or lifts - all of which will be provided under the stock transfer plan if they vote yes. So where is the choice? A gleaming refurbished estate with lots of new housing and an extra 225 social homes, or carrying on much the same? It's a no-brainer: opinion poll samples taken so far suggest the residents will vote for the change. And yet now that can't be taken for granted. Over the last years, I have been observing meetings where the plans have been drawn up with tenants in the driving seat of the board that runs the estate. There have been extensive consultations and public meetings. But at the last moment, the Defend Council Housing group has moved to mount a campaign for a no vote. A war of leaflets and meetings has broken out. Insults are flying to and fro, roughly translated as "a bunch of Trots" versus "a bunch of pocket-liners bent on doing down the tenants for profit". This is typical of the pattern of the debate that has raged over these ballots. Defend Council Housing is wrong on this stock transfer. And they are very wrong to frighten tenants with - to put it politely - misleading stories about what the plan will mean. They have been telling tenants that they will lose their security of tenure (false: it will get written back in) and that they will pay higher rents (false: true in the past but Labour has put council and housing association rents on a par, by law). Worst of all is the charge that they will be permanently decanted but no one knows to where. This last is the most powerful fear. But tenants have been given a firm guarantee that they can all stay on exactly the same part of the rebuilt estate, which is strongly divided between the east and west sides. (A false rumour said all the social housing was to be squeezed into the east, while the lush west would be new, private homes). What makes these ideological battles hard is that, despite its fear-mongering tactics, many agree that Defend Council Housing is not altogether wrong. This government keeps boasting about giving choice to public-service users - but choice, it seems, does not extend to council tenants. Alan Milburn uses the council estate of his youth as an example of the need for choice, recalling how the council painted all the doors the same colour, but the tenants' right to choose their landlord is rather more important than door colour. Local authorities only transfer homes to housing associations because of Treasury rules and political dogma allowing housing associations but not councils to borrow money on future development. A stroke of the pen could let councils do likewise. However, now is no time to tamper with how the public sector borrowing requirement is calculated, in the middle of an election fought over a so-called "black hole" in government finances. Stock transfer opponents are right to object to selling off council-owned land for private development, when expensive land in the south-east is needed for more social and key-worker homes in London. Lambeth, which is short of school places, already regrets sales of old schools converted into loft apartments. So how should the tenants on Clapham Park vote? The danger is that some will be swayed by scare tactics and false rumours spread by the anti campaign. People are easily frightened and a tenancy can feel precarious: this is their home, their neighbours, their future. However, in weighing it up, Lambeth council tenants know they have had nothing to be grateful for in the past 30 years from a council landlord who has mismanaged and neglected them and is still deep in debt. When Camden tenants voted against stock transfer, they wanted to stay with a beacon council with an "excellent" rating as a landlord: but voting no left them stranded without new money. Housing experts say the government should give the best councils the same powers as housing associations. But Lambeth is no Camden. This vote matters more here: it is a vote of confidence in the residents themselves, who have been helping to run the estate for the past five years. Clapham Park is one of the 39 New Deal for Communities (NDCs) - a remarkable experiment in handing more power to tenants elected to chair and sit on the board that runs it. It is they who oversaw the masterplan. Given 56m to spend over 10 years, NDCs are one of Labour's most radical regeneration ideas, closely monitored, a regeneration testbed for all kinds of social enterprise, and their success matters. So when Defend Council Housing puts out leaflets claiming "Regeneration isn't about our needs, it's about other people making money out of our misery", it is a direct attack on Clapham Park residents elected by other residents. This is no place to play out politics. The management board of local tenants gives up a phenomenal amount of unpaid time and has done well, hitting most targets for improvement. New community support officers patrol the estate, scores of crack houses have been closed, prostitution is less aggressive, there are CCTV cameras in the worst zones, crime is down and the number of residents feeling unsafe after dark has dropped from 78% to 43%. After paying for extra teachers for schools and after-school clubs, exam results have improved - above target in English, despite the many non-English speakers. There may be too little choice in how to vote, but Clapham Park residents should block their ears to those who tell them that their own elected New Deal board has done anything but what's best in drawing up this plan. Defend Council Housing's campaign of fear could put it all at risk: it has already left many estates without a future after a no vote. It should argue this out with the national politicians, not jeopardise the best chances of local people.
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8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Who said these wise words in the House of Commons? "In this spirit of great caring, dredging up personal cases of misery to try to find the one case that has gone badly in the NHS and overlooking all the reforms and successes that we have had, they have resorted to the lowest form of political debate." Was that Tony Blair this week? No, it was Tory shadow health spokesman Dr Liam Fox, in his maiden speech on May 12 1992. He spoke in the wake of the Jennifer's Ear debacle during the 1992 election, when Labour had used a child's case in an emotive party political broadcast and - as these things do - it blew up in their face. Dr Fox was dead right. That story too descended into farce as Jennifer's semi-separated parents rowed in public and it turned out that her mother was a Tory council candidate while her Labour-inclined father offered up her case to the party campaign machine. Families, we all know, are messy confused affairs with all kinds of internal dynamics and surprises. Now the family of Rose Addis have (unwisely) offered themselves up for public inspection by going straight to the Evening Standard with their version of their grandmother's treatment at the Whittington Hospital. The hospital's chief executive rightly sprang to the defence of his staff with a robust letter refuting every point of the family's complaint. Then all hell broke loose in the Commons as Iain Duncan Smith made the beginner's mistake of not triple-checking the facts. (The Tories are still green about cases that turn into political landmines.) Blair was genuinely angry and Duncan Smith lashed out, sensing that he may have fallen into an elephant trap. Things went from bad to worse as the hospital - the angriest of all - spelled out that the old lady refused to be undressed by black nurses. They gave Duncan Smith a furious walloping for raising a case without calling them first, demanding an apology. But nothing ever looks crystal clear. The hospital's hint that the old lady refused to be touched by black hands may have raised doubts about whether a confused 94-year-old was dumped by angry, offended nurses. Allow real life into political debate and things turn foggy. An independent witness spoke to me yesterday, outraged at the allegations against the Whittington. Jean Christodoulo was in the next door cubicle to Rose Addis, and she saw and listened to her most of the day. "She was very confused and the doctors and nurses were in to see her all the time, gave her a cardiogram and were very good with her," Jean Christodoulo said. "She refused to be cared for by a black nurse. She was in a terrible state and they were trying to clean her up but she would not let them. Sometimes she did not know where she was and kept calling out that she had lost her keys, very distraught, but they were really patient and caring. I was incensed when I saw her grandson on television saying she was not racist. I heard her shouting 'I don't want you touching me!' to a black nurse. I know those nurses and they are very nice, but maybe she was just confused. They couldn't have been more caring to her or to me. It's all political." The hospital's medical director, Professor James Malone-Lee (a Labour activist, it turns out) said what every family in the country must have thought when he suggested that Mrs Addis's relatives "had not helped at all" by failing to visit her for two days. "I regret to say it is not unusual for it to take such a long time for the family of elderly patients to visit." But families are not simple: who knows what their relationship is? The family put themselves up for such speculation by making the public allegations about Mrs Addis's treatment when they were not there to see for themselves. They could have used the Whittington's very good complaints procedure, but preferred the Evening Standard, newly edited by an apparatchik from the Mail which specialises in these frontpage NHS shockers. With breathtaking cheek - and surely some political motive - the grandson is now protesting about Downing Street: "I think it is an absolute disgrace they have committed such an intrusion. They may have breached codes of practice." He was considering legal action. Now the saga is unravelling, the entire Tory press has spun the story on its head and thundered into attacks on Labour for breaching patient confidentiality, as if Labour brought the case of this sad old lady to public attention. Does that mean the opposition and their press can use any case and no one can defend either hospital or government? Labour only repeated what the hospital had already said in an open letter. The peculiar question is whether doctors are allowed to use key patient information in public to clear themselves from calumny. Department of Health guidelines and BMA advice suggest that where a family puts information in the public domain, doctors are allowed to answer allegations with their version of the facts. The government should rush to sign today's BMA call for all parties to pledge no breaches in confidentiality, and all facts to be checked first. Will the Tories sign too? Who won? Labour, on points. But did they really? Most people only have half an eye on the news, so all that remains of poor Rose's 15 minutes of fame may be an old lady badly treated. In Rose's wake, came a stream of "My A&E hell" stories, many probably true. A&E may be getting better - most refurbished with another 100m just announced, 600 more nurses and targets to admit-or-discharge all within four hours by 2004. But "better" will never be 100%. This most public face of the NHS will still alarm on inner-city Saturday nights when eight out of 10 patients arrive with alcohol-related injuries and 65,000 staff were assaulted last year. That's why Casualty makes good TV drama. How can the NHS escape death by a thousand anecdotes? The Kings Fund, an independent health thinktank, yesterday called for ministers to withdraw to arm's length, giving real independence to each hospital. If only. The government already has similar plans but no seasoned observer imagines that it will ever be possible - here or in any other democracy - to stop health and its dramas being used as potent political ammunition by every opposition. How the Tory government blustered during Jennifer's Ear, accusing Labour of "shroud-weaving" and "sick NHS stunts". The best hope is that sharp and angry rebuttal by NHS staff themselves each time will see off political predators bent on proving that the NHS is unsustainable.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
Who said these wise words in the House of Commons? "In this spirit of great caring, dredging up personal cases of misery to try to find the one case that has gone badly in the NHS and overlooking all the reforms and successes that we have had, they have resorted to the lowest form of political debate." Was that Tony Blair this week? No, it was Tory shadow health spokesman Dr Liam Fox, in his maiden speech on May 12 1992. He spoke in the wake of the Jennifer's Ear debacle during the 1992 election, when Labour had used a child's case in an emotive party political broadcast and - as these things do - it blew up in their face. Dr Fox was dead right. That story too descended into farce as Jennifer's semi-separated parents rowed in public and it turned out that her mother was a Tory council candidate while her Labour-inclined father offered up her case to the party campaign machine. Families, we all know, are messy confused affairs with all kinds of internal dynamics and surprises. Now the family of Rose Addis have (unwisely) offered themselves up for public inspection by going straight to the Evening Standard with their version of their grandmother's treatment at the Whittington Hospital. The hospital's chief executive rightly sprang to the defence of his staff with a robust letter refuting every point of the family's complaint. Then all hell broke loose in the Commons as Iain Duncan Smith made the beginner's mistake of not triple-checking the facts. (The Tories are still green about cases that turn into political landmines.) Blair was genuinely angry and Duncan Smith lashed out, sensing that he may have fallen into an elephant trap. Things went from bad to worse as the hospital - the angriest of all - spelled out that the old lady refused to be undressed by black nurses. They gave Duncan Smith a furious walloping for raising a case without calling them first, demanding an apology. But nothing ever looks crystal clear. The hospital's hint that the old lady refused to be touched by black hands may have raised doubts about whether a confused 94-year-old was dumped by angry, offended nurses. Allow real life into political debate and things turn foggy. An independent witness spoke to me yesterday, outraged at the allegations against the Whittington. Jean Christodoulo was in the next door cubicle to Rose Addis, and she saw and listened to her most of the day. "She was very confused and the doctors and nurses were in to see her all the time, gave her a cardiogram and were very good with her," Jean Christodoulo said. "She refused to be cared for by a black nurse. She was in a terrible state and they were trying to clean her up but she would not let them. Sometimes she did not know where she was and kept calling out that she had lost her keys, very distraught, but they were really patient and caring. I was incensed when I saw her grandson on television saying she was not racist. I heard her shouting 'I don't want you touching me!' to a black nurse. I know those nurses and they are very nice, but maybe she was just confused. They couldn't have been more caring to her or to me. It's all political." The hospital's medical director, Professor James Malone-Lee (a Labour activist, it turns out) said what every family in the country must have thought when he suggested that Mrs Addis's relatives "had not helped at all" by failing to visit her for two days. "I regret to say it is not unusual for it to take such a long time for the family of elderly patients to visit." But families are not simple: who knows what their relationship is? The family put themselves up for such speculation by making the public allegations about Mrs Addis's treatment when they were not there to see for themselves. They could have used the Whittington's very good complaints procedure, but preferred the Evening Standard, newly edited by an apparatchik from the Mail which specialises in these frontpage NHS shockers. With breathtaking cheek - and surely some political motive - the grandson is now protesting about Downing Street: "I think it is an absolute disgrace they have committed such an intrusion. They may have breached codes of practice." He was considering legal action. Now the saga is unravelling, the entire Tory press has spun the story on its head and thundered into attacks on Labour for breaching patient confidentiality, as if Labour brought the case of this sad old lady to public attention. Does that mean the opposition and their press can use any case and no one can defend either hospital or government? Labour only repeated what the hospital had already said in an open letter. The peculiar question is whether doctors are allowed to use key patient information in public to clear themselves from calumny. Department of Health guidelines and BMA advice suggest that where a family puts information in the public domain, doctors are allowed to answer allegations with their version of the facts. The government should rush to sign today's BMA call for all parties to pledge no breaches in confidentiality, and all facts to be checked first. Will the Tories sign too? Who won? Labour, on points. But did they really? Most people only have half an eye on the news, so all that remains of poor Rose's 15 minutes of fame may be an old lady badly treated. In Rose's wake, came a stream of "My A&E hell" stories, many probably true. A&E may be getting better - most refurbished with another 100m just announced, 600 more nurses and targets to admit-or-discharge all within four hours by 2004. But "better" will never be 100%. This most public face of the NHS will still alarm on inner-city Saturday nights when eight out of 10 patients arrive with alcohol-related injuries and 65,000 staff were assaulted last year. That's why Casualty makes good TV drama. How can the NHS escape death by a thousand anecdotes? The Kings Fund, an independent health thinktank, yesterday called for ministers to withdraw to arm's length, giving real independence to each hospital. If only. The government already has similar plans but no seasoned observer imagines that it will ever be possible - here or in any other democracy - to stop health and its dramas being used as potent political ammunition by every opposition. How the Tory government blustered during Jennifer's Ear, accusing Labour of "shroud-weaving" and "sick NHS stunts". The best hope is that sharp and angry rebuttal by NHS staff themselves each time will see off political predators bent on proving that the NHS is unsustainable.
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8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Another day, another front page NHS horror story. London's billboards were ablaze this week with an evening paper tale - "94-year-old abandoned in casualty". It was a good blood-boiler - a frail old lady who had fallen and concussed herself was left alone "caked in blood" and forgotten for three days in A and E for lack of a hospital bed. Except it wasn't true. There were beds, but she was kept under observation, moved to a room of her own and only sent to a ward when well enough. But despite the hospital's vigorous denials the story still appeared, repeated in the Daily Mail, deeply implanting in a million minds yet another nasty NHS snapshot. The NHS is in grave danger - not from internal failure but from external attack. A war of anecdotes has replaced most attempts at careful analysis. It is more fun to write "My hospital hell", or "My hospital heaven in a much better Spanish hospital", "My wonderful NHS birth experience", or "My neighbour's 10-hour wait for his son's cut finger". Journalists who do not usually write about health feel quite at liberty to expound their own sudden brushes with medicine, good and bad, as if this were "evidence" of the state of the NHS, taking leave of the objective analysis they would apply to other subjects. Since I write about health, I am bombarded with friends' and colleagues' NHS sagas - good and bad - as if these were triumphant "proof" of anything. A head of a TV news service told me the other day that he now "knew" the NHS could not survive: his wife had a bad NHS birth. Actually it was because the hospital at the time was undergoing a major maternity ward renovation, one of more than 200 around the country, costing 100m. To be sure the temporary decanting process had been abominably managed, but this was not the sign he took it to be that now we must reach for some radical privatising alternative. Health stories are dynamite. Inordinate gleeful space and TV time is given to any medical calamity - last week's corker happened to come from a private hospital where a young mother died. As the NHS treats a million people a day, there will never be a shortage of such tales, as indeed, there never is in "better" Europe where just such horror stories of killer surgeons or fatal injections fill their tabloid pages too. In TV news rooms I see how pushy health correspondents, competing to get their faces on screen, can always elbow their way into the running order with some souped-up NHS crisis. Only 100% perfect medicine will do now, with zero mistakes and zero below-average treatment (a statistical impossibility). Without statistics, any bad anecdote lets the press ring the death knell for a non-viable, non-survivable health service. No such excited attention greeted the first annual report of the NHS modernisation board, the body which oversees the government's 10-year plan, on which sit leaders of the royal colleges of doctors and nurses, trade unions, managers and the independent Kings Fund. Barely reported, (not at all in most papers), here is the first annual assessment of what is actually happening. This is no New Labour spin machine, for on this board sit those who shout loudest when things get bad: they have no vested interest in glossing the facts, especially as many are in the middle of tricky NHS contract negotiations. Their report charts progress so far, not startling, but progress: 597 new critical care beds, 714 new general beds, 500 more secure mental beds, 10,000 more nurses, four new medical schools to double doctors in training, 10 new major hospitals, free nursing care for people in nursing homes, 150 new rapid access chest pain clinics, 797 GPs surgeries modernised, 42 new high street walk-in health centres, 5.75m patients using the new NHS Direct telephone advice service, and more. But some of the "successes" only serve to remind us how far there is still to go: 60% of GP surgeries now see patients within 48 hours, (hardly a triumph). The number of people waiting more than 15 months for their operation fell by a third but was still 8,100 (to be eliminated by 2005). Meanwhile, seven out of 10 were treated within three months. It is not much of a boast that no hospital now has "red" alert status for dirt, while more are still "yellow" than top class "green" clean. But the money is at last flowing in - 21 new MRI scanners, 52 CT scanners and so on. For all that, the killer anecdote will always win. Meanwhile consider the absence of some old stories. Leading NHS figures, like Lord Winston, are no longer blowing the whistle, as they rightly did on Labour's disastrous first two low-spending years. So far, for the second year running there has been no winter beds crisis. The NHS dog is no longer barking, even if it is too early to start wagging its tail. However good the NHS may become, the front pages of the 75% Conservative press will still proclaim it is getting worse. Tory hopes are pinned on persuading voters this failed "Stalinist" institution can only be saved by a dose of privatisation. As a tactic it works: Labour did the same with its own outrageous "24 hours to save the NHS" slogan at the 1997 election. It is lethal for public trust in the NHS, but all politicians kick it about recklessly for their own self-interest. The recent Telegraph poll showed how voters are swayed: two thirds think the NHS is in bad shape. Yet asked about their personal experience, 86% are happy with their GP and 77% happy with their hospital treatment. What can the NHS do when people believe the Daily Mail more than the evidence of their own lives? The answer has to come from within the NHS itself. Those doctors and nurses who speak out in bad times must get used to the idea of publicly defending it in good times against its predators. Tory ideas are flowing fast: Iain Duncan Smith posits getting people to pay to visit GPs. Professor Tim Congdon, Tory economic guru, this week publishes a pamphlet calling for state spending to shrink from 40% to 25% of GDP, cutting public services to a rump with minimal vouchers for health and education to be cashed in private facilities. "Over time extra expenditure would have to be financed by parents, patients and citizens, as they saw fit." It is not just the usual Tory extremists who now play around with the idea that the NHS is beyond repair, a 1940s outfit unfit for the 21st century and the like. The prime minister and Alan Milburn deserve their own share of the blame. It is time to stop floating a clever new NHS wheeze every week. It is time they started to stand up for the basic principles of the NHS, proclaiming its growing strength and encouraging its staff. Nuts and bolts reforms being implemented by the modernisation board are bearing fruit. The more Labour talks up radical ideas using the word "private", the more they undermine trust and confirm the Tory story that an ideological revolution is required: their own facts and figures suggest otherwise.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
Another day, another front page NHS horror story. London's billboards were ablaze this week with an evening paper tale - "94-year-old abandoned in casualty". It was a good blood-boiler - a frail old lady who had fallen and concussed herself was left alone "caked in blood" and forgotten for three days in A and E for lack of a hospital bed. Except it wasn't true. There were beds, but she was kept under observation, moved to a room of her own and only sent to a ward when well enough. But despite the hospital's vigorous denials the story still appeared, repeated in the Daily Mail, deeply implanting in a million minds yet another nasty NHS snapshot. The NHS is in grave danger - not from internal failure but from external attack. A war of anecdotes has replaced most attempts at careful analysis. It is more fun to write "My hospital hell", or "My hospital heaven in a much better Spanish hospital", "My wonderful NHS birth experience", or "My neighbour's 10-hour wait for his son's cut finger". Journalists who do not usually write about health feel quite at liberty to expound their own sudden brushes with medicine, good and bad, as if this were "evidence" of the state of the NHS, taking leave of the objective analysis they would apply to other subjects. Since I write about health, I am bombarded with friends' and colleagues' NHS sagas - good and bad - as if these were triumphant "proof" of anything. A head of a TV news service told me the other day that he now "knew" the NHS could not survive: his wife had a bad NHS birth. Actually it was because the hospital at the time was undergoing a major maternity ward renovation, one of more than 200 around the country, costing 100m. To be sure the temporary decanting process had been abominably managed, but this was not the sign he took it to be that now we must reach for some radical privatising alternative. Health stories are dynamite. Inordinate gleeful space and TV time is given to any medical calamity - last week's corker happened to come from a private hospital where a young mother died. As the NHS treats a million people a day, there will never be a shortage of such tales, as indeed, there never is in "better" Europe where just such horror stories of killer surgeons or fatal injections fill their tabloid pages too. In TV news rooms I see how pushy health correspondents, competing to get their faces on screen, can always elbow their way into the running order with some souped-up NHS crisis. Only 100% perfect medicine will do now, with zero mistakes and zero below-average treatment (a statistical impossibility). Without statistics, any bad anecdote lets the press ring the death knell for a non-viable, non-survivable health service. No such excited attention greeted the first annual report of the NHS modernisation board, the body which oversees the government's 10-year plan, on which sit leaders of the royal colleges of doctors and nurses, trade unions, managers and the independent Kings Fund. Barely reported, (not at all in most papers), here is the first annual assessment of what is actually happening. This is no New Labour spin machine, for on this board sit those who shout loudest when things get bad: they have no vested interest in glossing the facts, especially as many are in the middle of tricky NHS contract negotiations. Their report charts progress so far, not startling, but progress: 597 new critical care beds, 714 new general beds, 500 more secure mental beds, 10,000 more nurses, four new medical schools to double doctors in training, 10 new major hospitals, free nursing care for people in nursing homes, 150 new rapid access chest pain clinics, 797 GPs surgeries modernised, 42 new high street walk-in health centres, 5.75m patients using the new NHS Direct telephone advice service, and more. But some of the "successes" only serve to remind us how far there is still to go: 60% of GP surgeries now see patients within 48 hours, (hardly a triumph). The number of people waiting more than 15 months for their operation fell by a third but was still 8,100 (to be eliminated by 2005). Meanwhile, seven out of 10 were treated within three months. It is not much of a boast that no hospital now has "red" alert status for dirt, while more are still "yellow" than top class "green" clean. But the money is at last flowing in - 21 new MRI scanners, 52 CT scanners and so on. For all that, the killer anecdote will always win. Meanwhile consider the absence of some old stories. Leading NHS figures, like Lord Winston, are no longer blowing the whistle, as they rightly did on Labour's disastrous first two low-spending years. So far, for the second year running there has been no winter beds crisis. The NHS dog is no longer barking, even if it is too early to start wagging its tail. However good the NHS may become, the front pages of the 75% Conservative press will still proclaim it is getting worse. Tory hopes are pinned on persuading voters this failed "Stalinist" institution can only be saved by a dose of privatisation. As a tactic it works: Labour did the same with its own outrageous "24 hours to save the NHS" slogan at the 1997 election. It is lethal for public trust in the NHS, but all politicians kick it about recklessly for their own self-interest. The recent Telegraph poll showed how voters are swayed: two thirds think the NHS is in bad shape. Yet asked about their personal experience, 86% are happy with their GP and 77% happy with their hospital treatment. What can the NHS do when people believe the Daily Mail more than the evidence of their own lives? The answer has to come from within the NHS itself. Those doctors and nurses who speak out in bad times must get used to the idea of publicly defending it in good times against its predators. Tory ideas are flowing fast: Iain Duncan Smith posits getting people to pay to visit GPs. Professor Tim Congdon, Tory economic guru, this week publishes a pamphlet calling for state spending to shrink from 40% to 25% of GDP, cutting public services to a rump with minimal vouchers for health and education to be cashed in private facilities. "Over time extra expenditure would have to be financed by parents, patients and citizens, as they saw fit." It is not just the usual Tory extremists who now play around with the idea that the NHS is beyond repair, a 1940s outfit unfit for the 21st century and the like. The prime minister and Alan Milburn deserve their own share of the blame. It is time to stop floating a clever new NHS wheeze every week. It is time they started to stand up for the basic principles of the NHS, proclaiming its growing strength and encouraging its staff. Nuts and bolts reforms being implemented by the modernisation board are bearing fruit. The more Labour talks up radical ideas using the word "private", the more they undermine trust and confirm the Tory story that an ideological revolution is required: their own facts and figures suggest otherwise.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
After the season of excess come the resolutions - thinner/fitter/nicer. There may also be a nagging sense that it would be good to do something for the community. But what? Most people have a hazy idea of what volunteering might be and may shudder at the thought. Be a Brown Owl? Work in a charity shop sifting old clothes? Wheel a trolley of library books and Lucozade round a hospital? Clean out a canal? What if there is no escape from the blind old man waiting for your visit, a burden of guilt too far? The immediate manifestations of volunteering may not be 100% enticing to everyone and it is all too easy to alienate tentative would-be volunteers. Finding the right slot for each individual requires experience and sensitivity - and then it may last for life. Done badly, it may put people off for ever. As it is, half the population already does something: another 25% - 11m people - say they would "if only they were asked" but no one has. The government has waxed lyrical about the importance of volunteering, but their record so far is mixed. Millennium Volunteers, for 16 to 25-year-olds has gone well, using mostly experienced organisations such as the Prince's Trust and others. But elsewhere they have failed to use the experience of people who know how to entice volunteers and use them. Politicians always want to reinvent the wheel, eager to badge their own gleaming new organisations, often wasting money and good will. Volunteering was always fraught. Is it to produce a cheap workforce for things the state can't afford? Or is it to foster community? Should the outcome be the effectiveness of what volunteers do, or the satisfaction and community spirit engendered? In the end it has to be both, yet if matched badly the two functions can conflict. Community Service Volunteers (CSV), which places more than 150,000 volunteers a year for its 1m grant, looks with anxiety at some government spending. The government has just founded a new organisation, Experience Corps, to attract older volunteers for a walloping great 19m. It funded the new TimeBank for 27m. Many others in the same field, such as Reach, are asking the same question: why use complete beginners to start Experience Corps from scratch, employing expensive outside PR firms, the Saatchis and a host of those consultants who now increasingly descend upon large government grants? Allowing for all the usual charity rivalries, there is a storm brewing over what government can and can't do well in the voluntary field. Government does have a crucial role to play but not down at community level. Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV wants them to concentrate on opening up the institutions they run - prisons, hospitals, schools and social services - by setting targets for the number of volunteers each must use. She points to programmes in America where hard-pressed social services have a team of volunteers calling on the family of a child at risk. But here professional opposition to using volunteers is hardening. Half the hospitals use some, the other half use none at all, yet every ward has people who need company, feeding, reading to or taking outside. GPs who use volunteers for extra home visits have cut prescribing by 30%. Prisons are filled with illiterates needing tutors. Amateur eyes and ears, extra pairs of hands, befrienders, mentors, tutors and helpers would hugely improve most state services - but the professionals need to be forced to make it happen. This is not just to improve the service but to improve the local bond and the sense that these services belong to the community and not just to professionals. From next September, every 11 to 16-year-old will have to do community service as part of the national curriculum. Many schools will struggle to organise it, with hard-pressed teachers expected to devise and create suitable schemes. It will need seasoned senior volunteers to help schools set up plans, liaise with local government or hospitals. CSV says it and others can do it, using models from the best schools without each school learning from scratch. But the connection between the government and the people who have the experience on the ground often seems to be weak. The relationship between government and the voluntary sector is undergoing several reviews at once. With large sums of government money now pouring into community schemes, the voluntary sector complains it does not get a fair share and bidding for contracts can be a nightmare. Yet at the same time voluntary organisations fear becoming surrogate government agencies: many large housing associations are now hardly recognisable from housing departments. The problem is how charities can keep their freshness, originality and independence while taking on large slabs of heavily regulated state work. Figures for volunteers only emerge every three years, so we do not know yet whether government exhortations have helped slow the decline. Most people are drawn into volunteering by a friend or colleague inviting them to join in, not by M & C Saatchi. However, perusing the internet the huge array of opportunities is encouraging. It can include one-off short efforts and brief episodes: it does not have to be a long commitment. It might involve just keeping in telephone contact with a lonely person. Of the many sites, a good one to start at is do-it.org.uk where you can fill in your postcode and access an array of activities. In my patch I found this mixed bunch: painting frescos in a local day centre, being a business mentor, playing with children in Brixton prison visitors' centre, campaigning for fair trade, working in a Citizens Advice Bureau, mentoring young offenders or refugees, helping in a night shelter, mending electric buggies or knitting tiny clothes for premature babies. Local volunteering bureaux can offer more personalised ideas. Try csv.org.uk, volwork.org.uk, experiencecorps.co.uk, and timebank.org.uk.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
After the season of excess come the resolutions - thinner/fitter/nicer. There may also be a nagging sense that it would be good to do something for the community. But what? Most people have a hazy idea of what volunteering might be and may shudder at the thought. Be a Brown Owl? Work in a charity shop sifting old clothes? Wheel a trolley of library books and Lucozade round a hospital? Clean out a canal? What if there is no escape from the blind old man waiting for your visit, a burden of guilt too far? The immediate manifestations of volunteering may not be 100% enticing to everyone and it is all too easy to alienate tentative would-be volunteers. Finding the right slot for each individual requires experience and sensitivity - and then it may last for life. Done badly, it may put people off for ever. As it is, half the population already does something: another 25% - 11m people - say they would "if only they were asked" but no one has. The government has waxed lyrical about the importance of volunteering, but their record so far is mixed. Millennium Volunteers, for 16 to 25-year-olds has gone well, using mostly experienced organisations such as the Prince's Trust and others. But elsewhere they have failed to use the experience of people who know how to entice volunteers and use them. Politicians always want to reinvent the wheel, eager to badge their own gleaming new organisations, often wasting money and good will. Volunteering was always fraught. Is it to produce a cheap workforce for things the state can't afford? Or is it to foster community? Should the outcome be the effectiveness of what volunteers do, or the satisfaction and community spirit engendered? In the end it has to be both, yet if matched badly the two functions can conflict. Community Service Volunteers (CSV), which places more than 150,000 volunteers a year for its 1m grant, looks with anxiety at some government spending. The government has just founded a new organisation, Experience Corps, to attract older volunteers for a walloping great 19m. It funded the new TimeBank for 27m. Many others in the same field, such as Reach, are asking the same question: why use complete beginners to start Experience Corps from scratch, employing expensive outside PR firms, the Saatchis and a host of those consultants who now increasingly descend upon large government grants? Allowing for all the usual charity rivalries, there is a storm brewing over what government can and can't do well in the voluntary field. Government does have a crucial role to play but not down at community level. Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV wants them to concentrate on opening up the institutions they run - prisons, hospitals, schools and social services - by setting targets for the number of volunteers each must use. She points to programmes in America where hard-pressed social services have a team of volunteers calling on the family of a child at risk. But here professional opposition to using volunteers is hardening. Half the hospitals use some, the other half use none at all, yet every ward has people who need company, feeding, reading to or taking outside. GPs who use volunteers for extra home visits have cut prescribing by 30%. Prisons are filled with illiterates needing tutors. Amateur eyes and ears, extra pairs of hands, befrienders, mentors, tutors and helpers would hugely improve most state services - but the professionals need to be forced to make it happen. This is not just to improve the service but to improve the local bond and the sense that these services belong to the community and not just to professionals. From next September, every 11 to 16-year-old will have to do community service as part of the national curriculum. Many schools will struggle to organise it, with hard-pressed teachers expected to devise and create suitable schemes. It will need seasoned senior volunteers to help schools set up plans, liaise with local government or hospitals. CSV says it and others can do it, using models from the best schools without each school learning from scratch. But the connection between the government and the people who have the experience on the ground often seems to be weak. The relationship between government and the voluntary sector is undergoing several reviews at once. With large sums of government money now pouring into community schemes, the voluntary sector complains it does not get a fair share and bidding for contracts can be a nightmare. Yet at the same time voluntary organisations fear becoming surrogate government agencies: many large housing associations are now hardly recognisable from housing departments. The problem is how charities can keep their freshness, originality and independence while taking on large slabs of heavily regulated state work. Figures for volunteers only emerge every three years, so we do not know yet whether government exhortations have helped slow the decline. Most people are drawn into volunteering by a friend or colleague inviting them to join in, not by M & C Saatchi. However, perusing the internet the huge array of opportunities is encouraging. It can include one-off short efforts and brief episodes: it does not have to be a long commitment. It might involve just keeping in telephone contact with a lonely person. Of the many sites, a good one to start at is do-it.org.uk where you can fill in your postcode and access an array of activities. In my patch I found this mixed bunch: painting frescos in a local day centre, being a business mentor, playing with children in Brixton prison visitors' centre, campaigning for fair trade, working in a Citizens Advice Bureau, mentoring young offenders or refugees, helping in a night shelter, mending electric buggies or knitting tiny clothes for premature babies. Local volunteering bureaux can offer more personalised ideas. Try csv.org.uk, volwork.org.uk, experiencecorps.co.uk, and timebank.org.uk.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
At his new monthly press conferences, Tony Blair turns out a fine tour de force. He lays himself open to all questions, from footling local crime to great global issues. He looks unafraid, his manner warm and convincing. With elegant deftness he turns aside questions he does not want to answer. He plays off the hopeless vanity of the big cheeses among the lobby who vaunt their own questions instead of following up one after another to hammer home a previous point and dig deeper. He is master of this medium, knowing that one man exposed to a pack of hounds in public will always have the PR advantage. It is the fidgety press, not he, who winds up proceedings, bored after an hour or so, while he professes himself willing to stay and chat indefinitely. "Doesn't he do it well!" the journos say to one another between gritted teeth as they file out, feeling somehow cheated. This week's press conference was billed as the one where the butterfly would wriggle on the pin. The cabinet is against war, the party does not want it and only 53% of the public would support it even if there is full UN approval on a second resolution. Yet the Blair butterfly flapped its wings and escaped again. The effect doesn't last long. By the time the flotilla of hacks have reached the Downing Street gates, comparing notes as they go, they find there is nothing much there, another Chinese meal of a conference, hungry for more before they reach Whitehall. Then they realise the grounds for war have just shifted yet again. Last time it was because Saddam Hussein is a danger to his neighbours, has started four wars and must be stopped from launching a nuclear attack. But that line has worn thin: people see how containment works fairly well, with US bombing raids every week and no-fly enforcement. Dangerous materials may have slipped past sanctions - yet Iraq just does not look more threatening than North Korea. The real weapons of mass destruction are the hearts and minds of boys pouring out of madrassahs in our good friend Pakistan. So now the Blair argument has shifted. This week the clear and present danger is not Saddam starting another war but the danger of his weapons sold to the madrassah boys. Blair is rightly frightened about terror to come, but the missing link in his argument is this: wouldn't an attack on Iraq make such terror more - not less - likely? Dangerous materials are already loose on the global market and war will inflame a terrorist rage which can only be assuaged eventually with peace and prosperity in the region. There is no doubting the prime minister's sincerity: after all, his policy costs him more political pain than gain. Alas, that does not make him right and his moral rhetoric begins to sound naive in the real world where post-war Iraqi oil contracts are being bartered among UN security council members as the price and maybe the cause of war. His own attempt at peace in Palestine is crushed under the contemptuous White House boot. His passion on world poverty is ignored on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe if he were in the White House, he might be a great world leader. But he isn't. He has only a weak British hand to play and the only question to ask is has he maximised British influence for global good, or could he have done better with it? As the prime advocate of a joint European defence policy, he threw away the chance to bring Europe together and reconnect its citizens with a sense of purpose in the union. His global visions once seemed admirable - but now sadly misplaced in the hands of George Bush. If only the scope of his foreign dreams were matched in ambition by his visions at home. Perhaps that can change, for yesterday Tony Blair hosted a rather different event in Downing Street. It marked 10 years since the launch of Renewal, a magazine that sprung from the ruins of the 1992 election disaster. It was the thinking furnace to fire up ideas for New Labour modernisers. Tony Blair heads the list of its editorial advisory board and there collected was a room packed with many of New Labour's big brains - the advisers, the party apparat, heads of the thinktanks, cabinet brains, policy wonks, the brightest and best, (and many of those whey-faced young men who seem never to have left the artificial light of political seminar rooms). It was billed as a seminal event and so in a way it was, less for any actual ideas produced - (though there were plenty) - than for the fact that the prime minister himself recognised a need for them. Ten years ago New Labour began to shape its manifesto so that it came to power with a well-planned programme which has been carried out. Devolution, abolition of the hereditaries, a minimum wage, the New Deal, a million jobs, virtually full employment, tax credits, much more social security for children, child benefit, cash for poor pensioners, and a bigger increase than the NHS and schools ever saw before. But that was done or foreshadowed in the first term. Tony Blair promised a great leap forward in the second term, yet there has been dangerously little sign of new thinking. Delivery may be some time coming and even then expectations will run ahead, demanding more. Slowly nudging up statistics is not enough to sustain a government's momentum. So what now? A senior figure yesterday confessed, "We're crap at politics," and that is an important admission. It was said in a slightly faux self-deprecatory way, implying they were far too busy delivering to worry about spin. But politics does matter. It is the vision thing, a beacon that explains what they are doing and why. It is what makes people believe in politics and politicians. It is where trust begins and respect for politics is engendered. Tony Blair's great political fault is his refusal to deliver a clarity of ideals. He avoids taking sides, giving nothing to his allies without taking with the other hand. He is always equivocal, so every time a public service is praised, praise for the private must follow. The very word "modernise" which brought Renewal to birth is now a word damaged by daily abuse, a threat as often as a promise. Labour has evolved no new political vocabulary since then, a symptom of the lack of new political ideas for a political world changed out of recognition since 1993. This politics deficit is a curious phenomenon, for at heart Labour does not really lack ideals: it lacks the boldness to speak them out loud. The wish for social justice is there, but the vocabulary that might inspire others sticks in their throat. This meeting signified that the prime minister sees the problem. After a few years in power, all leaders have a dangerous tendency to spend too much time on foreign policy - so much more intellectually challenging. Tony Blair enunciates his big ideas globally and perhaps too grandiosely. What he lacks is some big new ideas at home, for the clever plans devised for 1997 cannot sustain Labour through the next election. Time for renewal indeed.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee .
|
At his new monthly press conferences, Tony Blair turns out a fine tour de force. He lays himself open to all questions, from footling local crime to great global issues. He looks unafraid, his manner warm and convincing. With elegant deftness he turns aside questions he does not want to answer. He plays off the hopeless vanity of the big cheeses among the lobby who vaunt their own questions instead of following up one after another to hammer home a previous point and dig deeper. He is master of this medium, knowing that one man exposed to a pack of hounds in public will always have the PR advantage. It is the fidgety press, not he, who winds up proceedings, bored after an hour or so, while he professes himself willing to stay and chat indefinitely. "Doesn't he do it well!" the journos say to one another between gritted teeth as they file out, feeling somehow cheated. This week's press conference was billed as the one where the butterfly would wriggle on the pin. The cabinet is against war, the party does not want it and only 53% of the public would support it even if there is full UN approval on a second resolution. Yet the Blair butterfly flapped its wings and escaped again. The effect doesn't last long. By the time the flotilla of hacks have reached the Downing Street gates, comparing notes as they go, they find there is nothing much there, another Chinese meal of a conference, hungry for more before they reach Whitehall. Then they realise the grounds for war have just shifted yet again. Last time it was because Saddam Hussein is a danger to his neighbours, has started four wars and must be stopped from launching a nuclear attack. But that line has worn thin: people see how containment works fairly well, with US bombing raids every week and no-fly enforcement. Dangerous materials may have slipped past sanctions - yet Iraq just does not look more threatening than North Korea. The real weapons of mass destruction are the hearts and minds of boys pouring out of madrassahs in our good friend Pakistan. So now the Blair argument has shifted. This week the clear and present danger is not Saddam starting another war but the danger of his weapons sold to the madrassah boys. Blair is rightly frightened about terror to come, but the missing link in his argument is this: wouldn't an attack on Iraq make such terror more - not less - likely? Dangerous materials are already loose on the global market and war will inflame a terrorist rage which can only be assuaged eventually with peace and prosperity in the region. There is no doubting the prime minister's sincerity: after all, his policy costs him more political pain than gain. Alas, that does not make him right and his moral rhetoric begins to sound naive in the real world where post-war Iraqi oil contracts are being bartered among UN security council members as the price and maybe the cause of war. His own attempt at peace in Palestine is crushed under the contemptuous White House boot. His passion on world poverty is ignored on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe if he were in the White House, he might be a great world leader. But he isn't. He has only a weak British hand to play and the only question to ask is has he maximised British influence for global good, or could he have done better with it? As the prime advocate of a joint European defence policy, he threw away the chance to bring Europe together and reconnect its citizens with a sense of purpose in the union. His global visions once seemed admirable - but now sadly misplaced in the hands of George Bush. If only the scope of his foreign dreams were matched in ambition by his visions at home. Perhaps that can change, for yesterday Tony Blair hosted a rather different event in Downing Street. It marked 10 years since the launch of Renewal, a magazine that sprung from the ruins of the 1992 election disaster. It was the thinking furnace to fire up ideas for New Labour modernisers. Tony Blair heads the list of its editorial advisory board and there collected was a room packed with many of New Labour's big brains - the advisers, the party apparat, heads of the thinktanks, cabinet brains, policy wonks, the brightest and best, (and many of those whey-faced young men who seem never to have left the artificial light of political seminar rooms). It was billed as a seminal event and so in a way it was, less for any actual ideas produced - (though there were plenty) - than for the fact that the prime minister himself recognised a need for them. Ten years ago New Labour began to shape its manifesto so that it came to power with a well-planned programme which has been carried out. Devolution, abolition of the hereditaries, a minimum wage, the New Deal, a million jobs, virtually full employment, tax credits, much more social security for children, child benefit, cash for poor pensioners, and a bigger increase than the NHS and schools ever saw before. But that was done or foreshadowed in the first term. Tony Blair promised a great leap forward in the second term, yet there has been dangerously little sign of new thinking. Delivery may be some time coming and even then expectations will run ahead, demanding more. Slowly nudging up statistics is not enough to sustain a government's momentum. So what now? A senior figure yesterday confessed, "We're crap at politics," and that is an important admission. It was said in a slightly faux self-deprecatory way, implying they were far too busy delivering to worry about spin. But politics does matter. It is the vision thing, a beacon that explains what they are doing and why. It is what makes people believe in politics and politicians. It is where trust begins and respect for politics is engendered. Tony Blair's great political fault is his refusal to deliver a clarity of ideals. He avoids taking sides, giving nothing to his allies without taking with the other hand. He is always equivocal, so every time a public service is praised, praise for the private must follow. The very word "modernise" which brought Renewal to birth is now a word damaged by daily abuse, a threat as often as a promise. Labour has evolved no new political vocabulary since then, a symptom of the lack of new political ideas for a political world changed out of recognition since 1993. This politics deficit is a curious phenomenon, for at heart Labour does not really lack ideals: it lacks the boldness to speak them out loud. The wish for social justice is there, but the vocabulary that might inspire others sticks in their throat. This meeting signified that the prime minister sees the problem. After a few years in power, all leaders have a dangerous tendency to spend too much time on foreign policy - so much more intellectually challenging. Tony Blair enunciates his big ideas globally and perhaps too grandiosely. What he lacks is some big new ideas at home, for the clever plans devised for 1997 cannot sustain Labour through the next election. Time for renewal indeed.
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6nickcohen
| 1Society
|
In an address given to an aptly awful audience of venture capitalists a few months ago, Tony Blair adopted the modish confessional style and told the world that his struggle to manage the public sector had left 'scars on my back'. The National Health Service was not a home for the many under-resourced and over-worked people who run the most efficient medical service in the developed world, but a swamp of vested interests. Nurses, doctors and cleaners were the élite forces of conservatism. The Prime Minister was their proletarian victim. Only the unreliable protection of an enormous Parliamentary majority and a Cabinet which will let him do anything he wants, prevented a martyrdom to rival Saint Di's. After his performance, no one had the right to be surprised when he announced that henceforth the NHS would buy operations from private hospitals. A 'concordat' had been reached with corporate medicine. 'I have always made clear that it is not a question of ideology,' he said in July when asked if further treaties were likely. Admittedly, this particular policy without ideology was the wheeze of New Labour's most influential think tank - the Conservative Party, which once was considered to be an ideologically motivated organisation. But all Third Wayers of good will and sound judgment could be relied upon to forget intellectual origins in this instance and agree that it is nothing more than plain common sense to cut waiting lists by snapping up private services. Who wouldn't prefer to be treated on demand by suddenly deferential consultants in a room of one's own, luxuriously appointed with pot plants the size of triffids, soft carpets and cable television? How many Observer readers have forgotten their loud defences of the NHS when worrying pains afflict them or their loved ones and gone private? What matters is what works. Only a weirdo and probable paedophile would sacrifice the health of a child on the alter of an exhausted ideology. The private sector delivers. It can deliver your child at the Portland Hospital, where Sarah Ferguson, Patsy Kensit, and Posh Spice were relieved of various sprogs. Those with other requirements can be sent to the Harley Street, Princess Grace or Wellington hospitals in central London. All four were brought by a company called HCA on 19 May. The US health conglomerate, which used to be called Columbia/HCA, but was forced to dance the old Windscale-Sellafield name shuffle for reasons we'll get to in a moment, added the Devonshire, Lister and London Bridge hospitals to its portfolio in June. The company intends to nab 'new facilities in markets outside the London area' as soon as possible. Commercial rivals at the London Heart Hospital are so worried by the Americans' predatory intent they are trying to excite a media campaign to persuade the Department of Trade and Industry to stop HCA creating a private monopoly in London. Sir Richard Needham, a former Conservative Health Minister who now runs the Heart, complained to me at length that HCA's associates, the PPP insurance company, had insisted their patients - sorry, customers - should be diverted from his beds to the rooms of HCA hospitals. Needham's colleagues say the loss of income may force him to sell to the Americans. You may not care about Needham's problems - I won't pretend to have been sobbing myself - when HCA seems the better product. The company's PRs boast it is 'one of London's leading healthcare providers... committed to excellence and quality through the provision of specialised healthcare services. We have established an international reputation for offering the highest quality of service in private healthcare'. They forgot to add that HCA's international reputation is somewhat tarnished. On 19 May it agreed to pay $745 million (500m) to the US Justice Department for the greatest fraud in American medical history, without admitting liability, after two executives had been jailed. When other alleged scams are resolved the final fine will be about a billion dollars. By purchasing private beds for public patients, New Labour is imitating American health care. The US government uses the Medicare and Medicaid national insurance schemes to pay 'independent' hospitals to treat working-class and elderly Americans. (The poor are left to suffer and die without health cover.) Charitable institutions with a rudimentary grasp of medical ethics are being taken over by medical conglomerates which seek to maximise profits. The US authorities cannot have officials on the spot to check that treatment is necessary and bills are accurate - if they did, they might as well go for the full Soviet terror of a 'socialistic' national health service administered by the state. The result of a freeish market is pervasive fraud. June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General of the US Department of Health, estimated that private hospitals were overpaid by $23 billion (15bn) a year. Fourteen cents in every dollar spent on health were stolen from the government by accident or design. Tales of scams fill the US press. There were the psychiatric hospitals which refused to release cash-earning patients even when they had recovered their wits; the psychologists who billed for 24 hours of therapy a day; and the health-company owners who claimed their son's first BMW was a medical expense. The FBI investigation into HCA showed corruption went beyond the odd rotten apple. 'Columbia's fraudulent cost-reporting practices have infected the cost reports of virtually every health care facility,' the US government said in its affidavit. As in Britain, HCA had engaged in the vigorous buying of beds and built a network of 340 hospitals. It was then able to add new euphemisms to the dictionary of fraud. Its executives tried 'upcoding': the exaggeration of the seriousness of an illness to receive higher fees; 'gaming': the double billing of the state; and 'physician partnerships': the practice of offering doctors shares, subsidised offices and directorships in return to steering patients to HCA hospitals. Mark Gardner, who worked in three Columbia hospitals, testified: 'I committed felonies every day. Let me tell you this a ruthless greedy company. Employees are the largest operating expense. Cut that to the bone. Cut nursing to the bone.' The instructions were obeyed to the letter. One nurse told how she was left to watch 80 heart monitors by herself. John W. Schilling, another whistleblower, said the company was confident it could avoid detection. Advertising and marketing costs were passed off as medical necessities and when the danger of a government auditor getting too close to the truth grew, he was told to buy her off with a job offer. Their testimony sounds strange to British ears. Yet Action for Proper Regulation of Private Hospitals (whose website at www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk I urge you to read before paying for treatment) suggests that many American vices are here in embryo. Private hospitals are dangerous places. They don't have the emergency teams of the NHS and their lovely single rooms are not the safest places to be when you need to attract attention urgently. For all the pampering on offer at HCA's Portland Hospital, the death rate of pregnant women is five times above the national average, as we reported last week. Their parasitic nature is well known - they rely on the NHS to train their staff and to take their patients when an operation goes wrong or an insurance company refuses to pay for complicated treatment - but their imitation of US practices deserves a wider audience. The British Medical Journal claimed in 1993 that at least one-third of all private 'hysterectomies... are unnecessary', while the growth in the number of 'therapeutically useless' removals of tonsils was an 'epidemic'. The NHS, by contrast, has no interest in overcharging or performing pointless operations, quite the reverse. The largest employer in Europe is remarkably free of fiddles in all areas except one: consultants skipping NHS commitments to work in the private sector. There is a perverse incentive: unscrupulous consultants benefit if they persuade patients to pay to see them privately. Invariably, the consultants with the longest waiting lists are those with the largest private practices. Instead of buying out consultants and giving them the generous salaries they deserve - for these are skilled men and women - to work exclusively for the NHS, the Government is making the perverse incentive more attractive still by pumping public funds to the likes of HCA. It claims that it will ensure that health authorities get value for money. If you were to point out that the US Government which has decades of experience of auditing private hospitals still cannot prevent fraud which would dazzle a mafioso, you would be dismissed as an ideological dinosaur. HCA has the advertising slogan 'You've Never Seen Health Care Like This Before'. Indeed you have not. But soon you may.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Nick Cohen .
|
In an address given to an aptly awful audience of venture capitalists a few months ago, Tony Blair adopted the modish confessional style and told the world that his struggle to manage the public sector had left 'scars on my back'. The National Health Service was not a home for the many under-resourced and over-worked people who run the most efficient medical service in the developed world, but a swamp of vested interests. Nurses, doctors and cleaners were the élite forces of conservatism. The Prime Minister was their proletarian victim. Only the unreliable protection of an enormous Parliamentary majority and a Cabinet which will let him do anything he wants, prevented a martyrdom to rival Saint Di's. After his performance, no one had the right to be surprised when he announced that henceforth the NHS would buy operations from private hospitals. A 'concordat' had been reached with corporate medicine. 'I have always made clear that it is not a question of ideology,' he said in July when asked if further treaties were likely. Admittedly, this particular policy without ideology was the wheeze of New Labour's most influential think tank - the Conservative Party, which once was considered to be an ideologically motivated organisation. But all Third Wayers of good will and sound judgment could be relied upon to forget intellectual origins in this instance and agree that it is nothing more than plain common sense to cut waiting lists by snapping up private services. Who wouldn't prefer to be treated on demand by suddenly deferential consultants in a room of one's own, luxuriously appointed with pot plants the size of triffids, soft carpets and cable television? How many Observer readers have forgotten their loud defences of the NHS when worrying pains afflict them or their loved ones and gone private? What matters is what works. Only a weirdo and probable paedophile would sacrifice the health of a child on the alter of an exhausted ideology. The private sector delivers. It can deliver your child at the Portland Hospital, where Sarah Ferguson, Patsy Kensit, and Posh Spice were relieved of various sprogs. Those with other requirements can be sent to the Harley Street, Princess Grace or Wellington hospitals in central London. All four were brought by a company called HCA on 19 May. The US health conglomerate, which used to be called Columbia/HCA, but was forced to dance the old Windscale-Sellafield name shuffle for reasons we'll get to in a moment, added the Devonshire, Lister and London Bridge hospitals to its portfolio in June. The company intends to nab 'new facilities in markets outside the London area' as soon as possible. Commercial rivals at the London Heart Hospital are so worried by the Americans' predatory intent they are trying to excite a media campaign to persuade the Department of Trade and Industry to stop HCA creating a private monopoly in London. Sir Richard Needham, a former Conservative Health Minister who now runs the Heart, complained to me at length that HCA's associates, the PPP insurance company, had insisted their patients - sorry, customers - should be diverted from his beds to the rooms of HCA hospitals. Needham's colleagues say the loss of income may force him to sell to the Americans. You may not care about Needham's problems - I won't pretend to have been sobbing myself - when HCA seems the better product. The company's PRs boast it is 'one of London's leading healthcare providers... committed to excellence and quality through the provision of specialised healthcare services. We have established an international reputation for offering the highest quality of service in private healthcare'. They forgot to add that HCA's international reputation is somewhat tarnished. On 19 May it agreed to pay $745 million (500m) to the US Justice Department for the greatest fraud in American medical history, without admitting liability, after two executives had been jailed. When other alleged scams are resolved the final fine will be about a billion dollars. By purchasing private beds for public patients, New Labour is imitating American health care. The US government uses the Medicare and Medicaid national insurance schemes to pay 'independent' hospitals to treat working-class and elderly Americans. (The poor are left to suffer and die without health cover.) Charitable institutions with a rudimentary grasp of medical ethics are being taken over by medical conglomerates which seek to maximise profits. The US authorities cannot have officials on the spot to check that treatment is necessary and bills are accurate - if they did, they might as well go for the full Soviet terror of a 'socialistic' national health service administered by the state. The result of a freeish market is pervasive fraud. June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General of the US Department of Health, estimated that private hospitals were overpaid by $23 billion (15bn) a year. Fourteen cents in every dollar spent on health were stolen from the government by accident or design. Tales of scams fill the US press. There were the psychiatric hospitals which refused to release cash-earning patients even when they had recovered their wits; the psychologists who billed for 24 hours of therapy a day; and the health-company owners who claimed their son's first BMW was a medical expense. The FBI investigation into HCA showed corruption went beyond the odd rotten apple. 'Columbia's fraudulent cost-reporting practices have infected the cost reports of virtually every health care facility,' the US government said in its affidavit. As in Britain, HCA had engaged in the vigorous buying of beds and built a network of 340 hospitals. It was then able to add new euphemisms to the dictionary of fraud. Its executives tried 'upcoding': the exaggeration of the seriousness of an illness to receive higher fees; 'gaming': the double billing of the state; and 'physician partnerships': the practice of offering doctors shares, subsidised offices and directorships in return to steering patients to HCA hospitals. Mark Gardner, who worked in three Columbia hospitals, testified: 'I committed felonies every day. Let me tell you this a ruthless greedy company. Employees are the largest operating expense. Cut that to the bone. Cut nursing to the bone.' The instructions were obeyed to the letter. One nurse told how she was left to watch 80 heart monitors by herself. John W. Schilling, another whistleblower, said the company was confident it could avoid detection. Advertising and marketing costs were passed off as medical necessities and when the danger of a government auditor getting too close to the truth grew, he was told to buy her off with a job offer. Their testimony sounds strange to British ears. Yet Action for Proper Regulation of Private Hospitals (whose website at www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk I urge you to read before paying for treatment) suggests that many American vices are here in embryo. Private hospitals are dangerous places. They don't have the emergency teams of the NHS and their lovely single rooms are not the safest places to be when you need to attract attention urgently. For all the pampering on offer at HCA's Portland Hospital, the death rate of pregnant women is five times above the national average, as we reported last week. Their parasitic nature is well known - they rely on the NHS to train their staff and to take their patients when an operation goes wrong or an insurance company refuses to pay for complicated treatment - but their imitation of US practices deserves a wider audience. The British Medical Journal claimed in 1993 that at least one-third of all private 'hysterectomies... are unnecessary', while the growth in the number of 'therapeutically useless' removals of tonsils was an 'epidemic'. The NHS, by contrast, has no interest in overcharging or performing pointless operations, quite the reverse. The largest employer in Europe is remarkably free of fiddles in all areas except one: consultants skipping NHS commitments to work in the private sector. There is a perverse incentive: unscrupulous consultants benefit if they persuade patients to pay to see them privately. Invariably, the consultants with the longest waiting lists are those with the largest private practices. Instead of buying out consultants and giving them the generous salaries they deserve - for these are skilled men and women - to work exclusively for the NHS, the Government is making the perverse incentive more attractive still by pumping public funds to the likes of HCA. It claims that it will ensure that health authorities get value for money. If you were to point out that the US Government which has decades of experience of auditing private hospitals still cannot prevent fraud which would dazzle a mafioso, you would be dismissed as an ideological dinosaur. HCA has the advertising slogan 'You've Never Seen Health Care Like This Before'. Indeed you have not. But soon you may.
|
6nickcohen
| 1Society
|
I know you should not judge by appearances, but 'Mrs B' doesn't look like a child killer. To use old-fashioned language, she is motherly - a plump, rosy-cheeked woman of Kent, whom nature seemed to have created to raise children. Kent social services soon put a stop to that. In 1999, Mrs B gave birth to a daughter. The child suffered fits that would have baffled previous generations of doctors, but which modern doctors could label with an impressively scientific name. Two concluded that Mrs B was poisoning the girl because she was an attention-seeker suffering from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. First, they claimed she had fed her tranquillisers. There was no trace of tranquilliser in the child's blood, hair or urine. Then they claimed she had injected her with water from a flower bowl or lavatory. One of Britain's foremost toxicologists said the idea that either could have caused fits was nonsense. The family paediatrician said he found the allegations absurd. The evidence was so feeble the police didn't investigate. No matter. In 2003, the Family Division of the High Court, sitting in closed session, upheld the decision to take the girl from her mother and send her to live with relatives 200 miles away. Curiously, since the authorities had declared that Mrs B was an insane and depraved woman, the courts allowed her to keep her other two daughters. I don't know how to explain this - maybe it's a miracle - but they survive in rude health. The Family Division might have been designed to allow miscarriages of justice. Judges need only find the case against parents proven 'on the balance of probabilities' rather than 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable questioning of their decisions by outsiders is next to impossible because it is a contempt of court to reveal what has gone on. The formal reason for secrecy is that it prevents the media identifying children - and, undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which they need protecting. When there is an injustice, however, it is in the interests of parents and child for the mother to be able to exercise a free woman's right to make a fuss by going to the papers, local TV station, her councillors and MP. In normal circumstances, the law would have stymied Mrs B, but she had two strokes of luck. The first was that her solicitor was Sarah Harman. This case has come close to ruining Harman. The best part of the past 18 months has been the admiring tributes. At the Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal last week, clients, judges and fellow solicitors spoke of a lawyer of the highest integrity who 'looks to right injustice wherever she finds it'. People who know her rely on her. After Michael Stone murdered Josie Russell's mother and sister, her father Shaun asked Harman to be Josie's trustee and protect her interests. If you need to smash your way through a brick wall, she is a good lawyer to have holding your coat. Mrs B was also fortunate that by 2003 politicians were belatedly realising that like many another secret world the Family Division was liable to be swept by pseudo-scientific manias. The spark for their concern was the quashing by the Court of Appeal of the convictions of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and others allegedly driven mad by Munchausen's. The evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow which had sent them down for child killing was revealed to be tosh. It was not just his cockeyed testimony. The Court of Appeal wisely noticed that doctors were trying to identify illnesses that 'may be unexplained today [but] perfectly well understood tomorrow'. When medieval cartographers did not know what lay beyond the mountains they filled the blank spaces on their maps with 'There be dragons'. Much the same had happened in English law. When no one could explain injuries or illnesses, Meadow and his associates filled the blank spaces with pictures of monstrous women. Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, announced a review that was potentially more explosive than the Court of Appeal's verdicts. Whatever else Angela Cannings and Sally Clark had suffered, their friends and families could at least protest loudly and in public. Hodge was to look at 5,000 Family Division cases with disputed medical evidence where the courts had taken away children in secret. Well, thought Sarah Harman, if there's at last going to be a review I want my client's voice heard. She sent details of Mrs B's case to the local MP and to her sister Harriet Harman, the solicitor-general, who passed them to Hodge. Nothing they saw identified Mrs B's daughter. Mrs B also spoke to the Daily Mail and the BBC. Nothing was printed or broadcast which identified the girl. Closed systems hate daylight. Kent County Council went ape and claimed that Sarah Harman was in contempt of court for talking to politicians and the press. It was far from clear that she was. No other common law democracy imposes such restrictions on child care cases. Even in Scotland, what Sarah Harman had done would not have raised an eyebrow. Kent County Council itself discussed Mrs B with Roy Meadow, even though he was not a witness in the case. If Sarah Harman were guilty of contempt of court, so were its officers, presumably. Mr Justice Munby heard the argument. On one point all sides agreed: Sarah Harman was slow to disclose what she had done to the court. She had a good excuse. Her doctors had just told her she was suffering from cancer, and she had to endure two bouts of emergency surgery while she was fighting to defend her reputation. You might have forgiven her for being a touch confused. Munby didn't forgive and threw the book at her. She was in contempt of court and had misled the court, he declared. No one had the right to discuss a Family Division case with anyone - not with the Children's Minister or the solicitor-general or their MP. People talk about judicial activism, but this was judicial totalitarianism. Britain is a parliamentary democracy, but Munby was saying that citizens who brought their grievances to their elected representatives were in contempt of court. Harman had to pay £20,000 in legal costs. The punishments didn't stop there. Last week the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard Kent County Council's complaint against Sarah Harman and banned her from practising law for three months. It is an ugly but typical picture of the legal establishment thumping critics when its faults are exposed. The backlash won't work and isn't working. Parliament reacted to Munby's treatment of Sarah Harman by changing the rules and giving citizens the right to discuss injustices. More reform is coming, albeit slowly and timorously. Even Mr Justice Munby told Parliament that he did not think 'the existing rules are necessary'. The old regime will die, but it is getting its pound of flesh before it goes. Sarah Harman has had her good name blackened and spent so many thousands of pounds defending herself that she has given up counting. I'm not saying all the 5,000 parents who had their children snatched were innocent. But the pathetic and frankly incredible review of their treatment found that in only one case - that's right, just one - did the Family Division get it wrong. Despite the scandal, despite the General Medical Council striking Meadow's name from the medical register, 'Mrs B' and 4,998 others are still being punished as child abusers. BBC1's adaptation of Bleak House continues at 4.10 this afternoon.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Nick Cohen .
|
I know you should not judge by appearances, but 'Mrs B' doesn't look like a child killer. To use old-fashioned language, she is motherly - a plump, rosy-cheeked woman of Kent, whom nature seemed to have created to raise children. Kent social services soon put a stop to that. In 1999, Mrs B gave birth to a daughter. The child suffered fits that would have baffled previous generations of doctors, but which modern doctors could label with an impressively scientific name. Two concluded that Mrs B was poisoning the girl because she was an attention-seeker suffering from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. First, they claimed she had fed her tranquillisers. There was no trace of tranquilliser in the child's blood, hair or urine. Then they claimed she had injected her with water from a flower bowl or lavatory. One of Britain's foremost toxicologists said the idea that either could have caused fits was nonsense. The family paediatrician said he found the allegations absurd. The evidence was so feeble the police didn't investigate. No matter. In 2003, the Family Division of the High Court, sitting in closed session, upheld the decision to take the girl from her mother and send her to live with relatives 200 miles away. Curiously, since the authorities had declared that Mrs B was an insane and depraved woman, the courts allowed her to keep her other two daughters. I don't know how to explain this - maybe it's a miracle - but they survive in rude health. The Family Division might have been designed to allow miscarriages of justice. Judges need only find the case against parents proven 'on the balance of probabilities' rather than 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable questioning of their decisions by outsiders is next to impossible because it is a contempt of court to reveal what has gone on. The formal reason for secrecy is that it prevents the media identifying children - and, undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which they need protecting. When there is an injustice, however, it is in the interests of parents and child for the mother to be able to exercise a free woman's right to make a fuss by going to the papers, local TV station, her councillors and MP. In normal circumstances, the law would have stymied Mrs B, but she had two strokes of luck. The first was that her solicitor was Sarah Harman. This case has come close to ruining Harman. The best part of the past 18 months has been the admiring tributes. At the Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal last week, clients, judges and fellow solicitors spoke of a lawyer of the highest integrity who 'looks to right injustice wherever she finds it'. People who know her rely on her. After Michael Stone murdered Josie Russell's mother and sister, her father Shaun asked Harman to be Josie's trustee and protect her interests. If you need to smash your way through a brick wall, she is a good lawyer to have holding your coat. Mrs B was also fortunate that by 2003 politicians were belatedly realising that like many another secret world the Family Division was liable to be swept by pseudo-scientific manias. The spark for their concern was the quashing by the Court of Appeal of the convictions of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and others allegedly driven mad by Munchausen's. The evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow which had sent them down for child killing was revealed to be tosh. It was not just his cockeyed testimony. The Court of Appeal wisely noticed that doctors were trying to identify illnesses that 'may be unexplained today [but] perfectly well understood tomorrow'. When medieval cartographers did not know what lay beyond the mountains they filled the blank spaces on their maps with 'There be dragons'. Much the same had happened in English law. When no one could explain injuries or illnesses, Meadow and his associates filled the blank spaces with pictures of monstrous women. Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, announced a review that was potentially more explosive than the Court of Appeal's verdicts. Whatever else Angela Cannings and Sally Clark had suffered, their friends and families could at least protest loudly and in public. Hodge was to look at 5,000 Family Division cases with disputed medical evidence where the courts had taken away children in secret. Well, thought Sarah Harman, if there's at last going to be a review I want my client's voice heard. She sent details of Mrs B's case to the local MP and to her sister Harriet Harman, the solicitor-general, who passed them to Hodge. Nothing they saw identified Mrs B's daughter. Mrs B also spoke to the Daily Mail and the BBC. Nothing was printed or broadcast which identified the girl. Closed systems hate daylight. Kent County Council went ape and claimed that Sarah Harman was in contempt of court for talking to politicians and the press. It was far from clear that she was. No other common law democracy imposes such restrictions on child care cases. Even in Scotland, what Sarah Harman had done would not have raised an eyebrow. Kent County Council itself discussed Mrs B with Roy Meadow, even though he was not a witness in the case. If Sarah Harman were guilty of contempt of court, so were its officers, presumably. Mr Justice Munby heard the argument. On one point all sides agreed: Sarah Harman was slow to disclose what she had done to the court. She had a good excuse. Her doctors had just told her she was suffering from cancer, and she had to endure two bouts of emergency surgery while she was fighting to defend her reputation. You might have forgiven her for being a touch confused. Munby didn't forgive and threw the book at her. She was in contempt of court and had misled the court, he declared. No one had the right to discuss a Family Division case with anyone - not with the Children's Minister or the solicitor-general or their MP. People talk about judicial activism, but this was judicial totalitarianism. Britain is a parliamentary democracy, but Munby was saying that citizens who brought their grievances to their elected representatives were in contempt of court. Harman had to pay £20,000 in legal costs. The punishments didn't stop there. Last week the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard Kent County Council's complaint against Sarah Harman and banned her from practising law for three months. It is an ugly but typical picture of the legal establishment thumping critics when its faults are exposed. The backlash won't work and isn't working. Parliament reacted to Munby's treatment of Sarah Harman by changing the rules and giving citizens the right to discuss injustices. More reform is coming, albeit slowly and timorously. Even Mr Justice Munby told Parliament that he did not think 'the existing rules are necessary'. The old regime will die, but it is getting its pound of flesh before it goes. Sarah Harman has had her good name blackened and spent so many thousands of pounds defending herself that she has given up counting. I'm not saying all the 5,000 parents who had their children snatched were innocent. But the pathetic and frankly incredible review of their treatment found that in only one case - that's right, just one - did the Family Division get it wrong. Despite the scandal, despite the General Medical Council striking Meadow's name from the medical register, 'Mrs B' and 4,998 others are still being punished as child abusers. BBC1's adaptation of Bleak House continues at 4.10 this afternoon.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Baroness Jay is to stand down from the Cabinet to see more of her granddaughter and, as an incidental bonus, fewer of the irksome headlines that have dogged her during her time as Leader of the Lords. Not that snipers are likely to have deterred her. At 61, she simply wishes to achieve what an aide calls a 'better work/life balance'. What an emblem she will be at a time when the stereotypes of creeping age are dead. Whatever balance Lady Jay achieves, it is unlikely to feature midweek bingo and holidays in Frinton. She will not be expected to peruse, for as long as the cataracts hold off, adverts for Dr Werner's denture fixative, pre-arranged funerals, incontinence pads, stairlifts and sunshine homes for the terminally confused. These days, the elderly call the shots. Shops and service providers target the grey pound. Politicians court the grey vote, and the discriminatory notion that employers must force people to leave when they become eligible for the state pension expired last week. From 2006, it will be illegal, under EU law, to stipulate a compulsory retirement date in an employment contract. This provision, hailed as upholding human rights, also gets the country out of a hole. There are now four workers for every pensioner. By 2050, without a rise in retirement age or an immigration total of one million a year, the ratio will be two to one. By then, a quarter of Britons will be over 65. Already, the over-50s represent one third of the UK population, have a collective income of 166 billion, hold 80 per cent of Britain's wealth and 60 per cent of UK savings. In short, they are loaded. Retailers fawn on them, while failing to establish what this strange, new breed wants or needs. A contributor to a recent anthology called The Definitive Guide to Mature Advertising And Marketing solemnly advises that home-shopping catalogues targeted at oldies should offer dress sizes up to 34, footwear of an EEE fitting and expandable trousers. 'Today's 50 year olds have worn jeans for 30-plus years,' the author (clearly a student of the T. Blair informal dress code) writes. 'Consequently, success is gained by flattering youthful aspirations and offering jeans with discreet side elastication for extra comfort.' How misunderstood the ageing are. For a start, 50 seems quite young to anyone but a creative director or a fruit fly. In addition, oldies do not, in general, have feet broader than telephone directories and bottoms resembling mattresses. They are, instead, skipping round like Baroness Jay and compiling a new lifestyle portfolio, or booking Saga cruises to the Galapagos, or brushing up on their golf swing or Mandarin. It is hard to see why this vibrant Sanatogen set should not carry on working, particularly since a retirement age of 65, or 60 for women, was established in Britain half a century ago to fit the narrow span between the gold watch and the grave. Now, according to a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, the Government's promise to pay the basic state pension to future pensioners represents an unrecognised liability of 1,000bn. The longer people work, the less acute the pensions problem becomes. But the calculation also involves well-being. Last week, the Guardian held up Bobby Robson, 67, and John Mortimer, 77, as examples of contented older workers who, but for their choice of football and writing, would have been out on their ears long ago. Instead, Mr Mortimer's life seems a pleasant round of parties and book signings and languorous champagne lunches. No doubt Lincolnshire beetroot-picklers or conductors on the Kilburn night bus or stressed-out teachers would also be delighted to put in a few extra years if the Krug and hours were right. Whether headteachers want to take up Margaret Hodge's kind suggestion of a classroom job after 65 'to lessen the pressure as they got older' seems quite another matter. For now, sticking around is rarely encouraged. Unwanted executives step aside at 55 with a fat pension and a mutual sigh of relief. Good policemen rarely stay beyond 50 because, under existing pension rules, it would be financial suicide to do so. Whitehall despatches its employees at 60, while others simply get booted out when they are deemed to have reached their use-by date. Only 37 per cent of men still work by the age of 64, and the Louis MacNiece axiom - 'Sit on your arse for 40 years and hang your hat on a pension' - is for serious time-servers only. Reversing the pattern will be hard, not least because many who can afford it quite like the idea of 30 years of indolence. Change may, despite pious talk of rights and choice, involve compulsion. For Britain to retain the same balance between workers and retired people over the next half century would mean raising the retirement age to 72. Already Iceland's threshold is 70, Norway's and Denmark's is 67, and in Italy, where the birth rate is dropping faster than anywhere in Europe, workers regularly slog on until 75. Whatever compact Britain eventually reaches - hopefully more immigration, a move towards funded pensions and encouraging, but not forcing, people to work longer - its success will depend on making the poorest better valued and rewarded. The new spotlight on old people gleams on a supposedly homogeneous breed. They, increasingly, are the dominant workers, consumers and electors. An Age Concern survey last week showed that six million elderly voters have still not decided which party to support. In 1997, 38 per cent backed Labour and 29 per cent Tory. If that position were reversed - as it was in a Gallup poll last summer - Labour would have won 349 seats instead of 418. No wonder both Hague and Blair are full of blandishments for the elderly. Labour's deal, skewed longer-term towards helping the poorest, is brave considering what is at stake. It is also the only solution. Old age is not synonymous with poverty any more. Over the past 20 years, pensioners have done twice as well as the general population. But while share-owning and occupational and personal pensions have underpinned a 60 per cent growth in income, the divide between rich and poor has widened dramatically. That gap must be narrowed now, not only for fairness but also, more expediently, because this is perhaps the last generation of pensioners that will vote for altruism. Affluent older people are the volunteers - the cancer-shop workers or meals-on-wheels deliverers - who see the poverty among those of their peers who get the worst NHS treatments, a pitiful pension and a life of isolation imposed, in part, by an abysmal transport system. The next generation of wealthy pensioners will be a Peter Pan collection of gym-toned, cryogenically-preserved, smooth-browed Eminem fans whose long juggling of the 'work/life balance' may blind them to the fact that others have little life and less work to weigh. The world grows older by the minute, The future is grey. There is nothing alarming in that evolution, beyond the fact that if the current gulf persists, a twenty-first century population composed of sprightly, globe-bestriding, vitamin-popping, nine-to-five-working octogenarians will only be camouflage for a society increasingly polarised between rich and poor.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Baroness Jay is to stand down from the Cabinet to see more of her granddaughter and, as an incidental bonus, fewer of the irksome headlines that have dogged her during her time as Leader of the Lords. Not that snipers are likely to have deterred her. At 61, she simply wishes to achieve what an aide calls a 'better work/life balance'. What an emblem she will be at a time when the stereotypes of creeping age are dead. Whatever balance Lady Jay achieves, it is unlikely to feature midweek bingo and holidays in Frinton. She will not be expected to peruse, for as long as the cataracts hold off, adverts for Dr Werner's denture fixative, pre-arranged funerals, incontinence pads, stairlifts and sunshine homes for the terminally confused. These days, the elderly call the shots. Shops and service providers target the grey pound. Politicians court the grey vote, and the discriminatory notion that employers must force people to leave when they become eligible for the state pension expired last week. From 2006, it will be illegal, under EU law, to stipulate a compulsory retirement date in an employment contract. This provision, hailed as upholding human rights, also gets the country out of a hole. There are now four workers for every pensioner. By 2050, without a rise in retirement age or an immigration total of one million a year, the ratio will be two to one. By then, a quarter of Britons will be over 65. Already, the over-50s represent one third of the UK population, have a collective income of 166 billion, hold 80 per cent of Britain's wealth and 60 per cent of UK savings. In short, they are loaded. Retailers fawn on them, while failing to establish what this strange, new breed wants or needs. A contributor to a recent anthology called The Definitive Guide to Mature Advertising And Marketing solemnly advises that home-shopping catalogues targeted at oldies should offer dress sizes up to 34, footwear of an EEE fitting and expandable trousers. 'Today's 50 year olds have worn jeans for 30-plus years,' the author (clearly a student of the T. Blair informal dress code) writes. 'Consequently, success is gained by flattering youthful aspirations and offering jeans with discreet side elastication for extra comfort.' How misunderstood the ageing are. For a start, 50 seems quite young to anyone but a creative director or a fruit fly. In addition, oldies do not, in general, have feet broader than telephone directories and bottoms resembling mattresses. They are, instead, skipping round like Baroness Jay and compiling a new lifestyle portfolio, or booking Saga cruises to the Galapagos, or brushing up on their golf swing or Mandarin. It is hard to see why this vibrant Sanatogen set should not carry on working, particularly since a retirement age of 65, or 60 for women, was established in Britain half a century ago to fit the narrow span between the gold watch and the grave. Now, according to a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, the Government's promise to pay the basic state pension to future pensioners represents an unrecognised liability of 1,000bn. The longer people work, the less acute the pensions problem becomes. But the calculation also involves well-being. Last week, the Guardian held up Bobby Robson, 67, and John Mortimer, 77, as examples of contented older workers who, but for their choice of football and writing, would have been out on their ears long ago. Instead, Mr Mortimer's life seems a pleasant round of parties and book signings and languorous champagne lunches. No doubt Lincolnshire beetroot-picklers or conductors on the Kilburn night bus or stressed-out teachers would also be delighted to put in a few extra years if the Krug and hours were right. Whether headteachers want to take up Margaret Hodge's kind suggestion of a classroom job after 65 'to lessen the pressure as they got older' seems quite another matter. For now, sticking around is rarely encouraged. Unwanted executives step aside at 55 with a fat pension and a mutual sigh of relief. Good policemen rarely stay beyond 50 because, under existing pension rules, it would be financial suicide to do so. Whitehall despatches its employees at 60, while others simply get booted out when they are deemed to have reached their use-by date. Only 37 per cent of men still work by the age of 64, and the Louis MacNiece axiom - 'Sit on your arse for 40 years and hang your hat on a pension' - is for serious time-servers only. Reversing the pattern will be hard, not least because many who can afford it quite like the idea of 30 years of indolence. Change may, despite pious talk of rights and choice, involve compulsion. For Britain to retain the same balance between workers and retired people over the next half century would mean raising the retirement age to 72. Already Iceland's threshold is 70, Norway's and Denmark's is 67, and in Italy, where the birth rate is dropping faster than anywhere in Europe, workers regularly slog on until 75. Whatever compact Britain eventually reaches - hopefully more immigration, a move towards funded pensions and encouraging, but not forcing, people to work longer - its success will depend on making the poorest better valued and rewarded. The new spotlight on old people gleams on a supposedly homogeneous breed. They, increasingly, are the dominant workers, consumers and electors. An Age Concern survey last week showed that six million elderly voters have still not decided which party to support. In 1997, 38 per cent backed Labour and 29 per cent Tory. If that position were reversed - as it was in a Gallup poll last summer - Labour would have won 349 seats instead of 418. No wonder both Hague and Blair are full of blandishments for the elderly. Labour's deal, skewed longer-term towards helping the poorest, is brave considering what is at stake. It is also the only solution. Old age is not synonymous with poverty any more. Over the past 20 years, pensioners have done twice as well as the general population. But while share-owning and occupational and personal pensions have underpinned a 60 per cent growth in income, the divide between rich and poor has widened dramatically. That gap must be narrowed now, not only for fairness but also, more expediently, because this is perhaps the last generation of pensioners that will vote for altruism. Affluent older people are the volunteers - the cancer-shop workers or meals-on-wheels deliverers - who see the poverty among those of their peers who get the worst NHS treatments, a pitiful pension and a life of isolation imposed, in part, by an abysmal transport system. The next generation of wealthy pensioners will be a Peter Pan collection of gym-toned, cryogenically-preserved, smooth-browed Eminem fans whose long juggling of the 'work/life balance' may blind them to the fact that others have little life and less work to weigh. The world grows older by the minute, The future is grey. There is nothing alarming in that evolution, beyond the fact that if the current gulf persists, a twenty-first century population composed of sprightly, globe-bestriding, vitamin-popping, nine-to-five-working octogenarians will only be camouflage for a society increasingly polarised between rich and poor.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
The BBC has just concluded an inspiring series on the pioneering work of Kypros Nicolaides. His struggle to save the lives of unborn babies at King's College Hospital reflected the world-beating empathy, resource and skill on offer through the NHS, albeit in limited doses. As Life Before Birth finished, another dramatic primetime documentary unfolded at a second London hospital. Though the plotlines could not have been more dissimilar, Professor Nicolaides's base at King's College is not so different to A&E at the Whittington, where Rose Addis was treated. In both departments, the scruffy interiors are less evocative of Nicky Haslam than Iris Murdoch. Neither is well-supplied with back copies of Tatler. There is no sense, in either waiting-area filled with grime-pitted plastic chairs and sticky Lego bricks, that a feng shui consultant has recently passed this way. The television cameras did not dwell either on shabby corridors or on Nicolaides's private gloom. Once, he told me recently, he went to conferences knowing that British foetal medicine was the best in Europe. 'Now I talk about the rate of death in premature babies, and people from so-called underdeveloped countries raise their eyebrows at our low standards compared to theirs,' he said. Morale among NHS staff generally was desperate. I expect the mood was similar at the Whittington, even before Iain Duncan Smith raised the case of Mrs Addis and her alleged neglect. Since the ensuing pandemonium produced no clear evidence, it is fair to judge the hospital only on its formal record. One recent study put the Whittington in Britain's top 40 trusts. The Government's commission for health improvements said last week that most aspects were fine but that patients had to wait too long in casualty. The real problem is evident to any visitor. You can calibrate it in lack of staff, or queuing time, or the ratio of Hampstead liberals to Holloway drunks, but the bottom line is poverty, as endemic in the patients as in the system. Even so, the Whittington is less awful than last week's insults suggest. King's College, for all its specialist brilliance, is more beleaguered than the flattery of the cameras implies. Two hospitals; two shifting perspectives. Why is the NHS always so misunderstood? Set aside the furore of the Addis case, with its baggage of blood-stained socks, unchanged clothes, tardy family visitors and (hastily-dropped) racism charges. The facts hardly matter, not least because there aren't many. The real issue is why most NHS debate has become unhinged from reason. No other country behaves so emotionally, or hysterically, about healthcare. Dutch and Italian patients must blink at the rapturous hymns delivered by incapacitated British tourists who end up in their hospitals. We ship our sick off on Eurostar for operations, convinced that Lille is the new Lourdes. The French system, often touted as a model institution, is actually riven by industrial battles over pay and hours. But when GPs went on strike again last week, there was no national panic or battalions of prescription-starved grandmas storming the Elyse Palace. While health is not to be compared with the services offered by glaziers or gasmen, attitudes to the NHS stray far beyond mere issues of life and death into the sentimental swampland of politics. To both main parties, the health service, replete with heroes and villains, is Victorian melodrama on an heroic scale. In the latest production of Temptation Sordid Or Virtue Rewarded, Duncan Smith used his odious Commons attack to smear the Whittington staff. But Alan Milburn has also cast health professionals as villainous Sir Jaspers. Although now all public servants are Mr Blair's social entrepreneurs, I do not remember Mr Milburn offering much comfort to can-do innovators who moved bodies into an overspill hospital morgue in Bedford. Both in that confected scandal and the Alder Hey organs dbcle, ministerial interventions inflamed fury. In an arena where cool logic should inform good stewardship, health policy looks too random and events-driven. Like rotas for cricket teas and church-hall rummage sales, it also owes a disproportionate debt to elderly women. Mr Blair's first pledge of parity with Europe and much more money was accelerated by the stories of the cancer patient, Mavis Skeet, and by Lord Winston's attack, fuelled by the treatment his sick mother had received. Now there is Mrs Addis. Sandwiched between those events is a confetti of initiatives. Billions of pounds have been almost tracelessly absorbed into the parched terrain of the NHS. Yet ironically, just before the Whittington case, the Government might have thought it could relax. The Bristol heart deaths affair was finally over. There was, as yet, no winter beds crisis; 86 per cent of patients were happy with their treatment. The new NHS modernisation board, a forum for the influential, had just produced a report so optimistic as to be almost unbelievable. And so it was. By Friday, the news that 5.75 million patients use NHS Direct had mutated into an Audit Commission verdict that the helplines aren't being used by the most needy and that the service is so far adrift of its targets that it is revising the aim of nearly all callers talking to a nurse in five minutes. The new goal time will be 20. Whatever the merits of the modernisation board, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons prefers, in an unusual gesture of independence, not to sit on it. Sir Peter Morris believes that such a role might compromise his ability to say what he believes to be true, namely, that hospitals are in a much worse mess than he would have believed possible. But despite government spin and professional gloom, there is good news too. Labour has abandoned the myth that the NHS can ever flourish without tax rises. It now looks possible that the upper limit on National Insurance will be removed. Mr Duncan Smith thinks, conversely, that tax cuts can be combined with a better NHS. That difference explains, more cogently than any hissy fit over individuals' treatment, why Labour may create an excellent health service, why the Tories never will, and why Mr Blair therefore holds all the cards. He should now deal a few out and see that salvation cannot be achieved while government goes into synchronised spasm at every twitch of a cubicle curtain in the Whittington Hospital or elsewhere. The King's Fund last week recommended, rightly, that local health providers should be autonomous. This is very different from the conditional freedom Mr Milburn is offering to the tractable and obedient. More radically, the King's Fund wants a corporation, similar to the BBC, to run the health service, leaving government only to raise money and do broad-brush strategy. Sir Peter Morris has also called for the service to be severed from political diktat. Handing the NHS over to faceless administrators strikes Ministers as crazy. They are wrong. Separation of powers is the obvious and perhaps the only way forward. What the King's Fund and Sir Peter are saying, more or less politely, has been perfectly illustrated by the histrionics of the past week. Governments, even well-intentioned ones, are not fit to run the health service.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
The BBC has just concluded an inspiring series on the pioneering work of Kypros Nicolaides. His struggle to save the lives of unborn babies at King's College Hospital reflected the world-beating empathy, resource and skill on offer through the NHS, albeit in limited doses. As Life Before Birth finished, another dramatic primetime documentary unfolded at a second London hospital. Though the plotlines could not have been more dissimilar, Professor Nicolaides's base at King's College is not so different to A&E at the Whittington, where Rose Addis was treated. In both departments, the scruffy interiors are less evocative of Nicky Haslam than Iris Murdoch. Neither is well-supplied with back copies of Tatler. There is no sense, in either waiting-area filled with grime-pitted plastic chairs and sticky Lego bricks, that a feng shui consultant has recently passed this way. The television cameras did not dwell either on shabby corridors or on Nicolaides's private gloom. Once, he told me recently, he went to conferences knowing that British foetal medicine was the best in Europe. 'Now I talk about the rate of death in premature babies, and people from so-called underdeveloped countries raise their eyebrows at our low standards compared to theirs,' he said. Morale among NHS staff generally was desperate. I expect the mood was similar at the Whittington, even before Iain Duncan Smith raised the case of Mrs Addis and her alleged neglect. Since the ensuing pandemonium produced no clear evidence, it is fair to judge the hospital only on its formal record. One recent study put the Whittington in Britain's top 40 trusts. The Government's commission for health improvements said last week that most aspects were fine but that patients had to wait too long in casualty. The real problem is evident to any visitor. You can calibrate it in lack of staff, or queuing time, or the ratio of Hampstead liberals to Holloway drunks, but the bottom line is poverty, as endemic in the patients as in the system. Even so, the Whittington is less awful than last week's insults suggest. King's College, for all its specialist brilliance, is more beleaguered than the flattery of the cameras implies. Two hospitals; two shifting perspectives. Why is the NHS always so misunderstood? Set aside the furore of the Addis case, with its baggage of blood-stained socks, unchanged clothes, tardy family visitors and (hastily-dropped) racism charges. The facts hardly matter, not least because there aren't many. The real issue is why most NHS debate has become unhinged from reason. No other country behaves so emotionally, or hysterically, about healthcare. Dutch and Italian patients must blink at the rapturous hymns delivered by incapacitated British tourists who end up in their hospitals. We ship our sick off on Eurostar for operations, convinced that Lille is the new Lourdes. The French system, often touted as a model institution, is actually riven by industrial battles over pay and hours. But when GPs went on strike again last week, there was no national panic or battalions of prescription-starved grandmas storming the Elyse Palace. While health is not to be compared with the services offered by glaziers or gasmen, attitudes to the NHS stray far beyond mere issues of life and death into the sentimental swampland of politics. To both main parties, the health service, replete with heroes and villains, is Victorian melodrama on an heroic scale. In the latest production of Temptation Sordid Or Virtue Rewarded, Duncan Smith used his odious Commons attack to smear the Whittington staff. But Alan Milburn has also cast health professionals as villainous Sir Jaspers. Although now all public servants are Mr Blair's social entrepreneurs, I do not remember Mr Milburn offering much comfort to can-do innovators who moved bodies into an overspill hospital morgue in Bedford. Both in that confected scandal and the Alder Hey organs dbcle, ministerial interventions inflamed fury. In an arena where cool logic should inform good stewardship, health policy looks too random and events-driven. Like rotas for cricket teas and church-hall rummage sales, it also owes a disproportionate debt to elderly women. Mr Blair's first pledge of parity with Europe and much more money was accelerated by the stories of the cancer patient, Mavis Skeet, and by Lord Winston's attack, fuelled by the treatment his sick mother had received. Now there is Mrs Addis. Sandwiched between those events is a confetti of initiatives. Billions of pounds have been almost tracelessly absorbed into the parched terrain of the NHS. Yet ironically, just before the Whittington case, the Government might have thought it could relax. The Bristol heart deaths affair was finally over. There was, as yet, no winter beds crisis; 86 per cent of patients were happy with their treatment. The new NHS modernisation board, a forum for the influential, had just produced a report so optimistic as to be almost unbelievable. And so it was. By Friday, the news that 5.75 million patients use NHS Direct had mutated into an Audit Commission verdict that the helplines aren't being used by the most needy and that the service is so far adrift of its targets that it is revising the aim of nearly all callers talking to a nurse in five minutes. The new goal time will be 20. Whatever the merits of the modernisation board, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons prefers, in an unusual gesture of independence, not to sit on it. Sir Peter Morris believes that such a role might compromise his ability to say what he believes to be true, namely, that hospitals are in a much worse mess than he would have believed possible. But despite government spin and professional gloom, there is good news too. Labour has abandoned the myth that the NHS can ever flourish without tax rises. It now looks possible that the upper limit on National Insurance will be removed. Mr Duncan Smith thinks, conversely, that tax cuts can be combined with a better NHS. That difference explains, more cogently than any hissy fit over individuals' treatment, why Labour may create an excellent health service, why the Tories never will, and why Mr Blair therefore holds all the cards. He should now deal a few out and see that salvation cannot be achieved while government goes into synchronised spasm at every twitch of a cubicle curtain in the Whittington Hospital or elsewhere. The King's Fund last week recommended, rightly, that local health providers should be autonomous. This is very different from the conditional freedom Mr Milburn is offering to the tractable and obedient. More radically, the King's Fund wants a corporation, similar to the BBC, to run the health service, leaving government only to raise money and do broad-brush strategy. Sir Peter Morris has also called for the service to be severed from political diktat. Handing the NHS over to faceless administrators strikes Ministers as crazy. They are wrong. Separation of powers is the obvious and perhaps the only way forward. What the King's Fund and Sir Peter are saying, more or less politely, has been perfectly illustrated by the histrionics of the past week. Governments, even well-intentioned ones, are not fit to run the health service.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Thank heavens for Professor Dick van Velzen. When a medical scandal erupts, it is invaluable to have a lightning conductor for public fury, and the professor is the textbook villain. Even better, he is Dutch and therefore subtly distanced from British pathological niceties. His research at Alder Hey hospital was suspect, his collection of human spare parts excessive, and his transparency left much to be desired. On Friday he was temporarily suspended by the General Medical Council, according to its convention of administering a mild knuckle-rap long after every other forum - barring the court of law the professor may still face - has pronounced judgment. A post-mortem on van Velzen's press clippings offers a grim carve-up of a man depicted as a composite of Burke and Hare, with a dash of Hannibal Lecter and a smattering of Mengele thrown in. Forget Alan Milburn's homily about paternalistic consultants stuck in a 1940s time warp. Van Velzen, as portrayed in the media, more resembles a dodgy doctor of Elizabethan times - a practitioner of sapientia prisca, the ancient wisdom based on the occult. But the professor, for all his flaws, is hardly a necromancer. Nor has he killed anyone. In hoarding body parts without consent, he was only doing, albeit on a grander scale, what other doctors did. That does not excuse the pain he caused to relatives. But neither does it quite explain the Health Secretary's demonisation of van Velzen - a symbol of 'gruesome' and 'grotesque' events evoking Gothic tragedy. Perhaps Mr Milburn thought that tremulous horror would play well with an electorate which is not, by and large, in favour of pickling babies. If so, he miscalculated. His behaviour looked so opportunistic and badly-judged that one wonders how he will cope with the next débcle. Alder Hey was only the warm-up. Any time now, the Kennedy report into the Bristol children's heart deaths disaster is due to reach Milburn's desk. The largest ever independent investigation into clinical practice in the NHS has already been unaccountably delayed. There is still no word of its progress or its findings, except that Professor Ian Kennedy is likely to discard the lone villains thesis and focus on the broad systems failures linked to James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana. Given Milburn's messianic stance on patient power, you might imagine that he would be desperate to release the Bristol findings. But perhaps not. The whisper from the royal colleges is that if the Kennedy report is not delivered soon, it may conveniently smoulder in the Ministerial in-tray until after the election, thus sparing Milburn the necessity of confronting the problems of an NHS plunged into deepening gloom. Doctors, it seems, are the new teachers; members of a profession which once put up with the rigours of the job partly because society esteemed them. These days, cat-stranglers boast a higher status. Beware your amiable GP, lest he turn out to be homicidal or incompetent. Mistrust your surgeon, a vainglorious conflation of the Emperor Napoleon and Sir Lancelot Spratt. Never hand over a scrap of tissue from your dear departed, unless doctors sign a contract elaborate enough to cover the purchase of the Dome. The latest doctor-bashing, as administered by Milburn, was a precise echo of the attack a fortnight ago by Sir Donald Irvine, the GMC president. According to Irvine, the flawed and secretive culture of the NHS allows 'paternalism' and poor medical practice to go unchallenged. This is a bit rich, given that the GMC is the dernier cri in self-protection, obfuscation and dilatory treatment of the miscreants it is supposed to police. Irvine's tirade, designed to encourage consensus, instead united the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges in a scornful denunciation. Doctors want the council halved to 50 members, with an executive, weighted towards lay people, of about a dozen. If Irvine cannot oblige, then Milburn should scrap the GMC and think up a better structure, for the sake of patients who must get the 'balance of power' skewed their way. Milburn is a curious patients' champion, who, so far, has abolished community health councils and installed weaker patients' advocates. The suspicion is that avenues for legitimate complaint are being closed, while patients are being encouraged, rashly, to be as strident as they wish. But, as Alder Hey has proved, patient power is hardly the Delphic oracle. Patients want medical progress but would quite like it to be achieved without the use of dead humans or live animals. They want kidney transplants but recoil at the thought of selling superfluous thymus glands used in anti-rejection research to pharmaceutical companies. Given the poverty of hospitals and the outrageous profits of drugs firms, the only scandal seems to me the nominal price of 10 a sample. Our odd attitude to morbidity and death is supposedly rooted in the veneration an irreligious society accords to the body rather than the soul, but that cannot be right. Church burials are a model of corporeal respect, whereas secular cremations involve only a conveyor-belt ride through Dralon curtains to the incinerator as the piped Bach plays. It seems more likely that our horror of death is rooted in an age of spurious immortality, where those who swallow their vitamins, do their Pilates, count their calories and get their Botox jabs may dream of frozen youth and deferred death, if not quite of eternal life. Hence the absurd fuss about bodies dumped in a hospital chapel and stripped of 'dignity', a commodity that never attaches to the dead and, in hospital, rarely to the living. There is nothing dignified in childbirth or in surgery. I once watched a hip replacement operation, which resembled a cross between Medea and an Alan Titchmarsh chainsaw demonstration. Riveting, but hardly stately. Dignity, however, matters to patients, and patients' voices matter to Mr Milburn. As, of course, they should. But where to draw the line? Emboldened by deserved public sympathy, the Alder Hey parents - in an echo of Denise Fergus demanding a say on the punishment of the Bulger killers - clamour, unjustifiably, for court action and mass sackings from an excellent hospital that has saved 1,600 children who would otherwise have died. In addition, the parents will sue for 10 million compensation. Two rival firms of solicitors vie for rights to this lucrative business. Hospital switchboards are jammed by those who fear their children's organs may lie in some glass jar. A commission is assembled to hand back sad relics whose discovery serves little purpose, beyond eclipsing joyful memories of a living child. Pathologists warn that life-saving operations are already ceasing for lack of donor organs and that medical research will be gravely affected. There are no winners here. The Bristol report will have to produce a more positive outcome. Threaded through the failings of one hospital will be the wider, unanswered questions - on why there is such a misfit between managers, doctors and regulators, on how over-centralised bureaucracy is stifling the NHS, and on why, in a time of government opulence, doctors profess despair. This time, Milburn will need more than the hot rhetoric of reform. If he gets it wrong, the result may make Professor van Velzen's chamber of horrors look tame.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Thank heavens for Professor Dick van Velzen. When a medical scandal erupts, it is invaluable to have a lightning conductor for public fury, and the professor is the textbook villain. Even better, he is Dutch and therefore subtly distanced from British pathological niceties. His research at Alder Hey hospital was suspect, his collection of human spare parts excessive, and his transparency left much to be desired. On Friday he was temporarily suspended by the General Medical Council, according to its convention of administering a mild knuckle-rap long after every other forum - barring the court of law the professor may still face - has pronounced judgment. A post-mortem on van Velzen's press clippings offers a grim carve-up of a man depicted as a composite of Burke and Hare, with a dash of Hannibal Lecter and a smattering of Mengele thrown in. Forget Alan Milburn's homily about paternalistic consultants stuck in a 1940s time warp. Van Velzen, as portrayed in the media, more resembles a dodgy doctor of Elizabethan times - a practitioner of sapientia prisca, the ancient wisdom based on the occult. But the professor, for all his flaws, is hardly a necromancer. Nor has he killed anyone. In hoarding body parts without consent, he was only doing, albeit on a grander scale, what other doctors did. That does not excuse the pain he caused to relatives. But neither does it quite explain the Health Secretary's demonisation of van Velzen - a symbol of 'gruesome' and 'grotesque' events evoking Gothic tragedy. Perhaps Mr Milburn thought that tremulous horror would play well with an electorate which is not, by and large, in favour of pickling babies. If so, he miscalculated. His behaviour looked so opportunistic and badly-judged that one wonders how he will cope with the next débcle. Alder Hey was only the warm-up. Any time now, the Kennedy report into the Bristol children's heart deaths disaster is due to reach Milburn's desk. The largest ever independent investigation into clinical practice in the NHS has already been unaccountably delayed. There is still no word of its progress or its findings, except that Professor Ian Kennedy is likely to discard the lone villains thesis and focus on the broad systems failures linked to James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana. Given Milburn's messianic stance on patient power, you might imagine that he would be desperate to release the Bristol findings. But perhaps not. The whisper from the royal colleges is that if the Kennedy report is not delivered soon, it may conveniently smoulder in the Ministerial in-tray until after the election, thus sparing Milburn the necessity of confronting the problems of an NHS plunged into deepening gloom. Doctors, it seems, are the new teachers; members of a profession which once put up with the rigours of the job partly because society esteemed them. These days, cat-stranglers boast a higher status. Beware your amiable GP, lest he turn out to be homicidal or incompetent. Mistrust your surgeon, a vainglorious conflation of the Emperor Napoleon and Sir Lancelot Spratt. Never hand over a scrap of tissue from your dear departed, unless doctors sign a contract elaborate enough to cover the purchase of the Dome. The latest doctor-bashing, as administered by Milburn, was a precise echo of the attack a fortnight ago by Sir Donald Irvine, the GMC president. According to Irvine, the flawed and secretive culture of the NHS allows 'paternalism' and poor medical practice to go unchallenged. This is a bit rich, given that the GMC is the dernier cri in self-protection, obfuscation and dilatory treatment of the miscreants it is supposed to police. Irvine's tirade, designed to encourage consensus, instead united the British Medical Association and the medical royal colleges in a scornful denunciation. Doctors want the council halved to 50 members, with an executive, weighted towards lay people, of about a dozen. If Irvine cannot oblige, then Milburn should scrap the GMC and think up a better structure, for the sake of patients who must get the 'balance of power' skewed their way. Milburn is a curious patients' champion, who, so far, has abolished community health councils and installed weaker patients' advocates. The suspicion is that avenues for legitimate complaint are being closed, while patients are being encouraged, rashly, to be as strident as they wish. But, as Alder Hey has proved, patient power is hardly the Delphic oracle. Patients want medical progress but would quite like it to be achieved without the use of dead humans or live animals. They want kidney transplants but recoil at the thought of selling superfluous thymus glands used in anti-rejection research to pharmaceutical companies. Given the poverty of hospitals and the outrageous profits of drugs firms, the only scandal seems to me the nominal price of 10 a sample. Our odd attitude to morbidity and death is supposedly rooted in the veneration an irreligious society accords to the body rather than the soul, but that cannot be right. Church burials are a model of corporeal respect, whereas secular cremations involve only a conveyor-belt ride through Dralon curtains to the incinerator as the piped Bach plays. It seems more likely that our horror of death is rooted in an age of spurious immortality, where those who swallow their vitamins, do their Pilates, count their calories and get their Botox jabs may dream of frozen youth and deferred death, if not quite of eternal life. Hence the absurd fuss about bodies dumped in a hospital chapel and stripped of 'dignity', a commodity that never attaches to the dead and, in hospital, rarely to the living. There is nothing dignified in childbirth or in surgery. I once watched a hip replacement operation, which resembled a cross between Medea and an Alan Titchmarsh chainsaw demonstration. Riveting, but hardly stately. Dignity, however, matters to patients, and patients' voices matter to Mr Milburn. As, of course, they should. But where to draw the line? Emboldened by deserved public sympathy, the Alder Hey parents - in an echo of Denise Fergus demanding a say on the punishment of the Bulger killers - clamour, unjustifiably, for court action and mass sackings from an excellent hospital that has saved 1,600 children who would otherwise have died. In addition, the parents will sue for 10 million compensation. Two rival firms of solicitors vie for rights to this lucrative business. Hospital switchboards are jammed by those who fear their children's organs may lie in some glass jar. A commission is assembled to hand back sad relics whose discovery serves little purpose, beyond eclipsing joyful memories of a living child. Pathologists warn that life-saving operations are already ceasing for lack of donor organs and that medical research will be gravely affected. There are no winners here. The Bristol report will have to produce a more positive outcome. Threaded through the failings of one hospital will be the wider, unanswered questions - on why there is such a misfit between managers, doctors and regulators, on how over-centralised bureaucracy is stifling the NHS, and on why, in a time of government opulence, doctors profess despair. This time, Milburn will need more than the hot rhetoric of reform. If he gets it wrong, the result may make Professor van Velzen's chamber of horrors look tame.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
The English language, spat out in a dribble of bile and asterisks, has rarely been so abused. The most graphic exponent of the new art of coarse speaking is Roy Keane, the Manchester United captain, whose memoir explains how he deliberately injured the Norway international, Alf Inge Haaland. 'I'd waited long enough. I f***ing hit him hard. The ball was there, I think. Take that, you c***.' Noel Gallagher's thoughts on the American music industry, as delivered to the New York Post, sound even further removed from the vernacular of Jane Austen, while, at the Edinburgh fringe, the comedy writer Barry Cryer has denounced the relentless crudeness of this year's offerings. The contagion has seeped into such outposts of the community as Crazy George's discount furniture store in Chatham, Kent, where Peter Moore, a customer, demanded of a trainee manageress: 'Who's the f***ing bitch who had a go at my missus?' Sentencing Mr Moore for abuse, Judge Keith Simpson suggested that it would be no bad thing if the courts were empowered to wash out the foul mouths of miscreants with carbolic soap, assuming it was still available. If carbolic was not remaindered around the time that shower gel got invented and Anthony Buckeridge's 'fossilised fishhooks' stopped being the literary expletive of choice, then the Royal College of Nursing could use some. The case of Pat Bottrill made all other examples of offensiveness seem mild. Her sin was to mention 'ten little niggers' in an allusion to the Agatha Christie novel whose characters, much like RCN delegates on a coffee break, disappeared without trace. Instead, Ms Bottrill vanished after her resignation as chair of the governing council was accepted by the American head of the RCN, Beverly Malone. The linkage between US sensibilities and the N-word is established. Some time ago, an American lawyer was reportedly forced to give up his public post when a member of a lecture audience took exception to his correct use of the word niggardly, meaning stingy or miserly. Even when better semantic logic applies, offending people is subjective. Those who agree with the Times , which serialised Roy Keane's book, that his thuggish musings are the imprimatur of 'tormented genius' might take umbrage at Gwyneth Paltrow's line on British men, or Thought for the Day's affinity for God. Defending insulting behaviour is, by contrast, simple. The term 'nigger', as thoughtlessly used by Ms Bottrill, is different from the same word screamed from the Millwall terraces by thugs with plankton brains. If Ms Bottrill had been the Alf Garnett of the bedpan, her lapse might have looked different, but the fact that she was horrified enough to relinquish her post was proof of innocence. The shame is that no colleague or superior was brave or wise enough to point out that the fuss over her error was spurious nonsense. Other examples include the complaint about Home Office Minister John Denham's reference, at the Police Federation Conference, to 'nitty gritty'. The charge that the phrase referred to a debris, mainly composed of lice and left in the scuppers of a slave ship after a voyage, came as news to black people, lexicographers included. No case to answer. Conversely, it was incontrovertible that Ann Winterton should lose her Tory frontbench post after telling a joke at a rugby club dinner about Pakistani citizens being ten a penny. Her humour was dire, her speech premeditated and her timing, the day after the British National Party won three council seats in Burnley, atrocious. The only mystery on racial sensitivity is why bodies like the RCN choose to court the derision of the Right. The Bottrill case tapped into the familiar vein of scorn for imagined legions of politically correct, hatchet-faced lentil-slurpers who forbid the use of spoon (Cockney rhyming slang for coon) and frown on Wodehouse's reference to 'good eggs' (ditto). Fabricating examples of weird behaviour, such as Brent Council's non-existent ban on schoolchildren watching the Queen Mum's funeral or Islington teachers singing 'Baa Baa Green Sheep', seems hardly necessary when the RCN obliges with the genuine article. Every fuss about political correctness masks the fact that, in schools and offices, there is too little attention to anti-racist education and training, not too much. Each new furore validates right-wing prejudice. There is another danger. At best, care over racial etiquette produces the sort of changes that make Agatha Christie's novel title and free golliwogs with jam jars look prehistoric. At worst, it is an anaesthetic to the liberal conscience. Attention to detail is a smokescreen against having to admit what a racist society this can be. Terror of uttering an inappropriate word or venturing into the minefield of racial humour suggests awkward distance rather than inclusiveness. Atoning for any lapse by allowing some sacrificial victim, like Ms Bottrill, to be singed on the bonfire of the sensibilities is pointless. Such patronising gestures are unlikely to reassure those who couldn't give a stuff about RCN internal politics but who worry about having swastikas daubed on their houses or excrement posted through their doors. Mantras of equality, diversity and ending institutional racism easily translate into the illusion of progress that isn't there. A white man is still three times more likely to get a professional job than a black one; only 3.7 per cent of prison staff and 3.1 per cent of police officers come from ethnic minorities. Hysteria may be the fault of the ignorant or the malign, but every bogus bit of scaremongering by doomful prophets of population explosion bears testament to a liberal failure properly to explain why, humane considerations aside, immigration is an economic necessity. That inability is rooted in taboos and confusion. Under a new paradox, equality legitimises unfairness. Raj Chandran, of the Commission For Racial Equality, was right to decry Ms Bottrill's departure, but the commission's recent record is even less glowing than the RCN's. Gurbux Singh's Roy Keane moment, in which he got drunk on corporate hospitality before bullying and threatening police officers, secured him a 120,000 pay-off and strangely muted criticism. The commission, now casting round for a new head, has been tainted. Government largess for Mr Singh only underlined the suspicion that the CRE, overly keen on PR and occasionally inept, is more in thrall to the Home Office than to clients in serious need of back-up. Our treatment of asylum-seekers sometimes borders on the barbaric. Tension mounts in cities and beyond. In rural Devon, racial incidents rose by 20 per cent last year, and the far Right is out for blood. A mood of fear is building in the media. Clamp down on immigration. Bring back capital punishment for paedophiles, and blame any resistance to the politics of vengeance on what ranters still deem the lunatic Left. Such retributive nonsense is made worse by unkind or absurd behaviour posturing as purity of heart.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
The English language, spat out in a dribble of bile and asterisks, has rarely been so abused. The most graphic exponent of the new art of coarse speaking is Roy Keane, the Manchester United captain, whose memoir explains how he deliberately injured the Norway international, Alf Inge Haaland. 'I'd waited long enough. I f***ing hit him hard. The ball was there, I think. Take that, you c***.' Noel Gallagher's thoughts on the American music industry, as delivered to the New York Post, sound even further removed from the vernacular of Jane Austen, while, at the Edinburgh fringe, the comedy writer Barry Cryer has denounced the relentless crudeness of this year's offerings. The contagion has seeped into such outposts of the community as Crazy George's discount furniture store in Chatham, Kent, where Peter Moore, a customer, demanded of a trainee manageress: 'Who's the f***ing bitch who had a go at my missus?' Sentencing Mr Moore for abuse, Judge Keith Simpson suggested that it would be no bad thing if the courts were empowered to wash out the foul mouths of miscreants with carbolic soap, assuming it was still available. If carbolic was not remaindered around the time that shower gel got invented and Anthony Buckeridge's 'fossilised fishhooks' stopped being the literary expletive of choice, then the Royal College of Nursing could use some. The case of Pat Bottrill made all other examples of offensiveness seem mild. Her sin was to mention 'ten little niggers' in an allusion to the Agatha Christie novel whose characters, much like RCN delegates on a coffee break, disappeared without trace. Instead, Ms Bottrill vanished after her resignation as chair of the governing council was accepted by the American head of the RCN, Beverly Malone. The linkage between US sensibilities and the N-word is established. Some time ago, an American lawyer was reportedly forced to give up his public post when a member of a lecture audience took exception to his correct use of the word niggardly, meaning stingy or miserly. Even when better semantic logic applies, offending people is subjective. Those who agree with the Times , which serialised Roy Keane's book, that his thuggish musings are the imprimatur of 'tormented genius' might take umbrage at Gwyneth Paltrow's line on British men, or Thought for the Day's affinity for God. Defending insulting behaviour is, by contrast, simple. The term 'nigger', as thoughtlessly used by Ms Bottrill, is different from the same word screamed from the Millwall terraces by thugs with plankton brains. If Ms Bottrill had been the Alf Garnett of the bedpan, her lapse might have looked different, but the fact that she was horrified enough to relinquish her post was proof of innocence. The shame is that no colleague or superior was brave or wise enough to point out that the fuss over her error was spurious nonsense. Other examples include the complaint about Home Office Minister John Denham's reference, at the Police Federation Conference, to 'nitty gritty'. The charge that the phrase referred to a debris, mainly composed of lice and left in the scuppers of a slave ship after a voyage, came as news to black people, lexicographers included. No case to answer. Conversely, it was incontrovertible that Ann Winterton should lose her Tory frontbench post after telling a joke at a rugby club dinner about Pakistani citizens being ten a penny. Her humour was dire, her speech premeditated and her timing, the day after the British National Party won three council seats in Burnley, atrocious. The only mystery on racial sensitivity is why bodies like the RCN choose to court the derision of the Right. The Bottrill case tapped into the familiar vein of scorn for imagined legions of politically correct, hatchet-faced lentil-slurpers who forbid the use of spoon (Cockney rhyming slang for coon) and frown on Wodehouse's reference to 'good eggs' (ditto). Fabricating examples of weird behaviour, such as Brent Council's non-existent ban on schoolchildren watching the Queen Mum's funeral or Islington teachers singing 'Baa Baa Green Sheep', seems hardly necessary when the RCN obliges with the genuine article. Every fuss about political correctness masks the fact that, in schools and offices, there is too little attention to anti-racist education and training, not too much. Each new furore validates right-wing prejudice. There is another danger. At best, care over racial etiquette produces the sort of changes that make Agatha Christie's novel title and free golliwogs with jam jars look prehistoric. At worst, it is an anaesthetic to the liberal conscience. Attention to detail is a smokescreen against having to admit what a racist society this can be. Terror of uttering an inappropriate word or venturing into the minefield of racial humour suggests awkward distance rather than inclusiveness. Atoning for any lapse by allowing some sacrificial victim, like Ms Bottrill, to be singed on the bonfire of the sensibilities is pointless. Such patronising gestures are unlikely to reassure those who couldn't give a stuff about RCN internal politics but who worry about having swastikas daubed on their houses or excrement posted through their doors. Mantras of equality, diversity and ending institutional racism easily translate into the illusion of progress that isn't there. A white man is still three times more likely to get a professional job than a black one; only 3.7 per cent of prison staff and 3.1 per cent of police officers come from ethnic minorities. Hysteria may be the fault of the ignorant or the malign, but every bogus bit of scaremongering by doomful prophets of population explosion bears testament to a liberal failure properly to explain why, humane considerations aside, immigration is an economic necessity. That inability is rooted in taboos and confusion. Under a new paradox, equality legitimises unfairness. Raj Chandran, of the Commission For Racial Equality, was right to decry Ms Bottrill's departure, but the commission's recent record is even less glowing than the RCN's. Gurbux Singh's Roy Keane moment, in which he got drunk on corporate hospitality before bullying and threatening police officers, secured him a 120,000 pay-off and strangely muted criticism. The commission, now casting round for a new head, has been tainted. Government largess for Mr Singh only underlined the suspicion that the CRE, overly keen on PR and occasionally inept, is more in thrall to the Home Office than to clients in serious need of back-up. Our treatment of asylum-seekers sometimes borders on the barbaric. Tension mounts in cities and beyond. In rural Devon, racial incidents rose by 20 per cent last year, and the far Right is out for blood. A mood of fear is building in the media. Clamp down on immigration. Bring back capital punishment for paedophiles, and blame any resistance to the politics of vengeance on what ranters still deem the lunatic Left. Such retributive nonsense is made worse by unkind or absurd behaviour posturing as purity of heart.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
The BBC has just concluded an inspiring series on the pioneering work of Kypros Nicolaides. His struggle to save the lives of unborn babies at King's College Hospital reflected the world-beating empathy, resource and skill on offer through the NHS, albeit in limited doses. As Life Before Birth finished, another dramatic primetime documentary unfolded at a second London hospital. Though the plotlines could not have been more dissimilar, Professor Nicolaides's base at King's College is not so different to A&E at the Whittington, where Rose Addis was treated. In both departments, the scruffy interiors are less evocative of Nicky Haslam than Iris Murdoch. Neither is well-supplied with back copies of Tatler. There is no sense, in either waiting-area filled with grime-pitted plastic chairs and sticky Lego bricks, that a feng shui consultant has recently passed this way. The television cameras did not dwell either on shabby corridors or on Nicolaides's private gloom. Once, he told me recently, he went to conferences knowing that British foetal medicine was the best in Europe. 'Now I talk about the rate of death in premature babies, and people from so-called underdeveloped countries raise their eyebrows at our low standards compared to theirs,' he said. Morale among NHS staff generally was desperate. I expect the mood was similar at the Whittington, even before Iain Duncan Smith raised the case of Mrs Addis and her alleged neglect. Since the ensuing pandemonium produced no clear evidence, it is fair to judge the hospital only on its formal record. One recent study put the Whittington in Britain's top 40 trusts. The Government's commission for health improvements said last week that most aspects were fine but that patients had to wait too long in casualty. The real problem is evident to any visitor. You can calibrate it in lack of staff, or queuing time, or the ratio of Hampstead liberals to Holloway drunks, but the bottom line is poverty, as endemic in the patients as in the system. Even so, the Whittington is less awful than last week's insults suggest. King's College, for all its specialist brilliance, is more beleaguered than the flattery of the cameras implies. Two hospitals; two shifting perspectives. Why is the NHS always so misunderstood? Set aside the furore of the Addis case, with its baggage of blood-stained socks, unchanged clothes, tardy family visitors and (hastily-dropped) racism charges. The facts hardly matter, not least because there aren't many. The real issue is why most NHS debate has become unhinged from reason. No other country behaves so emotionally, or hysterically, about healthcare. Dutch and Italian patients must blink at the rapturous hymns delivered by incapacitated British tourists who end up in their hospitals. We ship our sick off on Eurostar for operations, convinced that Lille is the new Lourdes. The French system, often touted as a model institution, is actually riven by industrial battles over pay and hours. But when GPs went on strike again last week, there was no national panic or battalions of prescription-starved grandmas storming the Elyse Palace. While health is not to be compared with the services offered by glaziers or gasmen, attitudes to the NHS stray far beyond mere issues of life and death into the sentimental swampland of politics. To both main parties, the health service, replete with heroes and villains, is Victorian melodrama on an heroic scale. In the latest production of Temptation Sordid Or Virtue Rewarded, Duncan Smith used his odious Commons attack to smear the Whittington staff. But Alan Milburn has also cast health professionals as villainous Sir Jaspers. Although now all public servants are Mr Blair's social entrepreneurs, I do not remember Mr Milburn offering much comfort to can-do innovators who moved bodies into an overspill hospital morgue in Bedford. Both in that confected scandal and the Alder Hey organs dbcle, ministerial interventions inflamed fury. In an arena where cool logic should inform good stewardship, health policy looks too random and events-driven. Like rotas for cricket teas and church-hall rummage sales, it also owes a disproportionate debt to elderly women. Mr Blair's first pledge of parity with Europe and much more money was accelerated by the stories of the cancer patient, Mavis Skeet, and by Lord Winston's attack, fuelled by the treatment his sick mother had received. Now there is Mrs Addis. Sandwiched between those events is a confetti of initiatives. Billions of pounds have been almost tracelessly absorbed into the parched terrain of the NHS. Yet ironically, just before the Whittington case, the Government might have thought it could relax. The Bristol heart deaths affair was finally over. There was, as yet, no winter beds crisis; 86 per cent of patients were happy with their treatment. The new NHS modernisation board, a forum for the influential, had just produced a report so optimistic as to be almost unbelievable. And so it was. By Friday, the news that 5.75 million patients use NHS Direct had mutated into an Audit Commission verdict that the helplines aren't being used by the most needy and that the service is so far adrift of its targets that it is revising the aim of nearly all callers talking to a nurse in five minutes. The new goal time will be 20. Whatever the merits of the modernisation board, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons prefers, in an unusual gesture of independence, not to sit on it. Sir Peter Morris believes that such a role might compromise his ability to say what he believes to be true, namely, that hospitals are in a much worse mess than he would have believed possible. But despite government spin and professional gloom, there is good news too. Labour has abandoned the myth that the NHS can ever flourish without tax rises. It now looks possible that the upper limit on National Insurance will be removed. Mr Duncan Smith thinks, conversely, that tax cuts can be combined with a better NHS. That difference explains, more cogently than any hissy fit over individuals' treatment, why Labour may create an excellent health service, why the Tories never will, and why Mr Blair therefore holds all the cards. He should now deal a few out and see that salvation cannot be achieved while government goes into synchronised spasm at every twitch of a cubicle curtain in the Whittington Hospital or elsewhere. The King's Fund last week recommended, rightly, that local health providers should be autonomous. This is very different from the conditional freedom Mr Milburn is offering to the tractable and obedient. More radically, the King's Fund wants a corporation, similar to the BBC, to run the health service, leaving government only to raise money and do broad-brush strategy. Sir Peter Morris has also called for the service to be severed from political diktat. Handing the NHS over to faceless administrators strikes Ministers as crazy. They are wrong. Separation of powers is the obvious and perhaps the only way forward. What the King's Fund and Sir Peter are saying, more or less politely, has been perfectly illustrated by the histrionics of the past week. Governments, even well-intentioned ones, are not fit to run the health service.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
The BBC has just concluded an inspiring series on the pioneering work of Kypros Nicolaides. His struggle to save the lives of unborn babies at King's College Hospital reflected the world-beating empathy, resource and skill on offer through the NHS, albeit in limited doses. As Life Before Birth finished, another dramatic primetime documentary unfolded at a second London hospital. Though the plotlines could not have been more dissimilar, Professor Nicolaides's base at King's College is not so different to A&E at the Whittington, where Rose Addis was treated. In both departments, the scruffy interiors are less evocative of Nicky Haslam than Iris Murdoch. Neither is well-supplied with back copies of Tatler. There is no sense, in either waiting-area filled with grime-pitted plastic chairs and sticky Lego bricks, that a feng shui consultant has recently passed this way. The television cameras did not dwell either on shabby corridors or on Nicolaides's private gloom. Once, he told me recently, he went to conferences knowing that British foetal medicine was the best in Europe. 'Now I talk about the rate of death in premature babies, and people from so-called underdeveloped countries raise their eyebrows at our low standards compared to theirs,' he said. Morale among NHS staff generally was desperate. I expect the mood was similar at the Whittington, even before Iain Duncan Smith raised the case of Mrs Addis and her alleged neglect. Since the ensuing pandemonium produced no clear evidence, it is fair to judge the hospital only on its formal record. One recent study put the Whittington in Britain's top 40 trusts. The Government's commission for health improvements said last week that most aspects were fine but that patients had to wait too long in casualty. The real problem is evident to any visitor. You can calibrate it in lack of staff, or queuing time, or the ratio of Hampstead liberals to Holloway drunks, but the bottom line is poverty, as endemic in the patients as in the system. Even so, the Whittington is less awful than last week's insults suggest. King's College, for all its specialist brilliance, is more beleaguered than the flattery of the cameras implies. Two hospitals; two shifting perspectives. Why is the NHS always so misunderstood? Set aside the furore of the Addis case, with its baggage of blood-stained socks, unchanged clothes, tardy family visitors and (hastily-dropped) racism charges. The facts hardly matter, not least because there aren't many. The real issue is why most NHS debate has become unhinged from reason. No other country behaves so emotionally, or hysterically, about healthcare. Dutch and Italian patients must blink at the rapturous hymns delivered by incapacitated British tourists who end up in their hospitals. We ship our sick off on Eurostar for operations, convinced that Lille is the new Lourdes. The French system, often touted as a model institution, is actually riven by industrial battles over pay and hours. But when GPs went on strike again last week, there was no national panic or battalions of prescription-starved grandmas storming the Elyse Palace. While health is not to be compared with the services offered by glaziers or gasmen, attitudes to the NHS stray far beyond mere issues of life and death into the sentimental swampland of politics. To both main parties, the health service, replete with heroes and villains, is Victorian melodrama on an heroic scale. In the latest production of Temptation Sordid Or Virtue Rewarded, Duncan Smith used his odious Commons attack to smear the Whittington staff. But Alan Milburn has also cast health professionals as villainous Sir Jaspers. Although now all public servants are Mr Blair's social entrepreneurs, I do not remember Mr Milburn offering much comfort to can-do innovators who moved bodies into an overspill hospital morgue in Bedford. Both in that confected scandal and the Alder Hey organs dbcle, ministerial interventions inflamed fury. In an arena where cool logic should inform good stewardship, health policy looks too random and events-driven. Like rotas for cricket teas and church-hall rummage sales, it also owes a disproportionate debt to elderly women. Mr Blair's first pledge of parity with Europe and much more money was accelerated by the stories of the cancer patient, Mavis Skeet, and by Lord Winston's attack, fuelled by the treatment his sick mother had received. Now there is Mrs Addis. Sandwiched between those events is a confetti of initiatives. Billions of pounds have been almost tracelessly absorbed into the parched terrain of the NHS. Yet ironically, just before the Whittington case, the Government might have thought it could relax. The Bristol heart deaths affair was finally over. There was, as yet, no winter beds crisis; 86 per cent of patients were happy with their treatment. The new NHS modernisation board, a forum for the influential, had just produced a report so optimistic as to be almost unbelievable. And so it was. By Friday, the news that 5.75 million patients use NHS Direct had mutated into an Audit Commission verdict that the helplines aren't being used by the most needy and that the service is so far adrift of its targets that it is revising the aim of nearly all callers talking to a nurse in five minutes. The new goal time will be 20. Whatever the merits of the modernisation board, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons prefers, in an unusual gesture of independence, not to sit on it. Sir Peter Morris believes that such a role might compromise his ability to say what he believes to be true, namely, that hospitals are in a much worse mess than he would have believed possible. But despite government spin and professional gloom, there is good news too. Labour has abandoned the myth that the NHS can ever flourish without tax rises. It now looks possible that the upper limit on National Insurance will be removed. Mr Duncan Smith thinks, conversely, that tax cuts can be combined with a better NHS. That difference explains, more cogently than any hissy fit over individuals' treatment, why Labour may create an excellent health service, why the Tories never will, and why Mr Blair therefore holds all the cards. He should now deal a few out and see that salvation cannot be achieved while government goes into synchronised spasm at every twitch of a cubicle curtain in the Whittington Hospital or elsewhere. The King's Fund last week recommended, rightly, that local health providers should be autonomous. This is very different from the conditional freedom Mr Milburn is offering to the tractable and obedient. More radically, the King's Fund wants a corporation, similar to the BBC, to run the health service, leaving government only to raise money and do broad-brush strategy. Sir Peter Morris has also called for the service to be severed from political diktat. Handing the NHS over to faceless administrators strikes Ministers as crazy. They are wrong. Separation of powers is the obvious and perhaps the only way forward. What the King's Fund and Sir Peter are saying, more or less politely, has been perfectly illustrated by the histrionics of the past week. Governments, even well-intentioned ones, are not fit to run the health service.
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5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Marriage is dead. Again. Secularism and overwork may have made it squirm, but the fatal blow comes from a footballer's wife. Karen Parlour's divorce settlement will, in the view of gloomy pundits, mean the end of matrimony, at least for the loaded. Ms Parlour, an unconventional member of her caste, is not a shopping locust stripping bare the racks of Versace. Her habitat is Romford High Street, her luxury is getting her nails done for 26 and her mum comes round to do the cleaning. Despite her homely credentials, Ms Parlour has terrified rich men, who will allegedly now be staying single or relying on pre-nuptial agreements drafted along the lines and length of the European Communities (Finance) Act. The panic follows the appeal court's decision to award Ms Parlour, who already has two homes worth 1 million, the sum of 440,000 a year, with the requirement that she should save an annual 294,000 as a nest egg. No wonder footballers fearful of claims on their future earnings are trembling over their Krug, or Highland Spring in the case of the abstemious Mr Parlour. Ex-wives have not, however, established a claim to 50 per cent of future income or to indefinite maintenance. The Parlour settlement, subject to revision in four years, allows for a clean break. But, if the ruling is not all bad for men, then neither is it as good as it looks for women. Once again, the notion is implanted that divorcing wives are cashing in, when the reverse is true. Three-quarters of single mothers live on less than 299 a week, before housing costs, compared with 16 per cent of couples. The Parlour judgment has nothing to do, though, with ordinary people. It deals instead with those who are rolling in surplus lucre. Obviously, Ms Parlour should be treated fairly, but it seems odd that there is no question of her getting a job, as other single mothers are always being urged to. There is no need for her to return to her previous occupation, as an optician's assistant. Specsavers would be too mundane for a woman capable of saving English football. If she were to set herself up as a lifestyle coach, managers would flock to seek the wisdom that weaned Ray off drink and loutishness and persuaded Lord Justice Thorpe that she deserved her money. If Ms Parlour's methods were replicated, the Priory would close for lack of business, Chinawhite's would serve beetroot juice, tracts of arable England would be given over to cultivating rocket for salads, and dubious women trawling foreign hotels to prey on legless soccer stars would have to take up cribbage. Even if you acknowledge her reformist genius, there is something arcane in a ruling that rewarded Ms Parlour, explicitly, for good wifeliness. If she had been a loving mother who left it to a strict manager, Arsne Wenger, to discipline her husband, would she have been given less? What if she had been more independent? If the Beckham marriage ever shudders to a halt, the appeal court's logic suggests that Posh will be awarded fourpence and instructed by some kindly judge to be sure and save it for a rainy day. The Parlour case, an illustration of what happens when imploded love meets the precision of the law, is a prelude to another messy showdown. The argument about who gets the money is over and we are moving on to who gets the kids. The government, having dusted the flour-bombers' purple residue off its lapels, hopes to launch a green paper on relationship breakdown before the summer recess, while the Tories, equally mindful of furious fathers, are holding their family summit tomorrow. Michael Howard will be saying that 'the best parents are both parents'. That truism, with its implicit nod towards crusading dads, echoes the views of campaigners elsewhere. In Wisconsin, advocates of 'equal shares parenting' say that a 50/50 split of marital property has reduced to almost zero the 80 per cent of divorces that went to court. Split children in two by law and the same result will follow. Here, Bob Geldof has argued for the presumption that youngsters will live with the father 50 per cent of the time. Mr Howard should be wary. Fathers often get an unfair deal, but the Geldof view is a charter for the selfish. Time-share children must have a ruling say in their own future. To most parents, it is obvious that friendships, routines and habits do not fit a legal straitjacket, and that children, conscious of adult jealousies, are willing to endure misery rather than causing any pain. Such unhappiness risks being disregarded, as pro-father feelings begin to echo through the courts. When a senior family judge urged earlier this year that mothers who defy access orders should be jailed, he was articulating a more general drift towards compulsion. In a major study to be published soon, Professor Carol Smart, of Leeds University, revisited 60 children of divorced parents who shared their care. Some young teenagers had been unhappy for years. One boy said his father barricaded him in the house and that he was desperate to run away. The happy children interviewed by Smart were invariably those whose parents sought their views and let them be flexible. Rigid arrangements for young people growing into adolescence could cause grave problems, she concludes. So what should fathers do? It is heartbreaking for men who have been involved more closely than any other generation with their children suddenly to be sidelined or excluded. But the answer, as the green paper will say, does not lie in edict. If the one in 10 divorcing couples in serious dispute cannot reach agreement, in private or with outside help, then the courts will rarely ordain peace for them or secure a good life for their children. The government will be hazy on what can be done. Information and conciliation are not great buzzwords for despairing fathers. But at least the green paper may acknowledge that children should not be parcelled out on adult whim and that their best interests, unfiltered through an adult prism, will be the guiding principle. With luck, there will be no mention of equal shares. In the divorce courts, an even split is a necessary illusion. Because it is impossible to weigh up the value of Ms Parlour's anti-drinking homilies against her husband's ability to take a penalty, the appeal court has ascribed a similar value to both. Since Mr Parlour is rich, the case sidesteps the misery that follows when dependent women, and men, ruin their former partners' lives by avarice. The Parlour result, in short, has no great consequences, unless soccer stars start suing their wives for failing to stop them trashing nightclubs. The real danger is that equality and fairness, the twin mantras of divorce law, risk being applied too rigidly to the offspring as well as the chattels of a marriage. A Shylock strategy of carving up children with no blood spilt would be a disastrous way of demonstrating that equality is often very far from fair.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Marriage is dead. Again. Secularism and overwork may have made it squirm, but the fatal blow comes from a footballer's wife. Karen Parlour's divorce settlement will, in the view of gloomy pundits, mean the end of matrimony, at least for the loaded. Ms Parlour, an unconventional member of her caste, is not a shopping locust stripping bare the racks of Versace. Her habitat is Romford High Street, her luxury is getting her nails done for 26 and her mum comes round to do the cleaning. Despite her homely credentials, Ms Parlour has terrified rich men, who will allegedly now be staying single or relying on pre-nuptial agreements drafted along the lines and length of the European Communities (Finance) Act. The panic follows the appeal court's decision to award Ms Parlour, who already has two homes worth 1 million, the sum of 440,000 a year, with the requirement that she should save an annual 294,000 as a nest egg. No wonder footballers fearful of claims on their future earnings are trembling over their Krug, or Highland Spring in the case of the abstemious Mr Parlour. Ex-wives have not, however, established a claim to 50 per cent of future income or to indefinite maintenance. The Parlour settlement, subject to revision in four years, allows for a clean break. But, if the ruling is not all bad for men, then neither is it as good as it looks for women. Once again, the notion is implanted that divorcing wives are cashing in, when the reverse is true. Three-quarters of single mothers live on less than 299 a week, before housing costs, compared with 16 per cent of couples. The Parlour judgment has nothing to do, though, with ordinary people. It deals instead with those who are rolling in surplus lucre. Obviously, Ms Parlour should be treated fairly, but it seems odd that there is no question of her getting a job, as other single mothers are always being urged to. There is no need for her to return to her previous occupation, as an optician's assistant. Specsavers would be too mundane for a woman capable of saving English football. If she were to set herself up as a lifestyle coach, managers would flock to seek the wisdom that weaned Ray off drink and loutishness and persuaded Lord Justice Thorpe that she deserved her money. If Ms Parlour's methods were replicated, the Priory would close for lack of business, Chinawhite's would serve beetroot juice, tracts of arable England would be given over to cultivating rocket for salads, and dubious women trawling foreign hotels to prey on legless soccer stars would have to take up cribbage. Even if you acknowledge her reformist genius, there is something arcane in a ruling that rewarded Ms Parlour, explicitly, for good wifeliness. If she had been a loving mother who left it to a strict manager, Arsne Wenger, to discipline her husband, would she have been given less? What if she had been more independent? If the Beckham marriage ever shudders to a halt, the appeal court's logic suggests that Posh will be awarded fourpence and instructed by some kindly judge to be sure and save it for a rainy day. The Parlour case, an illustration of what happens when imploded love meets the precision of the law, is a prelude to another messy showdown. The argument about who gets the money is over and we are moving on to who gets the kids. The government, having dusted the flour-bombers' purple residue off its lapels, hopes to launch a green paper on relationship breakdown before the summer recess, while the Tories, equally mindful of furious fathers, are holding their family summit tomorrow. Michael Howard will be saying that 'the best parents are both parents'. That truism, with its implicit nod towards crusading dads, echoes the views of campaigners elsewhere. In Wisconsin, advocates of 'equal shares parenting' say that a 50/50 split of marital property has reduced to almost zero the 80 per cent of divorces that went to court. Split children in two by law and the same result will follow. Here, Bob Geldof has argued for the presumption that youngsters will live with the father 50 per cent of the time. Mr Howard should be wary. Fathers often get an unfair deal, but the Geldof view is a charter for the selfish. Time-share children must have a ruling say in their own future. To most parents, it is obvious that friendships, routines and habits do not fit a legal straitjacket, and that children, conscious of adult jealousies, are willing to endure misery rather than causing any pain. Such unhappiness risks being disregarded, as pro-father feelings begin to echo through the courts. When a senior family judge urged earlier this year that mothers who defy access orders should be jailed, he was articulating a more general drift towards compulsion. In a major study to be published soon, Professor Carol Smart, of Leeds University, revisited 60 children of divorced parents who shared their care. Some young teenagers had been unhappy for years. One boy said his father barricaded him in the house and that he was desperate to run away. The happy children interviewed by Smart were invariably those whose parents sought their views and let them be flexible. Rigid arrangements for young people growing into adolescence could cause grave problems, she concludes. So what should fathers do? It is heartbreaking for men who have been involved more closely than any other generation with their children suddenly to be sidelined or excluded. But the answer, as the green paper will say, does not lie in edict. If the one in 10 divorcing couples in serious dispute cannot reach agreement, in private or with outside help, then the courts will rarely ordain peace for them or secure a good life for their children. The government will be hazy on what can be done. Information and conciliation are not great buzzwords for despairing fathers. But at least the green paper may acknowledge that children should not be parcelled out on adult whim and that their best interests, unfiltered through an adult prism, will be the guiding principle. With luck, there will be no mention of equal shares. In the divorce courts, an even split is a necessary illusion. Because it is impossible to weigh up the value of Ms Parlour's anti-drinking homilies against her husband's ability to take a penalty, the appeal court has ascribed a similar value to both. Since Mr Parlour is rich, the case sidesteps the misery that follows when dependent women, and men, ruin their former partners' lives by avarice. The Parlour result, in short, has no great consequences, unless soccer stars start suing their wives for failing to stop them trashing nightclubs. The real danger is that equality and fairness, the twin mantras of divorce law, risk being applied too rigidly to the offspring as well as the chattels of a marriage. A Shylock strategy of carving up children with no blood spilt would be a disastrous way of demonstrating that equality is often very far from fair.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Dead children always look so beautiful. Victoria Climbi's curls are held with yellow ties, and her smile is hopeful. Lauren Wright has blonde bunches caught in rosebud ribbons. The girls' school photos, shot in a rare instant of peace or pretence, bear no relationship to the reality of their lives. One child was left in a sack of excrement in a cold bath; the other was pulverised like steak on a butcher's slab and left to die. In the face of such incomprehensible brutality, the pictures tell a simpler horror story. A murderous great-aunt adjusted the yellow hair ties. A killer stepmother fixed the rosebud ribbons. The clash of normality and evil appals and also, in some curious way, absolves us. We are detached and at a loss to comprehend. Such wickedness, we think, does not brush ordinary lives. It does now. The Climbi inquiry is a recital of blight and official blindness in the anonymous inner city. The case of Lauren Wright demonstrates how a peaceful Norfolk village, with a church, an ivy-clad pub and 300 inhabitants, can double as a torture chamber. Neighbours and teachers looked on as Lauren's weight fell and her bruises spread. Tracey Wright, a playground helper, felt sufficiently emboldened by communitarian spirit to brutalise her in public and encourage her own children to spit in their stepsister's face. What sort of a woman commits such atrocities? Cruel, sadistic, not clever but very cunning. And familiar. The monstrous mother has existed since the time of Euripides and before. While Tracey Wright may not qualify as a modern Medea, she is a recognisable figure in the canon of evil. Nor is there anything new in the modern continuum of child torture. Every week in Britain, at least one child dies at the hands of a parent or carer. As the NSPCC points out, the roll call of child killing has continued uninterrupted since Maria Colwell was murdered in the early 70s. For all the reforms and promises, we have made no impact at all. But the culture that spawns viciousness evolves in terrifying ways. It seems unbelievable that those who watched Lauren suffer could shuffle their feet, like awkward spectators at a stranger's deathbed, as a child was inched towards her grave. It is unspeakable, too, that social services should lace their culpability with such cynicism. The official valediction to brief lives now contains two strands. First, supply extra money, or expect more deaths. The second message, whispered as the Climbi inquiry continues, is that professionals should not have their errors paraded, lest potential care workers shun this blighted system. Such arguments brand at-risk children as economic bait. It is, however, true that the Government is so miserly on child protection that English authorities have overspent by 500 million this year, just to provide the thin back-up that allowed Lauren and Victoria's killings. Diverting money into favoured, and successful, Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, means less for basic services. Promises to eradicate child poverty, linked closely to neglect, sound hopeful, but 4.3 million British children remain poor. The Prime Minister lauds America, where the impoverished black child may aspire to high office. We shall see soon how the Colin Powell model will play out here. Poverty is not the only issue. Nor is a pernicious minority of brutes who torture children the sole problem, though it is the least tractable. Michael Stone, the murderer of Lin and Megan Russell and a man no doubt immortalised some where in a sweet-faced school snapshot, was beaten by his stepfather at the age of one and abused by social workers. We understand how to create monsters. We do not know how to redeem them. Notions of parenting classes for the inadequate are little more than a sop for middle class do-gooders with the warm idea that cruelty is amenable to the intervention of a Dr Spockish government. But the state is a dreadful parent. It is responsible for care home scandals. It presides, in loco parentis, over the young offenders' institutions that, for all the warnings, still corrupt and kill. We weep, rightly, for murdered toddlers, but children discovered hanging in a Feltham cell die without public lament or remark. What binds such victims to each other, and to all those whose lives will never be corroded by cruelty, is absence of power. Adults see children as their property. The law is cavalier. A child can be arrested and strip-searched at 10 but not interviewed by police until he or she is 14. Children can drink alcohol at five but not buy a pet kitten before the age of 12. It took until last year for the Home Office to issue guidance that child prostitutes were abuse victims, not criminals. A few weeks ago Scotland announced its plan to outlaw smacking for the under-threes. Westminster proposals are imminent, and child protection charities fear that a government that recently sanctioned smacking by childminders might restrict the ban to babies only. Outlawing smacking altogether is imperative. Those who hesitated to report Tracey Wright as she went about the legalised business of battering her child might have thought again. Such a ban would also impact on parents, Blair and Blunkett included, who see no great harm in a remedial swipe. It would symbolise a fairer world for children and end the idea that Article 12 of the Human Rights Convention is, like recorder lessons and broccoli, desirable but inessential. A lack of rights for children drives society's failings. That absence feeds the confidence of torturers, the apathy of protectors and the vagueness of government reformers. It underpins the cruel practice of keeping children with their birth parents when all reason and humanity demands their removal. It genuflects to the madness of a system in which it is legal to assault a child but not a grown-up. It makes adults, the monstrous and the kind alike, complicit in neglect. So, reform the child care system. Have a Children's Commissioner, as the NSPCC and others demand. But a slicker, more accountable structure will not be enough. We have the worst child poverty and infant mortality rates in Europe. A quarter of recorded rape victims are children. One in five children is mentally ill. Another child will be killed by a parent before this week is over. The charge sheet, if there ever is one, is likely to say manslaughter, not murder. The presumption is that the premeditated slaughter of a child is a lesser crime. What are the remedies against such horrors? 'We deserve to know why,' Lauren's MP said, as she demanded an inquiry into her death. But we do know why. And the lesson, not yet absorbed, of Victoria's and Lauren's deaths is that children, not adults, are the deserving ones. They need more rights, more legal protection, more compassion. They need more than old stereotypes of evil and of innocence. They need solutions to disaster that go beyond a tired litany of official regret laced with laments on overwork. They deserve better than a society that turns its back on the ugly fate of living children while weeping at the beauty of the dead.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Dead children always look so beautiful. Victoria Climbi's curls are held with yellow ties, and her smile is hopeful. Lauren Wright has blonde bunches caught in rosebud ribbons. The girls' school photos, shot in a rare instant of peace or pretence, bear no relationship to the reality of their lives. One child was left in a sack of excrement in a cold bath; the other was pulverised like steak on a butcher's slab and left to die. In the face of such incomprehensible brutality, the pictures tell a simpler horror story. A murderous great-aunt adjusted the yellow hair ties. A killer stepmother fixed the rosebud ribbons. The clash of normality and evil appals and also, in some curious way, absolves us. We are detached and at a loss to comprehend. Such wickedness, we think, does not brush ordinary lives. It does now. The Climbi inquiry is a recital of blight and official blindness in the anonymous inner city. The case of Lauren Wright demonstrates how a peaceful Norfolk village, with a church, an ivy-clad pub and 300 inhabitants, can double as a torture chamber. Neighbours and teachers looked on as Lauren's weight fell and her bruises spread. Tracey Wright, a playground helper, felt sufficiently emboldened by communitarian spirit to brutalise her in public and encourage her own children to spit in their stepsister's face. What sort of a woman commits such atrocities? Cruel, sadistic, not clever but very cunning. And familiar. The monstrous mother has existed since the time of Euripides and before. While Tracey Wright may not qualify as a modern Medea, she is a recognisable figure in the canon of evil. Nor is there anything new in the modern continuum of child torture. Every week in Britain, at least one child dies at the hands of a parent or carer. As the NSPCC points out, the roll call of child killing has continued uninterrupted since Maria Colwell was murdered in the early 70s. For all the reforms and promises, we have made no impact at all. But the culture that spawns viciousness evolves in terrifying ways. It seems unbelievable that those who watched Lauren suffer could shuffle their feet, like awkward spectators at a stranger's deathbed, as a child was inched towards her grave. It is unspeakable, too, that social services should lace their culpability with such cynicism. The official valediction to brief lives now contains two strands. First, supply extra money, or expect more deaths. The second message, whispered as the Climbi inquiry continues, is that professionals should not have their errors paraded, lest potential care workers shun this blighted system. Such arguments brand at-risk children as economic bait. It is, however, true that the Government is so miserly on child protection that English authorities have overspent by 500 million this year, just to provide the thin back-up that allowed Lauren and Victoria's killings. Diverting money into favoured, and successful, Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, means less for basic services. Promises to eradicate child poverty, linked closely to neglect, sound hopeful, but 4.3 million British children remain poor. The Prime Minister lauds America, where the impoverished black child may aspire to high office. We shall see soon how the Colin Powell model will play out here. Poverty is not the only issue. Nor is a pernicious minority of brutes who torture children the sole problem, though it is the least tractable. Michael Stone, the murderer of Lin and Megan Russell and a man no doubt immortalised some where in a sweet-faced school snapshot, was beaten by his stepfather at the age of one and abused by social workers. We understand how to create monsters. We do not know how to redeem them. Notions of parenting classes for the inadequate are little more than a sop for middle class do-gooders with the warm idea that cruelty is amenable to the intervention of a Dr Spockish government. But the state is a dreadful parent. It is responsible for care home scandals. It presides, in loco parentis, over the young offenders' institutions that, for all the warnings, still corrupt and kill. We weep, rightly, for murdered toddlers, but children discovered hanging in a Feltham cell die without public lament or remark. What binds such victims to each other, and to all those whose lives will never be corroded by cruelty, is absence of power. Adults see children as their property. The law is cavalier. A child can be arrested and strip-searched at 10 but not interviewed by police until he or she is 14. Children can drink alcohol at five but not buy a pet kitten before the age of 12. It took until last year for the Home Office to issue guidance that child prostitutes were abuse victims, not criminals. A few weeks ago Scotland announced its plan to outlaw smacking for the under-threes. Westminster proposals are imminent, and child protection charities fear that a government that recently sanctioned smacking by childminders might restrict the ban to babies only. Outlawing smacking altogether is imperative. Those who hesitated to report Tracey Wright as she went about the legalised business of battering her child might have thought again. Such a ban would also impact on parents, Blair and Blunkett included, who see no great harm in a remedial swipe. It would symbolise a fairer world for children and end the idea that Article 12 of the Human Rights Convention is, like recorder lessons and broccoli, desirable but inessential. A lack of rights for children drives society's failings. That absence feeds the confidence of torturers, the apathy of protectors and the vagueness of government reformers. It underpins the cruel practice of keeping children with their birth parents when all reason and humanity demands their removal. It genuflects to the madness of a system in which it is legal to assault a child but not a grown-up. It makes adults, the monstrous and the kind alike, complicit in neglect. So, reform the child care system. Have a Children's Commissioner, as the NSPCC and others demand. But a slicker, more accountable structure will not be enough. We have the worst child poverty and infant mortality rates in Europe. A quarter of recorded rape victims are children. One in five children is mentally ill. Another child will be killed by a parent before this week is over. The charge sheet, if there ever is one, is likely to say manslaughter, not murder. The presumption is that the premeditated slaughter of a child is a lesser crime. What are the remedies against such horrors? 'We deserve to know why,' Lauren's MP said, as she demanded an inquiry into her death. But we do know why. And the lesson, not yet absorbed, of Victoria's and Lauren's deaths is that children, not adults, are the deserving ones. They need more rights, more legal protection, more compassion. They need more than old stereotypes of evil and of innocence. They need solutions to disaster that go beyond a tired litany of official regret laced with laments on overwork. They deserve better than a society that turns its back on the ugly fate of living children while weeping at the beauty of the dead.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Family doctors are in despair and at breaking point, according to the chair of the British Medical Association's GP committee. That cri de coeur produced a standing ovation from 400 delegates at last week's annual meeting and a few paragraphs in the Daily Telegraph. The public can dispense with most helmsmen of old civic life, from vicars to bank managers, but cannot do without GPs. Yet the news that half of them are thinking of resigning from the National Health Service causes barely a flutter of interest. Why should this be? Partly because surgeries, with their red plastic chairs veined with grime and their composted Reader's Digests have always hinted at frugal decline, but mainly because a new mood of suspicion grows. The image of Dr Harold Shipman, with his tidy beard and phials of powdered diamorphine stashed in his doctor's bag, is hardly a boost for a beleaguered profession. A more insidious destabilising force is at work As doctors, complained of and complaining, become the new teachers, the Government underlines how lucky they are. The NHS Reform Bill specifies that, by 2004, they will control 75 per cent of the health service budget. The message is that autonomy equals beneficence. No doubt some GPs are grateful. Others may think that if they wanted to count cash, they could have been NatWest cashiers, or that being the procurer for unavailable or unaffordable treatments does not constitute a shopper's paradise. The political message counters such pessimism. Doctors have never had it so good. Patients, conversely, have never had it so bad. John Major's patients' charter made us strident, and foreign holidays made us envious of those who get treated without spending half a day becalmed in a toxic A&E department. ER, Casualty and media scare stories mean we're experts in everything from small bowel transplants to the side-effects of Zyban. Some seek to sue doctors while others go for summary justice. Attacks on medical staff are running at 65,000 a year. Two in 10 Londoners fail to turn up for booked appointments, but that is our prerogative. Patients come first, the Government is constantly reminding us, as if malign doctors are trying to usurp those rights. Two new constructs are being fleshed out. One is the doctor from hell, the other the patient from hell. If each protagonist sees the other as the enemy, that divide-and -rule stratagem may suit a government with plenty of other worries. The greatest reminder of recent failure will surface any day now, when the inquiry into the Bristol children killed by bungled heart surgery is revealed in Parliament. Ian Kennedy's investigation, the largest undertaken into clinical practice in the UK, will make Lord Cullen's report on the Paddington rail disaster look like a Post-It note. It is so shrouded in secrecy that even Sir Barry Jackson, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has no clue on its findings about James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, who, with their former chief executive, were found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct over 29 infants who died. Jackson hopes, of course, that Kennedy will acknowledge tightened standards making it 'virtually inconceivable' that there could ever be a reprise of Bristol. Tonight's Panorama will argue, conversely, that a replay is all too likely. As the hype builds over the report, another question might be whether it was necessary at all. Harold Wilson once said that he saw no need for a Royal Commission that 'would take minutes and waste years'. How fortunate for him that he was spared the current mood for paper-pushing. In the Harold Shipman inquiry, a million pages of information have been put on databases, a video link-up is in place to Hyde, where he worked, and 500,000 has been spent on installing IT equipment. Where most public investigations are a requiem for official incompetence, this one is also a sleuthing exercise on how 459 patients died. Although few would deny relatives their right to know, only nine people arrived at the shabby viewing-room. One, a pensioner with a bag of sandwiches, could not bear to go in. For all the modish emphasis on 'closure', people don't always want old sorrow excavated, particularly when the aim is slaking public anger rather than personal grief. The Bristol parents might have found some peace long ago, but for government dithering. The Health Department could have held its own, wide-ranging inquiry at the outset. Instead, it shuffled the case on to the General Medical Council, which, pending yet another reorganisation in July, is still perceived as unfit to hold a stewards' inquiry into a three-legged race at a primary school sports day. Hence the need for the gravitas of Kennedy. His report, two years in gestation, may criticise the Health Department. It is expected to focus on the failures of systems rather than individuals. Undoubtedly it will advocate more audit trails, although how those are to be achieved is unclear when the Government has shown no signs of providing promised money for a computer set-up. Practical solutions cannot address a deeper ill- will. At the King's Fund president's lecture last Friday, a senior consultant said that he had been billed for several hundred pounds by a patient who had been kept waiting and wanted recompense for his 'professional time'. But where, the doctor asked, was he to find time? It seems the crucial question. British doctors, with annual pay rises of around 3.5 per cent, overtook their European counterparts in 1993 and stay comfortably ahead on wages. There are, however, only 1.8 doctors for every 1,000 Britons, against a European average of 3.4. GPs say an extra 10,000 are needed if government targets are to be met. To some, this seems a bit rich. Royal College protectionism, decreeing that no one without multiple grade As at A-level was fit to assess the nation's bunions bred a lean élite. Now medical school applications are dropping, from 12,076 in 1997 to 9,700 this year, and the panic is on. While there is some recognition on doctors' part that the clubbishness that helped foster rogues such as Rodney Ledward and Richard Neale was inexcusable, no one has yet worked out how to make health service jobs look appealing. Meanwhile, mutual mistrust and baroque inquiries obscure the bigger picture. The Government has backed itself into a corner on health. In not much more time than it took Professor Kennedy to produce one report, it has to fix the entire NHS. As a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research will say tomorrow, its plans for private partnerships look flawed. A purely tax-funded service works only if the rich pay more tax. That leaves either hypothecation or a social insurance model, such as the French one, where 90 per cent of the population pay around 17 per cent of their salary into a sickness fund and the poorest get the same care free. Although Blair dismisses both schemes, the suspicion is mounting that genuflecting to Beveridge must soon give way to something more radical. As the real battle for a better health service begins, doctors and patients should be fighting on the same side.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Family doctors are in despair and at breaking point, according to the chair of the British Medical Association's GP committee. That cri de coeur produced a standing ovation from 400 delegates at last week's annual meeting and a few paragraphs in the Daily Telegraph. The public can dispense with most helmsmen of old civic life, from vicars to bank managers, but cannot do without GPs. Yet the news that half of them are thinking of resigning from the National Health Service causes barely a flutter of interest. Why should this be? Partly because surgeries, with their red plastic chairs veined with grime and their composted Reader's Digests have always hinted at frugal decline, but mainly because a new mood of suspicion grows. The image of Dr Harold Shipman, with his tidy beard and phials of powdered diamorphine stashed in his doctor's bag, is hardly a boost for a beleaguered profession. A more insidious destabilising force is at work As doctors, complained of and complaining, become the new teachers, the Government underlines how lucky they are. The NHS Reform Bill specifies that, by 2004, they will control 75 per cent of the health service budget. The message is that autonomy equals beneficence. No doubt some GPs are grateful. Others may think that if they wanted to count cash, they could have been NatWest cashiers, or that being the procurer for unavailable or unaffordable treatments does not constitute a shopper's paradise. The political message counters such pessimism. Doctors have never had it so good. Patients, conversely, have never had it so bad. John Major's patients' charter made us strident, and foreign holidays made us envious of those who get treated without spending half a day becalmed in a toxic A&E department. ER, Casualty and media scare stories mean we're experts in everything from small bowel transplants to the side-effects of Zyban. Some seek to sue doctors while others go for summary justice. Attacks on medical staff are running at 65,000 a year. Two in 10 Londoners fail to turn up for booked appointments, but that is our prerogative. Patients come first, the Government is constantly reminding us, as if malign doctors are trying to usurp those rights. Two new constructs are being fleshed out. One is the doctor from hell, the other the patient from hell. If each protagonist sees the other as the enemy, that divide-and -rule stratagem may suit a government with plenty of other worries. The greatest reminder of recent failure will surface any day now, when the inquiry into the Bristol children killed by bungled heart surgery is revealed in Parliament. Ian Kennedy's investigation, the largest undertaken into clinical practice in the UK, will make Lord Cullen's report on the Paddington rail disaster look like a Post-It note. It is so shrouded in secrecy that even Sir Barry Jackson, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, has no clue on its findings about James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana, who, with their former chief executive, were found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct over 29 infants who died. Jackson hopes, of course, that Kennedy will acknowledge tightened standards making it 'virtually inconceivable' that there could ever be a reprise of Bristol. Tonight's Panorama will argue, conversely, that a replay is all too likely. As the hype builds over the report, another question might be whether it was necessary at all. Harold Wilson once said that he saw no need for a Royal Commission that 'would take minutes and waste years'. How fortunate for him that he was spared the current mood for paper-pushing. In the Harold Shipman inquiry, a million pages of information have been put on databases, a video link-up is in place to Hyde, where he worked, and 500,000 has been spent on installing IT equipment. Where most public investigations are a requiem for official incompetence, this one is also a sleuthing exercise on how 459 patients died. Although few would deny relatives their right to know, only nine people arrived at the shabby viewing-room. One, a pensioner with a bag of sandwiches, could not bear to go in. For all the modish emphasis on 'closure', people don't always want old sorrow excavated, particularly when the aim is slaking public anger rather than personal grief. The Bristol parents might have found some peace long ago, but for government dithering. The Health Department could have held its own, wide-ranging inquiry at the outset. Instead, it shuffled the case on to the General Medical Council, which, pending yet another reorganisation in July, is still perceived as unfit to hold a stewards' inquiry into a three-legged race at a primary school sports day. Hence the need for the gravitas of Kennedy. His report, two years in gestation, may criticise the Health Department. It is expected to focus on the failures of systems rather than individuals. Undoubtedly it will advocate more audit trails, although how those are to be achieved is unclear when the Government has shown no signs of providing promised money for a computer set-up. Practical solutions cannot address a deeper ill- will. At the King's Fund president's lecture last Friday, a senior consultant said that he had been billed for several hundred pounds by a patient who had been kept waiting and wanted recompense for his 'professional time'. But where, the doctor asked, was he to find time? It seems the crucial question. British doctors, with annual pay rises of around 3.5 per cent, overtook their European counterparts in 1993 and stay comfortably ahead on wages. There are, however, only 1.8 doctors for every 1,000 Britons, against a European average of 3.4. GPs say an extra 10,000 are needed if government targets are to be met. To some, this seems a bit rich. Royal College protectionism, decreeing that no one without multiple grade As at A-level was fit to assess the nation's bunions bred a lean élite. Now medical school applications are dropping, from 12,076 in 1997 to 9,700 this year, and the panic is on. While there is some recognition on doctors' part that the clubbishness that helped foster rogues such as Rodney Ledward and Richard Neale was inexcusable, no one has yet worked out how to make health service jobs look appealing. Meanwhile, mutual mistrust and baroque inquiries obscure the bigger picture. The Government has backed itself into a corner on health. In not much more time than it took Professor Kennedy to produce one report, it has to fix the entire NHS. As a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research will say tomorrow, its plans for private partnerships look flawed. A purely tax-funded service works only if the rich pay more tax. That leaves either hypothecation or a social insurance model, such as the French one, where 90 per cent of the population pay around 17 per cent of their salary into a sickness fund and the poorest get the same care free. Although Blair dismisses both schemes, the suspicion is mounting that genuflecting to Beveridge must soon give way to something more radical. As the real battle for a better health service begins, doctors and patients should be fighting on the same side.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
A crowd of 200 had gathered to watch the prisoner arrive. Mothers and fathers with pushchairs and small children in tow, screamed 'Scum', and 'Die' and 'Kill the bastard'. A man built like a Charolais and dressed in sweatshirt and trainers hurled himself at the silver police people-carrier bearing Roy Whiting, a 42-year-old mechanic, to Chichester Magistrates Court, where he was remanded in custody last Wednesday, charged with the kidnap and murder of Sarah Payne. The fury of the mob had been stoked at first by horror at the killing of an eight-year-old and by the News Of The World 's subsequent name-and-shame campaign. More recently the police, if not whipping up hysteria, have, seemingly, done little to tamp it down. A week ago, detectives helpfully tipped off the press that they planned to charge Whiting, who had been arrested and questioned twice previously, within three days. It was believed, though not confirmed, that their breakthrough hinged on an appeal by the BBC's Crimewatch programme. As a 'senior police source' told the Daily Mail: 'The incident room has not stopped working since the day little Sarah disappeared. The man is due to be arrested... and the mood among many officers is buoyant.' If true, this revelation of police hubris is a disgraceful affront to justice. Roy Whiting is innocent in the eyes of the law. He has entered no plea and faced no jury. Once a quaint old protocol decreed that, at the whiff of an arrest, a veil of secrecy descended. Now, it seems, practically anything goes in high-profile murder cases, where tragedy elides with show business and the public clamours for results. Can Whiting get a fair trial, given the weight and type of publicity surrounding Sarah's murder? Among other examples of goldfish-bowl defendants, the next in line is Barry George, a prime focus of the media spotlight, who goes on trial for Jill Dando's murder in a fortnight. One can see why three Appeal Court judges resisted the argument that Michael Stone should not have his case tested again in court because, as his barrister claimed, 'the wealth of prejudicial material... would make such a retrial unfair'. Perhaps, given the tonnage of pre-publicity surrounding criminal cases, the best to be hoped for is an amnesiac jury. Later this week, the judges will give their reasons for ordering a retrial following their decision to quash Stone's conviction for the murders of Lin Russell and her daughter, Megan, and the attempted murder of Josie Russell, after a key witness had been shown to be unreliable. The Russells will have to revisit their tragedy. Kent police may, in due course, have some tough questions to answer as to why justice miscarried. For now, the best that can be said of the whole debacle is that the appellate process has been shown to work. Whether Stone is found guilty or innocent, his case was treated with a swiftness denied to others. Last week Stephen Downing finally walked free, after serving 27 years for the murder of Wendy Howell, a crime he almost certainly did not commit. Disgracefully, he was held in prison long after he would normally have been released, because parole boards refuse to free those who do not admit their guilt. Last week too, the case of a man hanged for the murder of a cinema manager in 1950 went to appeal after the solicitor for George Kelly's family argued that 'the police and courts believed it was more important to secure a conviction to reassure the public than to properly investigate a crime'. So what's changed? A quarter of a century after Kelly went to the gallows, the notorious West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad began its regime of torture, bogus confessions and creative note-taking, resulting in a litany of miscarriages of justice. The Birmingham Six were wrongly convicted, and Ann Whelan spent 17 years fighting for the release of her son, Michael Hickey, and watching his life unravel in prison before it finally emerged that he and the two other living members of the Bridgewater Four had been framed by the Squad. How long ago it seems since the wrongful conviction of Judith Ward, Stefan Kiszko, the Maguire Seven, the Guildford Four. How far we have come since then. But not, perhaps, quite far enough. The Criminal Cases Review Commission is over-loaded with petitioners claiming to have been wrongly sentenced, and the Crown Prosecution Service remains unaccountable, prone to arbitrary decisions and strapped for cash. While science should make convictions watertight, the perception - or the reality - can be quite the opposite. The pattern of invisible blood spots that clinched the case of Sion Jenkins, the teacher found guilty of murdering his step-daughter, Billie-Jo, did not impress a number of powerful advocates who argue that he should never have been convicted. That unease, and the worries raised by the Michael Stone case, don't, of course, denote a return to the corrupt ways of the Seventies. There are, however, new considerations in an age when locking people up is becoming so simple. Not long ago, Tony Blair announced plans to take DNA samples from everyone arrested in Britain. Fine, except that genes are already being interpreted not only as evi dence of a crime committed but as indicative of one that might be. If genetic profiling becomes part of police investigation, then the presumption of innocence dies. The Law Commission is expected soon, in the light of DNA advances and Sir William Macpherson's recommendations, to relax the 'double jeopardy' principle, under which an acquitted suspect cannot be retried for the same offence. Fine, unless the police and CPS produce slovenly prosecution cases, knowing they can always have another bash. But the really iniquitous development is the promise by Government of post-election legislation indefinitely to detain people with untreatable personality disorders. Though the real scandal is the dearth of psychiatrists and of hospital beds for the mentally ill, Jack Straw has for years preferred to dream of incarcerating those who have committed no offence but who might. His success, framed in a recent White Paper, may delight those who choose not to recognise that schizophrenics commit 10 murders a year, or about 2 per cent of all killings. We are 20 times more likely to be killed by a sane person than an insane one, but such statistics carry little weight in a hot climate of fear in which we are encouraged to believe that a child-molesting monster lurks at every corner. In fact, British children are the second safest in the world, according to a new survey by Unicef. But even if they were not, there would be no justification for such a gross affront to human rights. When the weight of the criminal justice system offers no guarantee that we are locking up the right suspects, incarcerating people while skipping the optional extras of a crime and a trial is hardly likely to produce good outcomes. And besides, for those failed by the courts, there is still the prospect of finding justice, even if, in Stephen Downing's case, the quest took most of his life. Jack Straw's and Alan Milburn's detainees, unconvicted but 'untreatable', may have no such luxury.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
A crowd of 200 had gathered to watch the prisoner arrive. Mothers and fathers with pushchairs and small children in tow, screamed 'Scum', and 'Die' and 'Kill the bastard'. A man built like a Charolais and dressed in sweatshirt and trainers hurled himself at the silver police people-carrier bearing Roy Whiting, a 42-year-old mechanic, to Chichester Magistrates Court, where he was remanded in custody last Wednesday, charged with the kidnap and murder of Sarah Payne. The fury of the mob had been stoked at first by horror at the killing of an eight-year-old and by the News Of The World 's subsequent name-and-shame campaign. More recently the police, if not whipping up hysteria, have, seemingly, done little to tamp it down. A week ago, detectives helpfully tipped off the press that they planned to charge Whiting, who had been arrested and questioned twice previously, within three days. It was believed, though not confirmed, that their breakthrough hinged on an appeal by the BBC's Crimewatch programme. As a 'senior police source' told the Daily Mail: 'The incident room has not stopped working since the day little Sarah disappeared. The man is due to be arrested... and the mood among many officers is buoyant.' If true, this revelation of police hubris is a disgraceful affront to justice. Roy Whiting is innocent in the eyes of the law. He has entered no plea and faced no jury. Once a quaint old protocol decreed that, at the whiff of an arrest, a veil of secrecy descended. Now, it seems, practically anything goes in high-profile murder cases, where tragedy elides with show business and the public clamours for results. Can Whiting get a fair trial, given the weight and type of publicity surrounding Sarah's murder? Among other examples of goldfish-bowl defendants, the next in line is Barry George, a prime focus of the media spotlight, who goes on trial for Jill Dando's murder in a fortnight. One can see why three Appeal Court judges resisted the argument that Michael Stone should not have his case tested again in court because, as his barrister claimed, 'the wealth of prejudicial material... would make such a retrial unfair'. Perhaps, given the tonnage of pre-publicity surrounding criminal cases, the best to be hoped for is an amnesiac jury. Later this week, the judges will give their reasons for ordering a retrial following their decision to quash Stone's conviction for the murders of Lin Russell and her daughter, Megan, and the attempted murder of Josie Russell, after a key witness had been shown to be unreliable. The Russells will have to revisit their tragedy. Kent police may, in due course, have some tough questions to answer as to why justice miscarried. For now, the best that can be said of the whole debacle is that the appellate process has been shown to work. Whether Stone is found guilty or innocent, his case was treated with a swiftness denied to others. Last week Stephen Downing finally walked free, after serving 27 years for the murder of Wendy Howell, a crime he almost certainly did not commit. Disgracefully, he was held in prison long after he would normally have been released, because parole boards refuse to free those who do not admit their guilt. Last week too, the case of a man hanged for the murder of a cinema manager in 1950 went to appeal after the solicitor for George Kelly's family argued that 'the police and courts believed it was more important to secure a conviction to reassure the public than to properly investigate a crime'. So what's changed? A quarter of a century after Kelly went to the gallows, the notorious West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad began its regime of torture, bogus confessions and creative note-taking, resulting in a litany of miscarriages of justice. The Birmingham Six were wrongly convicted, and Ann Whelan spent 17 years fighting for the release of her son, Michael Hickey, and watching his life unravel in prison before it finally emerged that he and the two other living members of the Bridgewater Four had been framed by the Squad. How long ago it seems since the wrongful conviction of Judith Ward, Stefan Kiszko, the Maguire Seven, the Guildford Four. How far we have come since then. But not, perhaps, quite far enough. The Criminal Cases Review Commission is over-loaded with petitioners claiming to have been wrongly sentenced, and the Crown Prosecution Service remains unaccountable, prone to arbitrary decisions and strapped for cash. While science should make convictions watertight, the perception - or the reality - can be quite the opposite. The pattern of invisible blood spots that clinched the case of Sion Jenkins, the teacher found guilty of murdering his step-daughter, Billie-Jo, did not impress a number of powerful advocates who argue that he should never have been convicted. That unease, and the worries raised by the Michael Stone case, don't, of course, denote a return to the corrupt ways of the Seventies. There are, however, new considerations in an age when locking people up is becoming so simple. Not long ago, Tony Blair announced plans to take DNA samples from everyone arrested in Britain. Fine, except that genes are already being interpreted not only as evi dence of a crime committed but as indicative of one that might be. If genetic profiling becomes part of police investigation, then the presumption of innocence dies. The Law Commission is expected soon, in the light of DNA advances and Sir William Macpherson's recommendations, to relax the 'double jeopardy' principle, under which an acquitted suspect cannot be retried for the same offence. Fine, unless the police and CPS produce slovenly prosecution cases, knowing they can always have another bash. But the really iniquitous development is the promise by Government of post-election legislation indefinitely to detain people with untreatable personality disorders. Though the real scandal is the dearth of psychiatrists and of hospital beds for the mentally ill, Jack Straw has for years preferred to dream of incarcerating those who have committed no offence but who might. His success, framed in a recent White Paper, may delight those who choose not to recognise that schizophrenics commit 10 murders a year, or about 2 per cent of all killings. We are 20 times more likely to be killed by a sane person than an insane one, but such statistics carry little weight in a hot climate of fear in which we are encouraged to believe that a child-molesting monster lurks at every corner. In fact, British children are the second safest in the world, according to a new survey by Unicef. But even if they were not, there would be no justification for such a gross affront to human rights. When the weight of the criminal justice system offers no guarantee that we are locking up the right suspects, incarcerating people while skipping the optional extras of a crime and a trial is hardly likely to produce good outcomes. And besides, for those failed by the courts, there is still the prospect of finding justice, even if, in Stephen Downing's case, the quest took most of his life. Jack Straw's and Alan Milburn's detainees, unconvicted but 'untreatable', may have no such luxury.
|
5maryriddell
| 1Society
|
Once there was heroin chic. Its catwalk disciples had shadowed eyes, chalk faces and cadaverous cheeks. If they were high on anything, it was a cocktail of champagne, Marlboro Lights and irony. Now there is only heroin shock. The pictures of Rachel Whitear, killed at 21 with a syringe in her hand, are distressing both as an illustration of the ravages of death and for their contrasting tableau of a deeply normal life. In the tidiest of student rooms, a girl with shiny hair and a striped dress crouches in a pose of pain or supplication. She had tried to get off drugs. Her counsellor saw her as a success story. Yet she died despite her resolve and the bright future that beckoned before she dropped out of Bath University. Her mission, ordained by her parents, is that she should now spare other children a fate from which she could not absolve herself. Will her cautionary tale, a modern take on Belloc or Hoffman, have a lasting impact? Current wisdom says yes. Last week the British Medical Association urged the Government to revive the shock Aids campaigns of the Eighties. In their absence, sexually transmitted diseases have risen alarmingly. Complacency kills in a country where fortunes are spent to promote wrinkle creams and cars, and almost nothing on saving or enhancing lives. But the advertising of risk is inexact. What message, exactly, should teenagers absorb? Rachel's mottled body, complete with 'Just Say No' subtext, contrasts oddly with other drug stories. On the day Prince Harry escaped a police caution for smoking dope, an inquest heard how a high-achieving, 16-year-old boy on cannabis stabbed himself through the heart with scissors in front of his father. Real life is too complex for simple analysis of danger. That is why adult stories of addiction are so sinuous. Sir Anthony Hopkins cannot resist the suggestion that his life was once enhanced, as well as ravaged, by drink. Martin Broughton, who heads British American Tobacco, concedes that smoking is bad for you and he would counsel his children never to take it up. Such mixed messages typify our ambivalence. Print the anti-smoking notices small on cigarette packets. Downplay the charge that alcohol abuse costs the NHS 3 billion a year. But stress the parable of Rachel Whitear, an emblem of the tragedies that befall our children. Except that she, for all the prominence of her dying, was the minority of a minority; a privileged university student who found her nemesis in lethal drugs. Hers, in the end, is a personal, not a public lesson. Her parents longed no doubt that other children should not die needlessly. They must have yearned to give a purpose to an abbreviated life and its crushed promise. Rachel wanted her organs to help others, but heroin abuse forbade that. Instead her parents chose to breach the privacy that death normally accords. No doubt they wished, understandably, that their child should not live and die in vain. It is indisputable that newspapers should publish pictures offered to them. It is also right that editors should understand that such stark images may have less to say about public duty than about private despair.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Mary Riddell .
|
Once there was heroin chic. Its catwalk disciples had shadowed eyes, chalk faces and cadaverous cheeks. If they were high on anything, it was a cocktail of champagne, Marlboro Lights and irony. Now there is only heroin shock. The pictures of Rachel Whitear, killed at 21 with a syringe in her hand, are distressing both as an illustration of the ravages of death and for their contrasting tableau of a deeply normal life. In the tidiest of student rooms, a girl with shiny hair and a striped dress crouches in a pose of pain or supplication. She had tried to get off drugs. Her counsellor saw her as a success story. Yet she died despite her resolve and the bright future that beckoned before she dropped out of Bath University. Her mission, ordained by her parents, is that she should now spare other children a fate from which she could not absolve herself. Will her cautionary tale, a modern take on Belloc or Hoffman, have a lasting impact? Current wisdom says yes. Last week the British Medical Association urged the Government to revive the shock Aids campaigns of the Eighties. In their absence, sexually transmitted diseases have risen alarmingly. Complacency kills in a country where fortunes are spent to promote wrinkle creams and cars, and almost nothing on saving or enhancing lives. But the advertising of risk is inexact. What message, exactly, should teenagers absorb? Rachel's mottled body, complete with 'Just Say No' subtext, contrasts oddly with other drug stories. On the day Prince Harry escaped a police caution for smoking dope, an inquest heard how a high-achieving, 16-year-old boy on cannabis stabbed himself through the heart with scissors in front of his father. Real life is too complex for simple analysis of danger. That is why adult stories of addiction are so sinuous. Sir Anthony Hopkins cannot resist the suggestion that his life was once enhanced, as well as ravaged, by drink. Martin Broughton, who heads British American Tobacco, concedes that smoking is bad for you and he would counsel his children never to take it up. Such mixed messages typify our ambivalence. Print the anti-smoking notices small on cigarette packets. Downplay the charge that alcohol abuse costs the NHS 3 billion a year. But stress the parable of Rachel Whitear, an emblem of the tragedies that befall our children. Except that she, for all the prominence of her dying, was the minority of a minority; a privileged university student who found her nemesis in lethal drugs. Hers, in the end, is a personal, not a public lesson. Her parents longed no doubt that other children should not die needlessly. They must have yearned to give a purpose to an abbreviated life and its crushed promise. Rachel wanted her organs to help others, but heroin abuse forbade that. Instead her parents chose to breach the privacy that death normally accords. No doubt they wished, understandably, that their child should not live and die in vain. It is indisputable that newspapers should publish pictures offered to them. It is also right that editors should understand that such stark images may have less to say about public duty than about private despair.
|
7peterpreston
| 1Society
|
I suppose you could say that my current inquiries (into the state of European healthcare) went rather deeper than anything managed by Dr Liam Fox or Alan Milburn. I didn't just go and look at hospitals. I became the involuntary English patient. Too easily done. A dark night in a pretty deserted Catalan village. A trip and a heavy fall, cannoning sideways into a giant flower pot. When I got back to home base, the ribs were shrieking and I was bleeding internally. Kidney damage? Not - even by my battered lights - a good scene. The ambulance came - from the local town, six miles away - in 15 minutes. On to that town's little all-night clinic, then, at the double, to the hospital in Palamos (population 15,000). Ninety-two minutes after the fall I'd been x-rayed, assessed, put on a drip and given a bed in the emergency ward, blood pressure monitored on the hour. By eight in the morning, I'd had an ultrasound scan of the kidneys. "Normal" said the scanner lugubriously. "Normal." But the bleeding hadn't stopped. Getting better - on solemn doctor's orders - involved four more days and nights lying immobile in a bed upstairs. Plenty of time to think and observe, as well as ache. What was different about this place? How was it different from, say, the south London hospital of rather grim repute where my mother-in-law once took her 89-year-old broken hip? Here are a few of the different things - some physical, some social, some organisational. Physically, there weren't any wards in the old British manner - and certainly not the mixed-sex agglomeration my mother-in-law found so humiliating. Palamos gives you a large room to share (suitably curtained) between two, a phone at your right hand, a light switch and buzzer at your left. The room comes with a loo, shower and basin and coin-in-the-slot TV. In no sense lush; indeed, rather bare. But fresh and clean. The first person in each morning, before it was light, was the cleaner. Socially, you might as well have been on another planet. There are no defined visiting hours. My wife slept with me the first night upstairs on an aeroplane-type chair by the bed. Standard practice in Spain: all relatives welcome. My roomshare beyond the curtain had an operation at six one evening, was wheeled back from theatre at 9.30 and seemed then to stage a bustle of comings and goings till 25 minutes to midnight. You don't feel - from the noise - as though you're in hospital. It's more like a good party where the drinks have run out. Revitalisation? Si. Recuperation? Maybe. Organisationally, they believe in clockwork. You could set your watch by the appearance of meals, temperature takers, linen changers (new linen every day at 10.30), bed bathers. Everybody - except one glum night nurse - smiled. I made the average bell response time 51 seconds. No demarcation lines. Nurses or radiographers turn porters in an instant if that's sensible. No queueing. On discharge morning, they fetched me for a second x-ray and scan exactly when they'd said they would. The doctor arrived on cue. I was checked and on my way out in three meticulous hours. Efficiency - even in the middle of a Catalan flu epidemic - lives. As you arrive, they give you a report card to tick on the way out about your treatment. Now, I've no way of knowing whether Palamos hospital - founded 1761 - is in any way exceptional. The boys in my village bar say it's fine, better than Girona. "Though you should try France. That's perfecto." And, of course, there are surely many better hospitals around than the decrepit, rigidly dour place my mother-in-law encountered a few days before she died. Even so, Palamos came up trumps. It was cheery, carefully organised and care-filled. I'd have done brilliantly to have found its like in Britain at the first time of asking (and I might have found the Portland). Now for the nitty-gritty. Five nights, drips, drugs, ambulances, food and two complete sets of tests cost 980 on travel insurance - because I hadn't got an EU form E111 with me. That, stacked against 300 for an annual 45 minutes of Harley Street check-up, is amazing value. It also points to the door where Messrs Fox and Milburn might like to knock. The way Spain finances its health (at around the European average that Mr Blair would aspire to immediately, if only his defence spending wasn't far above the European average) is calculated to invite a British frown. The state, via taxation, buys you what Ally Campbell would probably call bog standard care. In time of emergency need, nobody worries. (I'd have been treated the same in Palamos whatever scheme or non-scheme operated). But that isn't the whole of the story. Beyond the bog standard, there's also private insurance and super private insurance. We don't need to worry about the super club. That's just big bucks as usual. But the modest insurance route (a mix and match with state provision) is much more interesting. For one thing, it's relatively cheap. My daughter pays just under 1 a day - a cup of coffee - for coverage which allows her access to a chosen doctor, chosen hospitals to give birth in, and stay for four days, annual dental checks - the lot. For another thing, millions of people - a huge majority - take out the policy. It is the norm, not the exception. It echoes a mix of means and methods (where the state sometimes finances private hospitals). It sanctions choice and convenience. It separates the good from the slack, because quality follows the funds flow. Being a customer matters. It buys the equipment. It puts extra cash directly into the central system. Is that what Nye Bevin would hail as his dream made flesh? Perhaps not. Egalitarianism gags at the public/private divide. So, in British terms, does the political necessity of paying something extra for a supposedly "free" service. New Labour has seen this future - and dived for cover. Iain Duncan Smith will probably do likewise for all his Swedish foreplay. "But why shouldn't people who can afford to pay be asked to pay something?" inquires a Spanish doctor. It is what makes their health service viable - for the price of a grotty package holiday. It can, as a matter of priority, be afforded. It's pitched low because it needs to keep costs down for the many - not set them high for exclusiveness. It trains the extra doctors and nurses Mr Milburn would like to recruit. And all for the price of a cup of coffee. There's the principle (paradise lost) and the practicality. And the question - as the bleeding man said when he cannoned into an amphora - is what's so wrong, if those who were ill get better?
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Peter Preston .
|
I suppose you could say that my current inquiries (into the state of European healthcare) went rather deeper than anything managed by Dr Liam Fox or Alan Milburn. I didn't just go and look at hospitals. I became the involuntary English patient. Too easily done. A dark night in a pretty deserted Catalan village. A trip and a heavy fall, cannoning sideways into a giant flower pot. When I got back to home base, the ribs were shrieking and I was bleeding internally. Kidney damage? Not - even by my battered lights - a good scene. The ambulance came - from the local town, six miles away - in 15 minutes. On to that town's little all-night clinic, then, at the double, to the hospital in Palamos (population 15,000). Ninety-two minutes after the fall I'd been x-rayed, assessed, put on a drip and given a bed in the emergency ward, blood pressure monitored on the hour. By eight in the morning, I'd had an ultrasound scan of the kidneys. "Normal" said the scanner lugubriously. "Normal." But the bleeding hadn't stopped. Getting better - on solemn doctor's orders - involved four more days and nights lying immobile in a bed upstairs. Plenty of time to think and observe, as well as ache. What was different about this place? How was it different from, say, the south London hospital of rather grim repute where my mother-in-law once took her 89-year-old broken hip? Here are a few of the different things - some physical, some social, some organisational. Physically, there weren't any wards in the old British manner - and certainly not the mixed-sex agglomeration my mother-in-law found so humiliating. Palamos gives you a large room to share (suitably curtained) between two, a phone at your right hand, a light switch and buzzer at your left. The room comes with a loo, shower and basin and coin-in-the-slot TV. In no sense lush; indeed, rather bare. But fresh and clean. The first person in each morning, before it was light, was the cleaner. Socially, you might as well have been on another planet. There are no defined visiting hours. My wife slept with me the first night upstairs on an aeroplane-type chair by the bed. Standard practice in Spain: all relatives welcome. My roomshare beyond the curtain had an operation at six one evening, was wheeled back from theatre at 9.30 and seemed then to stage a bustle of comings and goings till 25 minutes to midnight. You don't feel - from the noise - as though you're in hospital. It's more like a good party where the drinks have run out. Revitalisation? Si. Recuperation? Maybe. Organisationally, they believe in clockwork. You could set your watch by the appearance of meals, temperature takers, linen changers (new linen every day at 10.30), bed bathers. Everybody - except one glum night nurse - smiled. I made the average bell response time 51 seconds. No demarcation lines. Nurses or radiographers turn porters in an instant if that's sensible. No queueing. On discharge morning, they fetched me for a second x-ray and scan exactly when they'd said they would. The doctor arrived on cue. I was checked and on my way out in three meticulous hours. Efficiency - even in the middle of a Catalan flu epidemic - lives. As you arrive, they give you a report card to tick on the way out about your treatment. Now, I've no way of knowing whether Palamos hospital - founded 1761 - is in any way exceptional. The boys in my village bar say it's fine, better than Girona. "Though you should try France. That's perfecto." And, of course, there are surely many better hospitals around than the decrepit, rigidly dour place my mother-in-law encountered a few days before she died. Even so, Palamos came up trumps. It was cheery, carefully organised and care-filled. I'd have done brilliantly to have found its like in Britain at the first time of asking (and I might have found the Portland). Now for the nitty-gritty. Five nights, drips, drugs, ambulances, food and two complete sets of tests cost 980 on travel insurance - because I hadn't got an EU form E111 with me. That, stacked against 300 for an annual 45 minutes of Harley Street check-up, is amazing value. It also points to the door where Messrs Fox and Milburn might like to knock. The way Spain finances its health (at around the European average that Mr Blair would aspire to immediately, if only his defence spending wasn't far above the European average) is calculated to invite a British frown. The state, via taxation, buys you what Ally Campbell would probably call bog standard care. In time of emergency need, nobody worries. (I'd have been treated the same in Palamos whatever scheme or non-scheme operated). But that isn't the whole of the story. Beyond the bog standard, there's also private insurance and super private insurance. We don't need to worry about the super club. That's just big bucks as usual. But the modest insurance route (a mix and match with state provision) is much more interesting. For one thing, it's relatively cheap. My daughter pays just under 1 a day - a cup of coffee - for coverage which allows her access to a chosen doctor, chosen hospitals to give birth in, and stay for four days, annual dental checks - the lot. For another thing, millions of people - a huge majority - take out the policy. It is the norm, not the exception. It echoes a mix of means and methods (where the state sometimes finances private hospitals). It sanctions choice and convenience. It separates the good from the slack, because quality follows the funds flow. Being a customer matters. It buys the equipment. It puts extra cash directly into the central system. Is that what Nye Bevin would hail as his dream made flesh? Perhaps not. Egalitarianism gags at the public/private divide. So, in British terms, does the political necessity of paying something extra for a supposedly "free" service. New Labour has seen this future - and dived for cover. Iain Duncan Smith will probably do likewise for all his Swedish foreplay. "But why shouldn't people who can afford to pay be asked to pay something?" inquires a Spanish doctor. It is what makes their health service viable - for the price of a grotty package holiday. It can, as a matter of priority, be afforded. It's pitched low because it needs to keep costs down for the many - not set them high for exclusiveness. It trains the extra doctors and nurses Mr Milburn would like to recruit. And all for the price of a cup of coffee. There's the principle (paradise lost) and the practicality. And the question - as the bleeding man said when he cannoned into an amphora - is what's so wrong, if those who were ill get better?
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
Ministers are public people. That is their uniqueness. What they do is speak for the state. They may be parents, and they may be viewers, but these are secondary characteristics, which may add to their claim to be human beings but can be distractions from their main function. When reacting to public events, they deserve attention only in their public role. Faced in the last week by two challenges to their capacity for speedy judgment - those swift uncalculated words that tell so much - they responded by exposing some pretty sinister instincts among those who command the British public realm. This is not a party point. The degeneration that has unfolded under Mr Blair builds on that which was well developed under Thatcherism. Maybe it's characteristic of governments everywhere. But seldom has there been such a revealing mismatch of responses, such a woeful reaction to two events that had in common the fact that television encompassed them. In the case of Brass Eye, the programme satirising anti-paedophile hysteria, ministers put on display their incorrigible capacity for intervention. They seem to be incapable of shutting up, or of observing the elementary rules that might entitle them not to, and this film could of course not be allowed to pass. David Blunkett sent word from his holiday that he was "dismayed" by the programme, which he had not seen. One of his deputies, Beverley Hughes, called it "unspeakably sick", again without having seen it; and, when challenged 24 hours later by Jim Naughtie, was defiant in her determination not to see it, even though sending for a video might have been considered a prudent manoeuvre if she was to go on braying about the scandal of it ever being shown. Tessa Jowell, the culture minister, was a little more careful. She saw the programme, but plainly failed to see its point, and found another way of saying that it should have been stopped. As secretary of state, she was alive to the danger of direct censorship, but spent yesterday putting the arm on the Independent Television Commission to perform that task instead. Why hadn't the ITC stopped the show being repeated? she whinged. There ought to be a law. There needed to be a system whereby the censor intervened quickly, if enough complaints clocked up. She would be urgently inventing such a system. This must stop. And so on. I thought the programme was a failure. The satire was too deeply embedded in the shock effect to make much sense. Some stupid personalities were conned into appearing on it. But it had a point, which survived many levels of scrutiny at Channel 4. Is the volume of viewers' complaints to be the touchstone for acceptability? If it is, a mere 2,500 complaints out of a viewership of some millions, though large by historic standards, surely ask a question about the rights of the silent majority. Above all, this is nothing to do with ministers. The worse the programme, the more important it is to remember that point, if we still believe in a television regime that aspires not to take the state-controlled public-private monopolies of Silvio Berlusconi as its model. In any case, these interventions seem to be very selective. Confronted by pictures of unparalleled police brutality from Genoa, ministers did not react so fiercely. They seemed to be not at all shocked. Neither as viewers nor as parents did they have anything to say to the evidence before their eyes that young people, including quite a lot of Brits, were systematically beaten up by various branches of the Italian state apparatus. Conceivably it was excusable for Mr Blair to react as he did to the opening scenes of this encounter, which happened while he was still in Genoa. In saying that he supported the Italians' efforts to stop the G8 meeting being wrecked, he made a necessary case for peaceful international diplomacy. But then things turned brutally unpleasant from the other side, with credible statements by innocent British people that at least deserved the status of evidence to be believed or refuted. At that stage our prime minister, as far as I have traced, said nothing. Our foreign secretary, after a two-day delay, came out with the bloodless assertion that the Italians should inquire into what happened, and the promise that, if the victims could marshal a case against the carabinieri who had beaten them black and blue, it would be forwarded to Rome. The premise at work here is a long way from the assumption that lies behind the onslaught on Brass Eye. One set of images, sight unseen, attracts ministers' maximum intolerance. The other, featuring criminal behaviour by another government, achieves only their acquiescence. Peter Hain, the one minister who talked about "the over- reaction from the police" in Genoa, soon had the ground removed from under him by Mr Straw. The state fell over itself not to be appalled, even conditionally, by what had palpably happened in Genoa: the beating of non-violent protesters by a quasi-fascist police force. On the other hand, it was ready with instant condemnation of a television programme it had no locus to attack. Is television to be free of government control, or is it not? Ministers set the rules of ownership and create the regulatory regime. Ofcom, which is about to take that task, will be one of the most powerful public bodies in the country. But ministers should legislate, then withdraw. When Chris Smith was culture minister, he found such restraint impossible. He was forever interfering, especially with the BBC. He thought nothing of telling them to lay off the costume dramas in favour of more gritty television, or exploding with rage over the supremely unimportant issue of the scheduling of the nightly television news. He talked about liberty in one breath, and challenged it in the next. The Blunkett-Jowell intervention over Brass Eye is in the same spirit. It speaks for a ministeriat that thinks it must say something about everything, especially when the tabloids are baying. It can't see any social imperfection, such as a tasteless TV programme, without reaching for a new law to deal with it. To say it cannot recognise irony or satire is perhaps to offer counsel of unreasonable perfection. But to charge this collective governmental spirit with dislike for other people's freedom, whether as creators or receivers, is to say no more than the tedious, deadening, sanctimonious truth. Yet the spirit has a darker side. Swift to intervene in what does not matter, it's unwilling to recognise what does. I have no doubt Mr Blair sincerely believed in Genoa that his duty was to defend the Italian authorities. But then the evidence changed, and neither he nor Straw could summon a single heartfelt phrase of indignation on behalf of their own citizens with a prima facie case against Berlusconi's government. For this was diplomacy not paedophilia. In that arena, state power is quick to recognise its own. Where there was caution there should have been fire, and where there was fire, caution. Such are the priorities of a government that finds it easier to rage against paedophilia than defend the freedoms of its citizens abroad, when television stakes out the ground.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
Ministers are public people. That is their uniqueness. What they do is speak for the state. They may be parents, and they may be viewers, but these are secondary characteristics, which may add to their claim to be human beings but can be distractions from their main function. When reacting to public events, they deserve attention only in their public role. Faced in the last week by two challenges to their capacity for speedy judgment - those swift uncalculated words that tell so much - they responded by exposing some pretty sinister instincts among those who command the British public realm. This is not a party point. The degeneration that has unfolded under Mr Blair builds on that which was well developed under Thatcherism. Maybe it's characteristic of governments everywhere. But seldom has there been such a revealing mismatch of responses, such a woeful reaction to two events that had in common the fact that television encompassed them. In the case of Brass Eye, the programme satirising anti-paedophile hysteria, ministers put on display their incorrigible capacity for intervention. They seem to be incapable of shutting up, or of observing the elementary rules that might entitle them not to, and this film could of course not be allowed to pass. David Blunkett sent word from his holiday that he was "dismayed" by the programme, which he had not seen. One of his deputies, Beverley Hughes, called it "unspeakably sick", again without having seen it; and, when challenged 24 hours later by Jim Naughtie, was defiant in her determination not to see it, even though sending for a video might have been considered a prudent manoeuvre if she was to go on braying about the scandal of it ever being shown. Tessa Jowell, the culture minister, was a little more careful. She saw the programme, but plainly failed to see its point, and found another way of saying that it should have been stopped. As secretary of state, she was alive to the danger of direct censorship, but spent yesterday putting the arm on the Independent Television Commission to perform that task instead. Why hadn't the ITC stopped the show being repeated? she whinged. There ought to be a law. There needed to be a system whereby the censor intervened quickly, if enough complaints clocked up. She would be urgently inventing such a system. This must stop. And so on. I thought the programme was a failure. The satire was too deeply embedded in the shock effect to make much sense. Some stupid personalities were conned into appearing on it. But it had a point, which survived many levels of scrutiny at Channel 4. Is the volume of viewers' complaints to be the touchstone for acceptability? If it is, a mere 2,500 complaints out of a viewership of some millions, though large by historic standards, surely ask a question about the rights of the silent majority. Above all, this is nothing to do with ministers. The worse the programme, the more important it is to remember that point, if we still believe in a television regime that aspires not to take the state-controlled public-private monopolies of Silvio Berlusconi as its model. In any case, these interventions seem to be very selective. Confronted by pictures of unparalleled police brutality from Genoa, ministers did not react so fiercely. They seemed to be not at all shocked. Neither as viewers nor as parents did they have anything to say to the evidence before their eyes that young people, including quite a lot of Brits, were systematically beaten up by various branches of the Italian state apparatus. Conceivably it was excusable for Mr Blair to react as he did to the opening scenes of this encounter, which happened while he was still in Genoa. In saying that he supported the Italians' efforts to stop the G8 meeting being wrecked, he made a necessary case for peaceful international diplomacy. But then things turned brutally unpleasant from the other side, with credible statements by innocent British people that at least deserved the status of evidence to be believed or refuted. At that stage our prime minister, as far as I have traced, said nothing. Our foreign secretary, after a two-day delay, came out with the bloodless assertion that the Italians should inquire into what happened, and the promise that, if the victims could marshal a case against the carabinieri who had beaten them black and blue, it would be forwarded to Rome. The premise at work here is a long way from the assumption that lies behind the onslaught on Brass Eye. One set of images, sight unseen, attracts ministers' maximum intolerance. The other, featuring criminal behaviour by another government, achieves only their acquiescence. Peter Hain, the one minister who talked about "the over- reaction from the police" in Genoa, soon had the ground removed from under him by Mr Straw. The state fell over itself not to be appalled, even conditionally, by what had palpably happened in Genoa: the beating of non-violent protesters by a quasi-fascist police force. On the other hand, it was ready with instant condemnation of a television programme it had no locus to attack. Is television to be free of government control, or is it not? Ministers set the rules of ownership and create the regulatory regime. Ofcom, which is about to take that task, will be one of the most powerful public bodies in the country. But ministers should legislate, then withdraw. When Chris Smith was culture minister, he found such restraint impossible. He was forever interfering, especially with the BBC. He thought nothing of telling them to lay off the costume dramas in favour of more gritty television, or exploding with rage over the supremely unimportant issue of the scheduling of the nightly television news. He talked about liberty in one breath, and challenged it in the next. The Blunkett-Jowell intervention over Brass Eye is in the same spirit. It speaks for a ministeriat that thinks it must say something about everything, especially when the tabloids are baying. It can't see any social imperfection, such as a tasteless TV programme, without reaching for a new law to deal with it. To say it cannot recognise irony or satire is perhaps to offer counsel of unreasonable perfection. But to charge this collective governmental spirit with dislike for other people's freedom, whether as creators or receivers, is to say no more than the tedious, deadening, sanctimonious truth. Yet the spirit has a darker side. Swift to intervene in what does not matter, it's unwilling to recognise what does. I have no doubt Mr Blair sincerely believed in Genoa that his duty was to defend the Italian authorities. But then the evidence changed, and neither he nor Straw could summon a single heartfelt phrase of indignation on behalf of their own citizens with a prima facie case against Berlusconi's government. For this was diplomacy not paedophilia. In that arena, state power is quick to recognise its own. Where there was caution there should have been fire, and where there was fire, caution. Such are the priorities of a government that finds it easier to rage against paedophilia than defend the freedoms of its citizens abroad, when television stakes out the ground.
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
Somewhere at the heart of government sits a blueprint specifying a date for the euro referendum. It is May 1 2003. Naturally, it's only one notion. There are other possibilities, including no date at all. Nothing like a decision is near. But this is the one on which most work has been done. I've discussed it with ministers and officials. It dispels the idea, urged in a letter to the Guardian by an important group of Labour sceptics, that public services are far more important than the euro, and the referendum must be put off until they're fixed. That could yet prove to be the opposite of the truth. Start working back from May 1, and you hit other deadlines. The campaign proper is reckoned to need two months. March and April would see it hammering away at full intensity. Before that, a preparatory campaign would unfold, in parallel with the parliamentary process of getting a referendum bill passed into law. Little problem in the Commons here, but the Lords would be another matter. That's where all those - Lord Owen, many Tories - whose strategy is to stop a referendum happening would make their last stand, filibustering about campaign finance and the wording of the question. The planners are allowing four months for that, which means starting in November - which means, in turn, settlement of the five economic tests by October, maybe before the party conference. This is an adventurous programme, faster than most people are aware of. I happen to believe that, unless it's adopted, there will be no referendum in this parliament. It would maximise the political opportunity, and just about enable the whole euro deal, including notes and coins, to be completed before the next election. But that's a personal opinion. The relevant political fact is that important ministers are very sure they can hold and win a referendum within that time, or by autumn at the latest, and thus secure an historic achievement for the Blair administration. No other scenario offers such an incontestable triumph. This is painfully obvious from the first month's activities of this year, in which ministers have set themselves life-or-death tests they have no hope of conclusively winning. Two weeks ago, Stephen Byers staked his future on "the quality of your travelling experience". If this hasn't greatly improved, he said, he would deserve to be punished at the election. On Sunday, Tony Blair vowed more explicitly to fall on his sword if the NHS isn't "basically fixed" by the next election. "I am quite happy to suffer the consequences," he said. "I am quite willing to be held to account by the voters if we fail." These were the words of desperate, perhaps complacent, certainly pious politicians. They used the strongest language they could think of to reflect the perception of failure in which they fear they're now engulfed. They wouldn't have spoken thus unless they thought they could deliver. Yet, far from launching a supreme national effort to make the trains run on time and the hospitals im prove beyond recognition, these promises are likely to inaugurate an era of dismal politics. For the pledges are never provable. It's quite conceivable that the railways will respond to three years of consistently enhanced investment. It's possible that the NHS will deliver improved statistics in some parts of the country, or even nationwide. But the argument about their meaning will never end. Last week was an acrid foretaste of the years to come, with ministers pointing to abstract figures that purport to show improvement, and other people - patients, families, doctors, nurses, Conservative politicians, bloody-minded journalists - deploying the singular human disasters that will be available every day of the week to show the opposite. What we have to look forward to from a political era staked entirely to public sector performance is, in other words, a battle of the spinners more utterly bewildering than ever before. Even if delivery does improve, there'll be myriad stories that say otherwise. Even if 86% of people still claim to be satisfied with the NHS, everyone knows this figure is distorted by gratitude, loyalty and fear of complaining, for everyone has experiences, of delay especially, that make satisfaction entirely inappropriate. The politics of this will turn far more on the general credibility of the parties than on the specific funding each purports to offer: because funding promises seldom link into the felt lives of voters. The claim that the NHS has been "fixed", or that travel is now "improved", will remain profoundly disputable until the day of the election. There's not much joy in that for anyone. It's vital that the investment goes on, but the political excitement it's capable of generating is limited. For Mr Blair to be expelled from power because he's failed to fix the NHS is no more credible than him being kept in power because he can show a couple of thousand more acute hospital beds and a useful rise in nurse recruitment. Essential though better trains and schools and hospitals are, the heart must sink - and the electoral turnout too - at the prospect of three years' futile argument between rival narratives that are both incurably mendacious. A referendum on the euro will be, by contrast, a clear-cut political contest. For a start, it's something the government promised at the last election. The need for it, to detoxify British politics, becomes ever clearer. The demand for a British decision, one way or the other, becomes more pressing as the years go by, and the weakness of the strongest government in Europe failing to provide one becomes more embarrassing, more subject to tacit peer- group contempt, with each month that the single currency defies the hostility of those who thought it could never happen and/or never work. But the case for a referendum is not just to fulfil some textbook idea of decent political conduct. I'm not that crazy. The case revolves round Labour's need for a project the voters can understand, to establish a raison d'tre that has some chance of being manifestly fulfilled. Improving public services does not fill that ticket. It's good work, essential work, work governments should be doing anyway. If it doesn't happen over the next decade, the so-called fourth largest economy in the world will look thoroughly sick. But as New-verging-on-Old Labour's Big Idea, its outcome will be indistinct and its claim on history trivial. Pace Lord Healey and his friends the sceptic letter-writers, it certainly isn't an alternative to a euro referendum. The two can run alongside. They will need to. Awaiting public-service perfection is just another pretext for never putting the euro to the people. The opposite case is more positive than that. Winning the referendum won't be easy. But it's already more plausible than it was a month ago. It's the challenge a serious party can no longer duck, for the sake of its own standing. Far from the referendum making service delivery harder, it is Labour's only route away from lassitude, denial, and a verdict that says permanently and on everything: not proven.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
Somewhere at the heart of government sits a blueprint specifying a date for the euro referendum. It is May 1 2003. Naturally, it's only one notion. There are other possibilities, including no date at all. Nothing like a decision is near. But this is the one on which most work has been done. I've discussed it with ministers and officials. It dispels the idea, urged in a letter to the Guardian by an important group of Labour sceptics, that public services are far more important than the euro, and the referendum must be put off until they're fixed. That could yet prove to be the opposite of the truth. Start working back from May 1, and you hit other deadlines. The campaign proper is reckoned to need two months. March and April would see it hammering away at full intensity. Before that, a preparatory campaign would unfold, in parallel with the parliamentary process of getting a referendum bill passed into law. Little problem in the Commons here, but the Lords would be another matter. That's where all those - Lord Owen, many Tories - whose strategy is to stop a referendum happening would make their last stand, filibustering about campaign finance and the wording of the question. The planners are allowing four months for that, which means starting in November - which means, in turn, settlement of the five economic tests by October, maybe before the party conference. This is an adventurous programme, faster than most people are aware of. I happen to believe that, unless it's adopted, there will be no referendum in this parliament. It would maximise the political opportunity, and just about enable the whole euro deal, including notes and coins, to be completed before the next election. But that's a personal opinion. The relevant political fact is that important ministers are very sure they can hold and win a referendum within that time, or by autumn at the latest, and thus secure an historic achievement for the Blair administration. No other scenario offers such an incontestable triumph. This is painfully obvious from the first month's activities of this year, in which ministers have set themselves life-or-death tests they have no hope of conclusively winning. Two weeks ago, Stephen Byers staked his future on "the quality of your travelling experience". If this hasn't greatly improved, he said, he would deserve to be punished at the election. On Sunday, Tony Blair vowed more explicitly to fall on his sword if the NHS isn't "basically fixed" by the next election. "I am quite happy to suffer the consequences," he said. "I am quite willing to be held to account by the voters if we fail." These were the words of desperate, perhaps complacent, certainly pious politicians. They used the strongest language they could think of to reflect the perception of failure in which they fear they're now engulfed. They wouldn't have spoken thus unless they thought they could deliver. Yet, far from launching a supreme national effort to make the trains run on time and the hospitals im prove beyond recognition, these promises are likely to inaugurate an era of dismal politics. For the pledges are never provable. It's quite conceivable that the railways will respond to three years of consistently enhanced investment. It's possible that the NHS will deliver improved statistics in some parts of the country, or even nationwide. But the argument about their meaning will never end. Last week was an acrid foretaste of the years to come, with ministers pointing to abstract figures that purport to show improvement, and other people - patients, families, doctors, nurses, Conservative politicians, bloody-minded journalists - deploying the singular human disasters that will be available every day of the week to show the opposite. What we have to look forward to from a political era staked entirely to public sector performance is, in other words, a battle of the spinners more utterly bewildering than ever before. Even if delivery does improve, there'll be myriad stories that say otherwise. Even if 86% of people still claim to be satisfied with the NHS, everyone knows this figure is distorted by gratitude, loyalty and fear of complaining, for everyone has experiences, of delay especially, that make satisfaction entirely inappropriate. The politics of this will turn far more on the general credibility of the parties than on the specific funding each purports to offer: because funding promises seldom link into the felt lives of voters. The claim that the NHS has been "fixed", or that travel is now "improved", will remain profoundly disputable until the day of the election. There's not much joy in that for anyone. It's vital that the investment goes on, but the political excitement it's capable of generating is limited. For Mr Blair to be expelled from power because he's failed to fix the NHS is no more credible than him being kept in power because he can show a couple of thousand more acute hospital beds and a useful rise in nurse recruitment. Essential though better trains and schools and hospitals are, the heart must sink - and the electoral turnout too - at the prospect of three years' futile argument between rival narratives that are both incurably mendacious. A referendum on the euro will be, by contrast, a clear-cut political contest. For a start, it's something the government promised at the last election. The need for it, to detoxify British politics, becomes ever clearer. The demand for a British decision, one way or the other, becomes more pressing as the years go by, and the weakness of the strongest government in Europe failing to provide one becomes more embarrassing, more subject to tacit peer- group contempt, with each month that the single currency defies the hostility of those who thought it could never happen and/or never work. But the case for a referendum is not just to fulfil some textbook idea of decent political conduct. I'm not that crazy. The case revolves round Labour's need for a project the voters can understand, to establish a raison d'tre that has some chance of being manifestly fulfilled. Improving public services does not fill that ticket. It's good work, essential work, work governments should be doing anyway. If it doesn't happen over the next decade, the so-called fourth largest economy in the world will look thoroughly sick. But as New-verging-on-Old Labour's Big Idea, its outcome will be indistinct and its claim on history trivial. Pace Lord Healey and his friends the sceptic letter-writers, it certainly isn't an alternative to a euro referendum. The two can run alongside. They will need to. Awaiting public-service perfection is just another pretext for never putting the euro to the people. The opposite case is more positive than that. Winning the referendum won't be easy. But it's already more plausible than it was a month ago. It's the challenge a serious party can no longer duck, for the sake of its own standing. Far from the referendum making service delivery harder, it is Labour's only route away from lassitude, denial, and a verdict that says permanently and on everything: not proven.
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
All parties agree that ideology is dead. The word is as dirty to Tories battling out the leadership contest as it is to Tony Blair delivering a major speech on public services. And who is not pleased to hear it? But there is a downside. Having no ideology means that all aspects of politics become more perplexing. Government is complicated to do and just as complicated to understand. The silver thread that linked and determined everything has gone. When the defining mantra of the left said public good and private bad, and the right said roughly the opposite, politics was easy to make sense of. Now everything is messier. While the practice of the trade has eventually had no alternative but to recognise this, public understanding has not caught up. It strives to cling to the old simplicities. The mindset of ideology survives the passing of the ideological age. It's not merely in newspaper headlines, groping for the familiar matrix, that Blairism's plans for public service delivery are seen as a private sector takeover. I bet most people in the country see it that way too. For this the government is largely to blame. In its first term, feeling its way forward, it wasn't straight. It wanted to please all the people all the time, so it tended to reassure the business world with one spin about innovation and competition, while distracting its own constituency with words that said nothing fundamental would change. Its attitude to the health service covered a gamut of promises from tough to tender. Its replacement weapon for ideology was "what works". But this became its philosophy well before it knew what worked in either health or education. It knew that what the Tories had done, especially in the NHS, did not work, but was far from sure how to replace it. There remains a lot of confusion. Important differences are still not widely apprehended, partly because ministers' own schemes reflect the complication of post-ideological government, and partly because producer unions want to make things seem more threatening than they are. Enlisting private sector skills and money to develop surgical centres or improve failing schools is not the same as privatisation. Very little of the public sector is capable of being run by the private sector in any case. Instituting regimes of competition or "contestability", a practice common in the public sectors of France, Germany, Holland and other continental models, isn't an assault on public service principles but a minimal necessity for raising them to the best practice levels everyone is entitled to expect. Yesterday, Mr Blair got closer to clarifying some of this than he has done before. It was the most important speech he has made since the election. Though the news line will be his commitment not to "flinch" from producer union opposition, the real message was a more cogent invitation than ever before to move out of the ideological box. Some of the unions believe he is thirsting for a fight, even looking for a demonstration combat such as Mrs Thatcher had with the miners. Actually his words sounded as though they came from the last chance saloon of the British version of social democracy, which has rather suddenly woken up to the danger of its core proposition being seen to fail. It was a sobering not a militant address. The case it made chimes with the experience of most people who use public services of every kind, which tells them that while more money is absolutely necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient, and that reform is essential if delivery is going to improve. This was an inaugural moment for the second term in another way as well. It put into operation the vow of plodding, responsible realism with which Mr Blair said he would replace the ever deceptive spinning that was the leitmotif of 1997-2001. As such it sent three signals. First, the government has no single plan for public services. There is no Great Blueprint, the temptation towards which it was lured in the first term. Compared with some of its first-term rhetoric, the glorification of the private has actually receded. There are different answers for different problems. If more than half of local education authorities are described by Ofsted as either fairly or very successful, as they are, the sweeping abolition favoured by some reformers makes no sense. It makes as little sense to insist that only NHS units may tender to run the new surgical centres just because they are being set up as a supplement to NHS hospitals. A senior trade unionist told me yesterday he was sceptical of ministers' ability to get down to the detail of reform. They were, he said, more at home talking about, and endlessly revising, their fancy institutional structures than with the tedious practicalities. He also regretted the adversarial - anti-union - subtext that seemed to have made its way into the discourse. But Mr Blair avoided that. His real subtext was that, at a time of peace and high employment, no task of government is in greater public demand than making essential public services, the base material of a functioning society, work properly. Second, it is without doubt true that only a social democratic government has a chance of doing this. Only the party with an incontestable belief in the primacy of public services can be trusted to reform their delivery in ways that do not merely profit private business and ultimately deprive the less advantaged members of society. As a matter of fact, this belief may be a little more widespread than it was: another victory, perhaps, for a new spirit of the times. Two of the candidates for the Tory party leadership make almost everything of their commitment to health and education, and admit that it was failure in this field that contributed most to the public's hatred of their party at the election. But the third candidate might yet win. Iain Duncan Smith is the voice of the hard Tory right, which flirts with the minimal state, and much of which favours an American-style approach. With that line, Mr Duncan Smith would be even less likely than Michael Portillo or Kenneth Clarke to win the next election. But the state of Conservatism makes plain the danger that without visible improvements brought about by progressive politicians the public sector will become the source of yet deeper cynicism and despair. Third, though, the challenge is in one sense impossible to meet. Blair said yesterday that it was "as great as any that has faced a postwar government". We have to be aware that he has staked everything on outcomes that will, in many people's eyes, never be satisfactory. The famous glass, whether in school or hospital, is always in danger of being half empty. If the world economy, dragging Britain's with it, faces a prolonged downturn, not even the prudence of Mr Brown will have been enough to preserve the required budget surplus. All one can say at the moment is that Mr Blair has set out, without glamour or spin, on the defining stage of his engagement with the realities the people most value. Even that is worth saying, however - and worth supporting.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
All parties agree that ideology is dead. The word is as dirty to Tories battling out the leadership contest as it is to Tony Blair delivering a major speech on public services. And who is not pleased to hear it? But there is a downside. Having no ideology means that all aspects of politics become more perplexing. Government is complicated to do and just as complicated to understand. The silver thread that linked and determined everything has gone. When the defining mantra of the left said public good and private bad, and the right said roughly the opposite, politics was easy to make sense of. Now everything is messier. While the practice of the trade has eventually had no alternative but to recognise this, public understanding has not caught up. It strives to cling to the old simplicities. The mindset of ideology survives the passing of the ideological age. It's not merely in newspaper headlines, groping for the familiar matrix, that Blairism's plans for public service delivery are seen as a private sector takeover. I bet most people in the country see it that way too. For this the government is largely to blame. In its first term, feeling its way forward, it wasn't straight. It wanted to please all the people all the time, so it tended to reassure the business world with one spin about innovation and competition, while distracting its own constituency with words that said nothing fundamental would change. Its attitude to the health service covered a gamut of promises from tough to tender. Its replacement weapon for ideology was "what works". But this became its philosophy well before it knew what worked in either health or education. It knew that what the Tories had done, especially in the NHS, did not work, but was far from sure how to replace it. There remains a lot of confusion. Important differences are still not widely apprehended, partly because ministers' own schemes reflect the complication of post-ideological government, and partly because producer unions want to make things seem more threatening than they are. Enlisting private sector skills and money to develop surgical centres or improve failing schools is not the same as privatisation. Very little of the public sector is capable of being run by the private sector in any case. Instituting regimes of competition or "contestability", a practice common in the public sectors of France, Germany, Holland and other continental models, isn't an assault on public service principles but a minimal necessity for raising them to the best practice levels everyone is entitled to expect. Yesterday, Mr Blair got closer to clarifying some of this than he has done before. It was the most important speech he has made since the election. Though the news line will be his commitment not to "flinch" from producer union opposition, the real message was a more cogent invitation than ever before to move out of the ideological box. Some of the unions believe he is thirsting for a fight, even looking for a demonstration combat such as Mrs Thatcher had with the miners. Actually his words sounded as though they came from the last chance saloon of the British version of social democracy, which has rather suddenly woken up to the danger of its core proposition being seen to fail. It was a sobering not a militant address. The case it made chimes with the experience of most people who use public services of every kind, which tells them that while more money is absolutely necessary, it is not necessarily sufficient, and that reform is essential if delivery is going to improve. This was an inaugural moment for the second term in another way as well. It put into operation the vow of plodding, responsible realism with which Mr Blair said he would replace the ever deceptive spinning that was the leitmotif of 1997-2001. As such it sent three signals. First, the government has no single plan for public services. There is no Great Blueprint, the temptation towards which it was lured in the first term. Compared with some of its first-term rhetoric, the glorification of the private has actually receded. There are different answers for different problems. If more than half of local education authorities are described by Ofsted as either fairly or very successful, as they are, the sweeping abolition favoured by some reformers makes no sense. It makes as little sense to insist that only NHS units may tender to run the new surgical centres just because they are being set up as a supplement to NHS hospitals. A senior trade unionist told me yesterday he was sceptical of ministers' ability to get down to the detail of reform. They were, he said, more at home talking about, and endlessly revising, their fancy institutional structures than with the tedious practicalities. He also regretted the adversarial - anti-union - subtext that seemed to have made its way into the discourse. But Mr Blair avoided that. His real subtext was that, at a time of peace and high employment, no task of government is in greater public demand than making essential public services, the base material of a functioning society, work properly. Second, it is without doubt true that only a social democratic government has a chance of doing this. Only the party with an incontestable belief in the primacy of public services can be trusted to reform their delivery in ways that do not merely profit private business and ultimately deprive the less advantaged members of society. As a matter of fact, this belief may be a little more widespread than it was: another victory, perhaps, for a new spirit of the times. Two of the candidates for the Tory party leadership make almost everything of their commitment to health and education, and admit that it was failure in this field that contributed most to the public's hatred of their party at the election. But the third candidate might yet win. Iain Duncan Smith is the voice of the hard Tory right, which flirts with the minimal state, and much of which favours an American-style approach. With that line, Mr Duncan Smith would be even less likely than Michael Portillo or Kenneth Clarke to win the next election. But the state of Conservatism makes plain the danger that without visible improvements brought about by progressive politicians the public sector will become the source of yet deeper cynicism and despair. Third, though, the challenge is in one sense impossible to meet. Blair said yesterday that it was "as great as any that has faced a postwar government". We have to be aware that he has staked everything on outcomes that will, in many people's eyes, never be satisfactory. The famous glass, whether in school or hospital, is always in danger of being half empty. If the world economy, dragging Britain's with it, faces a prolonged downturn, not even the prudence of Mr Brown will have been enough to preserve the required budget surplus. All one can say at the moment is that Mr Blair has set out, without glamour or spin, on the defining stage of his engagement with the realities the people most value. Even that is worth saying, however - and worth supporting.
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
Anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1980s, to look no further, knows what wrecking meant. Those were decades of constant politico-industrial wreckage. The political culture was one of conflict, in which most people knew which side they were on. There was a government and an opposition, and there were forces outside them that challenged both of them. This was a country in dire economic trouble, the basket case of Europe, a nation at war with itself. The two decades were not identical. The Callaghan years were marked by savage disputes between public sector workers and industries the public owned, without the faintest regard for the national interest. Wreckage spread through the private sector, culminating in 1978-9 with a winter for which the voters did not forgive Mr Callaghan. The Thatcher years saw similar upheaval, though in a different context. Here was a government taking on the public sector, bashing trade unions, privatising sacred cows, under a leader who did not disguise her mission to wreck much of the economic and political power structure that had been in place since the war. These were decades of turmoil. The forces of order struggled constantly to maintain it. You could say the political culture was unstable, but not that it was moribund. There were real contests for political life and death. Thus were fought out the last years of the left-right ideological struggle, before the collapse of socialism. What's startling about the present deployment of the word "wreckers" is that it comes out of a quite different sky. The weather is grey, not thunderous. The word most commonly applied to the culture is not conflict but apathy. Apathy, verging on universal scepticism, pervades the body politic. The government may scan the far horizon with the most powerful telescope but cannot see itself in peril. Successive elections yield evidence that the formal opposition party may be dying. This is no longer a nation in the middle of a war between definable enemies. Its political culture is comatose, if not dead. But the prime minister seems to have a strategy for reviving it, which is by getting his retaliation in first. It is he rather than his critics who wants to create a climate of conflict. Could he be further from James Callaghan? There being no serious challengers, he needs to invent them. There is no meaningful threat from the right, beyond a half-baked nihilistic confusion which, as a leader committed to making public services better, he can easily swat aside. So he discovers threats on the left, likening them to a militant tendency that belonged in the decades long gone. To any detached observer, this is at odds with observable facts. Reform has been Labour's project since 1997. What's interesting is not how much wrecking Labour's reforms have induced but how little. Take education, the prime interest of the first term. Primary school reform was slow, difficult, contested. It forced a lot of new work on teachers. Curricula, standards, league tables, endlessly shifting demands, all were meat to the enemies of reform. But in the end the work was done. It continues. There was a lot of abrasion, but the output of schools measurably improved. There was no wrecking. The term may be more applicable to old-fashioned disputes about pay and conditions, which still go on as well. But these are hardly systemic. The RMT union's battle with Arriva is a consequence of the worst of all the privatising "reforms" of the Conservative government, which Labour did not change. Closer to justifying the word wreckage will be the prison officers and police, if they fight to the bitter end against the kind of employment reforms that everyone who has ever managed them knows are necessary. But the other side of the picture is more striking. At the centre of it are union leaders who operate in a context that is different from the old days. The law now makes wrecking difficult. The professional attitudes of many of these leaders have more to do with providing for and keeping their members than with taking political positions. The acme of this style is John Monks, general secretary of the TUC, a thoroughly modern exponent of pragmatic and collaborative industrial reform, who is part of a union generation that would claim to have done much quietly to assist, in the health service and elsewhere, the kind of working changes that have to be negotiated rather than imposed if any real reform is to occur. This is not the end of the story. A new batch of union leaders await election in key sectors, some pledged to a more combative attitude against the undercutting that private sector employers have brought to public service work. The old ideological certainties are being deployed to fire up the argument against the public-private partnership which the Treasury has proved so rampantly determined to impose on London Underground. Both sides are reeking of blind dogma. There's still a big difference from the old days, though. These arguments now barely engage the wider public. There is no grand political contest. Everyone wants better hospitals and railways, but hardly anyone cares how these are organised, as long as they improve. To most people, I strongly suspect, the argument as couched by the prime minister, between wreckers and reformers, does not touch a reality they understand. It seems to them to be a sectional dispute, of an esoteric kind, not a large struggle for the future of Britain. For the truth is that change is happening anyway. The NHS may be less far advanced than schools, but the argument about using private sector resources has been won and lost through force of circumstance. It is happening. The momentum is with it. There will be struggles at the edge. But no trade union seriously believes that this government intends to privatise the health service, any more than the schools. The third way, in that elementary sense, is winning. It is dull, slogging, unglamorous work, producing slow incremental gains, on a track that cannot now be reversed. "Wreckers" is a word that seems as anachronistic as it is emotive, thrown into an essentially consensual scene. So why does Mr Blair think and talk like that? He is certainly a different man from the one who came to power. Years of office have finally, and much to his credit, removed his desire to please rather than persuade. The quick smiles have all gone, overtaken by the gravitas of struggle abroad and at home. Perhaps it's the fate of all prime ministers to become Manicheans, even when, as this one does, they bestride the scene without a challenge. Evidently Mr Blair needs to believe there are wreckers, as a way of heightening the drama. Also, however, it's a kind of alibi for the ineffable delay that bedevils all institutional reform: a substitute for the billions of pounds which, far more than the expulsion of wreckers, will be needed to fulfil his pledge to make the NHS a health service to be proud of.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
Anyone who lived through the 1970s and 1980s, to look no further, knows what wrecking meant. Those were decades of constant politico-industrial wreckage. The political culture was one of conflict, in which most people knew which side they were on. There was a government and an opposition, and there were forces outside them that challenged both of them. This was a country in dire economic trouble, the basket case of Europe, a nation at war with itself. The two decades were not identical. The Callaghan years were marked by savage disputes between public sector workers and industries the public owned, without the faintest regard for the national interest. Wreckage spread through the private sector, culminating in 1978-9 with a winter for which the voters did not forgive Mr Callaghan. The Thatcher years saw similar upheaval, though in a different context. Here was a government taking on the public sector, bashing trade unions, privatising sacred cows, under a leader who did not disguise her mission to wreck much of the economic and political power structure that had been in place since the war. These were decades of turmoil. The forces of order struggled constantly to maintain it. You could say the political culture was unstable, but not that it was moribund. There were real contests for political life and death. Thus were fought out the last years of the left-right ideological struggle, before the collapse of socialism. What's startling about the present deployment of the word "wreckers" is that it comes out of a quite different sky. The weather is grey, not thunderous. The word most commonly applied to the culture is not conflict but apathy. Apathy, verging on universal scepticism, pervades the body politic. The government may scan the far horizon with the most powerful telescope but cannot see itself in peril. Successive elections yield evidence that the formal opposition party may be dying. This is no longer a nation in the middle of a war between definable enemies. Its political culture is comatose, if not dead. But the prime minister seems to have a strategy for reviving it, which is by getting his retaliation in first. It is he rather than his critics who wants to create a climate of conflict. Could he be further from James Callaghan? There being no serious challengers, he needs to invent them. There is no meaningful threat from the right, beyond a half-baked nihilistic confusion which, as a leader committed to making public services better, he can easily swat aside. So he discovers threats on the left, likening them to a militant tendency that belonged in the decades long gone. To any detached observer, this is at odds with observable facts. Reform has been Labour's project since 1997. What's interesting is not how much wrecking Labour's reforms have induced but how little. Take education, the prime interest of the first term. Primary school reform was slow, difficult, contested. It forced a lot of new work on teachers. Curricula, standards, league tables, endlessly shifting demands, all were meat to the enemies of reform. But in the end the work was done. It continues. There was a lot of abrasion, but the output of schools measurably improved. There was no wrecking. The term may be more applicable to old-fashioned disputes about pay and conditions, which still go on as well. But these are hardly systemic. The RMT union's battle with Arriva is a consequence of the worst of all the privatising "reforms" of the Conservative government, which Labour did not change. Closer to justifying the word wreckage will be the prison officers and police, if they fight to the bitter end against the kind of employment reforms that everyone who has ever managed them knows are necessary. But the other side of the picture is more striking. At the centre of it are union leaders who operate in a context that is different from the old days. The law now makes wrecking difficult. The professional attitudes of many of these leaders have more to do with providing for and keeping their members than with taking political positions. The acme of this style is John Monks, general secretary of the TUC, a thoroughly modern exponent of pragmatic and collaborative industrial reform, who is part of a union generation that would claim to have done much quietly to assist, in the health service and elsewhere, the kind of working changes that have to be negotiated rather than imposed if any real reform is to occur. This is not the end of the story. A new batch of union leaders await election in key sectors, some pledged to a more combative attitude against the undercutting that private sector employers have brought to public service work. The old ideological certainties are being deployed to fire up the argument against the public-private partnership which the Treasury has proved so rampantly determined to impose on London Underground. Both sides are reeking of blind dogma. There's still a big difference from the old days, though. These arguments now barely engage the wider public. There is no grand political contest. Everyone wants better hospitals and railways, but hardly anyone cares how these are organised, as long as they improve. To most people, I strongly suspect, the argument as couched by the prime minister, between wreckers and reformers, does not touch a reality they understand. It seems to them to be a sectional dispute, of an esoteric kind, not a large struggle for the future of Britain. For the truth is that change is happening anyway. The NHS may be less far advanced than schools, but the argument about using private sector resources has been won and lost through force of circumstance. It is happening. The momentum is with it. There will be struggles at the edge. But no trade union seriously believes that this government intends to privatise the health service, any more than the schools. The third way, in that elementary sense, is winning. It is dull, slogging, unglamorous work, producing slow incremental gains, on a track that cannot now be reversed. "Wreckers" is a word that seems as anachronistic as it is emotive, thrown into an essentially consensual scene. So why does Mr Blair think and talk like that? He is certainly a different man from the one who came to power. Years of office have finally, and much to his credit, removed his desire to please rather than persuade. The quick smiles have all gone, overtaken by the gravitas of struggle abroad and at home. Perhaps it's the fate of all prime ministers to become Manicheans, even when, as this one does, they bestride the scene without a challenge. Evidently Mr Blair needs to believe there are wreckers, as a way of heightening the drama. Also, however, it's a kind of alibi for the ineffable delay that bedevils all institutional reform: a substitute for the billions of pounds which, far more than the expulsion of wreckers, will be needed to fulfil his pledge to make the NHS a health service to be proud of.
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
Just before the second term launches, consider one thing the first has done. Catch it before it departs into the maw of another mandate where all is forgiven and much forgotten. See what power did in one particular zone, which I'm still prepared to call the moral sensibility of ministers. Not only have their arteries hardened and their consciences grown dull. That's to be expected under the weight of office. More startling is how easily the gates of perception, their sense of what they are doing, have been closed and locked. When they came to power, one principle they seemed unbreakably attached to was a detestation of racial prejudice. Equality of racial justice and hostility to ethnic discrimination were ideals that united old and new Labour. To men like Tony Blair and Jack Straw they were articles of faith, which lay behind both the swift abolition of the Tories' primary-purpose rule challenging migrant spouses to prove they had any right to join their partners, and the later setting up of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. To Blair and Straw it is unimaginable that they could be party to anything but the most impeccable correctness in all matters that touch on race. Yet they have been. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which outlawed ethnic discrimination by public authorities but made an exception for the immigration service. I unearthed a ministerial order which authorised immigration officers to treat people of certain nationalities - unspecified, but to be identified at the future decision of ministers and officials - worse than other people. Replying to the critique, Straw pleaded a mere drafting technicality and termed my attack "bizarre". But this order was only a beginning. There has now been a second one, dated April 23, which extends the reach from nationalities to what it describes, in its own headline, as "discrimination on ground of ethnic or national origin". This time the ethnics in question are listed: "a) Kurd, b) Roma, c) Albanian, d) Tamil, e) Pontic Greek, f) Somali, g) Afghan". All persons of these origins are now to be subject "to a more rigorous examination than other persons in the same circumstances". They can be detained, questioned and rejected, as a class, more freely than other people because they are now deemed prima facie more likely to be illegal immigrants or bogus asylum-seekers. They have something else in common, however. There is no Kurdish passport, there is no Roma passport. Identifying these people can be attempted through little more than their personal appearance, plus some inference from the flight or possibly boat they arrive on. So, not only is the bar on collective discrimination being ditched, but a peculiarly vicious form of sorting is written into statute, whereby immigration officers herd together anyone who looks like a Kurd or a Tamil or a Pontic Greek - regardless of whether these come, as Tamils do, from Sri Lanka, Canada, India or even the UK - and impose special oppression on them. Ministers' handling of this law went through two phases. The first, during passage, was to pretend it was benign. The only purpose they cited was to make it easier to discriminate in favour of, say, Kosovan refugees. When pressed by Liberal Democrats such as Lord Lester, that was the scenario they repeatedly mentioned. They were lying. It is quite apparent from the April 23 order that what they wanted all along was the power to authorise state-sponsored mass exclusion of certain ethnic groups, without regard for individual justice, on a scale never before seen in this country. Phase two came last week. The new law, said Barbara Roche, Straw's minion in charge of immigration, was merely giving formal shape to a practice that had been going on a long time. She was almost flippant in her incredulity that anyone should complain about a long-established pattern of ethnic selection. She talked about the need for "objective evidence" against each migrant. But no one has explained how a Roma is meant to overcome the ethnic evidence against him, especially in view of the further sub-clause in the order which states, almost incredibly: "If the information [needed to pursue an application to enter] is not available in a language which the person understands, it is not necessary to provide the information in a language which he does understand." Three conclusions can be drawn from this. First, whether or not ethnic selection went on before, it has now been systematised. If an apparent Kurd, or potential Roma, or notional Pontic Greek has by some oversight not been discriminated against, ministers may want to know the reason why. Immigration controllers are now on formal notice as to which ethnic and national origins are especially unwelcome in Britain. Their conduct will be policed by someone called a "race monitor", but only retrospectively and without attention to individual cases. The monitor is plainly a PR stooge in the making. Second, as the government's contribution to present discontents over asylum, this is political cowardice on a grand scale. No one disputes the need for immigration control. But faced by the mighty force of Ann Widdecombe, Blair and Straw are evidently terrified of electoral punishment if they can't match her rhetoric of national alarm with measures of ethnic hostility. Though all these politicians avow their respect for genuine cases, it's the tritest lip service. Straw collaborates with Widdecombe in a discourse from which only the Lib Dems stand aside, that stigmatises asylum itself as presumptively a bogus concept, eating away at the resources of the fifth largest economy in the world. Third, something unpleasant has happened to Labour in power. For all sorts of reasons, they need to win the election. I hope they do. They're the only plausible choice on offer and defend several important policies that will probably, given time, make this country a better place. But their immigration regime shows not only that they've become, in a vital area, as bad as the Tories, but that they have lost their intellectual as well as moral faculties. They appear not to know what they're doing. They sincerely believe they do not favour ethnic discrimination. Straw, the posturing anti-racist, thinks any challenge to his law can only be "bizarre". He is surrounded by a party that seems to believe the same - barely a squeak came out of it when the law went through. Such, it seems, is today's corruption of power: not so much a conspiracy of self-interest as the building of a wall of righteous self-belief. A power-driven certainty that, because one is who one is, one can by definition do no wrong. This law of ethnic punishment is a disgrace. Perhaps only a party infused by belief in its own anti-racism would have the nerve to smuggle it past the frontier that separates a decent country from a shameful one.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
Just before the second term launches, consider one thing the first has done. Catch it before it departs into the maw of another mandate where all is forgiven and much forgotten. See what power did in one particular zone, which I'm still prepared to call the moral sensibility of ministers. Not only have their arteries hardened and their consciences grown dull. That's to be expected under the weight of office. More startling is how easily the gates of perception, their sense of what they are doing, have been closed and locked. When they came to power, one principle they seemed unbreakably attached to was a detestation of racial prejudice. Equality of racial justice and hostility to ethnic discrimination were ideals that united old and new Labour. To men like Tony Blair and Jack Straw they were articles of faith, which lay behind both the swift abolition of the Tories' primary-purpose rule challenging migrant spouses to prove they had any right to join their partners, and the later setting up of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. To Blair and Straw it is unimaginable that they could be party to anything but the most impeccable correctness in all matters that touch on race. Yet they have been. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which outlawed ethnic discrimination by public authorities but made an exception for the immigration service. I unearthed a ministerial order which authorised immigration officers to treat people of certain nationalities - unspecified, but to be identified at the future decision of ministers and officials - worse than other people. Replying to the critique, Straw pleaded a mere drafting technicality and termed my attack "bizarre". But this order was only a beginning. There has now been a second one, dated April 23, which extends the reach from nationalities to what it describes, in its own headline, as "discrimination on ground of ethnic or national origin". This time the ethnics in question are listed: "a) Kurd, b) Roma, c) Albanian, d) Tamil, e) Pontic Greek, f) Somali, g) Afghan". All persons of these origins are now to be subject "to a more rigorous examination than other persons in the same circumstances". They can be detained, questioned and rejected, as a class, more freely than other people because they are now deemed prima facie more likely to be illegal immigrants or bogus asylum-seekers. They have something else in common, however. There is no Kurdish passport, there is no Roma passport. Identifying these people can be attempted through little more than their personal appearance, plus some inference from the flight or possibly boat they arrive on. So, not only is the bar on collective discrimination being ditched, but a peculiarly vicious form of sorting is written into statute, whereby immigration officers herd together anyone who looks like a Kurd or a Tamil or a Pontic Greek - regardless of whether these come, as Tamils do, from Sri Lanka, Canada, India or even the UK - and impose special oppression on them. Ministers' handling of this law went through two phases. The first, during passage, was to pretend it was benign. The only purpose they cited was to make it easier to discriminate in favour of, say, Kosovan refugees. When pressed by Liberal Democrats such as Lord Lester, that was the scenario they repeatedly mentioned. They were lying. It is quite apparent from the April 23 order that what they wanted all along was the power to authorise state-sponsored mass exclusion of certain ethnic groups, without regard for individual justice, on a scale never before seen in this country. Phase two came last week. The new law, said Barbara Roche, Straw's minion in charge of immigration, was merely giving formal shape to a practice that had been going on a long time. She was almost flippant in her incredulity that anyone should complain about a long-established pattern of ethnic selection. She talked about the need for "objective evidence" against each migrant. But no one has explained how a Roma is meant to overcome the ethnic evidence against him, especially in view of the further sub-clause in the order which states, almost incredibly: "If the information [needed to pursue an application to enter] is not available in a language which the person understands, it is not necessary to provide the information in a language which he does understand." Three conclusions can be drawn from this. First, whether or not ethnic selection went on before, it has now been systematised. If an apparent Kurd, or potential Roma, or notional Pontic Greek has by some oversight not been discriminated against, ministers may want to know the reason why. Immigration controllers are now on formal notice as to which ethnic and national origins are especially unwelcome in Britain. Their conduct will be policed by someone called a "race monitor", but only retrospectively and without attention to individual cases. The monitor is plainly a PR stooge in the making. Second, as the government's contribution to present discontents over asylum, this is political cowardice on a grand scale. No one disputes the need for immigration control. But faced by the mighty force of Ann Widdecombe, Blair and Straw are evidently terrified of electoral punishment if they can't match her rhetoric of national alarm with measures of ethnic hostility. Though all these politicians avow their respect for genuine cases, it's the tritest lip service. Straw collaborates with Widdecombe in a discourse from which only the Lib Dems stand aside, that stigmatises asylum itself as presumptively a bogus concept, eating away at the resources of the fifth largest economy in the world. Third, something unpleasant has happened to Labour in power. For all sorts of reasons, they need to win the election. I hope they do. They're the only plausible choice on offer and defend several important policies that will probably, given time, make this country a better place. But their immigration regime shows not only that they've become, in a vital area, as bad as the Tories, but that they have lost their intellectual as well as moral faculties. They appear not to know what they're doing. They sincerely believe they do not favour ethnic discrimination. Straw, the posturing anti-racist, thinks any challenge to his law can only be "bizarre". He is surrounded by a party that seems to believe the same - barely a squeak came out of it when the law went through. Such, it seems, is today's corruption of power: not so much a conspiracy of self-interest as the building of a wall of righteous self-belief. A power-driven certainty that, because one is who one is, one can by definition do no wrong. This law of ethnic punishment is a disgrace. Perhaps only a party infused by belief in its own anti-racism would have the nerve to smuggle it past the frontier that separates a decent country from a shameful one.
|
2hugoyoung
| 1Society
|
Urging us to start a debate about tax is a strange thing to find as the centre-piece of a Labour chancellor's agenda. Isn't that one of the main questions political choice was always supposed to be about? Gordon Brown unfurls the issue after seven years spent keeping it tightly wrapped. Not having the debate has been at the heart of his political strategy. Such silence about a key mechanism of what we used to call socialism has been apparent all round the western world, a by-product of the left-right stasis that settled over the 1990s. But nowhere was the possibility of a pro-tax position further beyond the pale than in the realm of New Labour. In Britain, Mr Brown and Mr Blair implied, the issue was settled. Thatcherism had established the new norm, from which they would not depart. Their commitment against higher direct tax rates, and their decision to freeze public spending for the first two years, were meant to close down the fundamental argument. In reality, all kinds of taxes were pushed up. There was a welcome shift on another left-right axis, the pattern of redistribution. But debate was precisely what was not allowed. These things happened by stealth. Any possibility that public opinion might favour higher taxes openly proposed was too alarming to put to the test. It might tear apart the image of a reformed Labour party. Political convenience dictated that debate should not occur. Now political convenience says differently. The leaders invite a discussion because they see the need to raise taxes, including perhaps direct taxes, which they've previously promised not to touch. Moreover, a cynic might say, they've loaded the outcome in their favour. Some public services have reached such a depth of inadequacy, in the fourth largest economy in the world, that there can be no case against greater public spending, or therefore higher tax. We've been living for five years in the middle of a social experiment that might have been designed to prove that the low-tax, low-spend aspirations of Thatcherism had finally to be contested. It's unnerving to think that the impoverishment of the NHS may be the only way a progressive party could get its case across. But that has surely helped precipitate Mr Brown's uncharacteristic request for a debate. Meanwhile something else has been happening. The argument may at last be urgent, but it will be harder to have. There's a new dimension since the early days of Mr Blair. Public confidence in politicians seems to be steadily declining. The latest survey of British Social Attitudes (18th report, National Centre for Social Research) asked some questions about political engagement and trust, mainly to explore why apathy has reached such depths as were registered by the deplorable turnout at the last election. The verdict does not look good for a genuine tax debate. In some ways, the British prove to be less apathetic than is commonly assumed. The survey, which is more meticulous than any opinion poll, produces figures that could persuade one there's plenty of life in the democratic dog yet. Though turnout is low, and interest in parliament in decline, engagement with public issues by other means is on the rise. Petition-signing, media-contacting, street protesting and even writing to an MP have grown markedly in the last 15 years. Many millions of us evidently still care about things beyond our precious lifestyles. But to enlist us in a serious debate about higher taxation is to presume a reasonable level of trust in politicians to spend the proceeds well, and such trust seems to be in tatters. This is the only conclusion to draw from a wider measurement of confidence that was tested in a question asking whether people trusted British governments of any persuasion to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party. Only 16% said they did so "just about always" or "most of the time". This is less than half the percentage (39) that said the same in 1974. The trust gauge steadily declined over three decades, with an upward blip to 29 in 1998, followed by the present abysmal figure, which implies a near halving of trust over the life thus far of the Blair government. Whatever ministers say, in other words, the voters are becoming ever less inclined to believe in their selfless concern for the national interest. In particular, one may reasonably infer, if they say they want more of voters' money, they will face deep mistrust about how the proceeds will be used. Actually, another survey in a different context showed that, if asked the right way, people say they're willing to pay higher tax, including income tax. Last year's Fabian Society commission of inquiry into tax came up with old-fashioned, even socialistic, answers. But they were conditional on the belief that ministers can be trusted to give consumers of public services a better deal. An earmarked tax-rise for the NHS got 80% support. Public desperation is already changing the context. Anxiety levels about health and transport in particular have now reached new peaks. Slowly but inexorably, the inviolable sanctity of the NHS as presently conceived is being challenged by intolerable waiting-lists and death-rates few other European countries suffer. The need for private money, essentially from the users of the service, subject to every kind of necessary means test, will become more glaring. Equally, the railway system cannot survive without public-private partnerships, organised on a basis that corrects the biggest scandal of the Major government, its rush to privatise at whatever price as long as the ideological pledge was met. So the voters are ready for reform. They want to see investment and delivery on a level France and Germany regard as routine. Some of this will be with private money. But they're also ready for more public investment. What they await is a government that can break through the familiar contradiction, found in every survey on the subject, which reveals most respondents wanting better services and lower taxes at the same time, the Gordian knot that Gordon now seeks help in cutting. The apparent challenge is to his arithmetic. But the real one is to his credibility. How can he persuade the country that their taxes really are worth paying? For in a sense, the debate is already over. Better services, in these elementary parts of civilised life, have now become such a paramount need that they've transcended the pressure for lower tax. We are a European not an American society, and demand the outcomes, if not always the methods, of social democracy. The demonstration effect of five years' Labour government has been, ironically, to prove the urgency of that priority by failing to deliver it. What we know about political alienation is that much the greatest withdrawal of trust is due to the breaking of promises and the failure of delivery. Most other things, as the BSA survey suggests, are chaff in the media wind. So Gordon's discussion of forbidden subjects may be interesting. But not as a mask for what politicians should be doing, and are widely seen not to have done.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Hugo Young .
|
Urging us to start a debate about tax is a strange thing to find as the centre-piece of a Labour chancellor's agenda. Isn't that one of the main questions political choice was always supposed to be about? Gordon Brown unfurls the issue after seven years spent keeping it tightly wrapped. Not having the debate has been at the heart of his political strategy. Such silence about a key mechanism of what we used to call socialism has been apparent all round the western world, a by-product of the left-right stasis that settled over the 1990s. But nowhere was the possibility of a pro-tax position further beyond the pale than in the realm of New Labour. In Britain, Mr Brown and Mr Blair implied, the issue was settled. Thatcherism had established the new norm, from which they would not depart. Their commitment against higher direct tax rates, and their decision to freeze public spending for the first two years, were meant to close down the fundamental argument. In reality, all kinds of taxes were pushed up. There was a welcome shift on another left-right axis, the pattern of redistribution. But debate was precisely what was not allowed. These things happened by stealth. Any possibility that public opinion might favour higher taxes openly proposed was too alarming to put to the test. It might tear apart the image of a reformed Labour party. Political convenience dictated that debate should not occur. Now political convenience says differently. The leaders invite a discussion because they see the need to raise taxes, including perhaps direct taxes, which they've previously promised not to touch. Moreover, a cynic might say, they've loaded the outcome in their favour. Some public services have reached such a depth of inadequacy, in the fourth largest economy in the world, that there can be no case against greater public spending, or therefore higher tax. We've been living for five years in the middle of a social experiment that might have been designed to prove that the low-tax, low-spend aspirations of Thatcherism had finally to be contested. It's unnerving to think that the impoverishment of the NHS may be the only way a progressive party could get its case across. But that has surely helped precipitate Mr Brown's uncharacteristic request for a debate. Meanwhile something else has been happening. The argument may at last be urgent, but it will be harder to have. There's a new dimension since the early days of Mr Blair. Public confidence in politicians seems to be steadily declining. The latest survey of British Social Attitudes (18th report, National Centre for Social Research) asked some questions about political engagement and trust, mainly to explore why apathy has reached such depths as were registered by the deplorable turnout at the last election. The verdict does not look good for a genuine tax debate. In some ways, the British prove to be less apathetic than is commonly assumed. The survey, which is more meticulous than any opinion poll, produces figures that could persuade one there's plenty of life in the democratic dog yet. Though turnout is low, and interest in parliament in decline, engagement with public issues by other means is on the rise. Petition-signing, media-contacting, street protesting and even writing to an MP have grown markedly in the last 15 years. Many millions of us evidently still care about things beyond our precious lifestyles. But to enlist us in a serious debate about higher taxation is to presume a reasonable level of trust in politicians to spend the proceeds well, and such trust seems to be in tatters. This is the only conclusion to draw from a wider measurement of confidence that was tested in a question asking whether people trusted British governments of any persuasion to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party. Only 16% said they did so "just about always" or "most of the time". This is less than half the percentage (39) that said the same in 1974. The trust gauge steadily declined over three decades, with an upward blip to 29 in 1998, followed by the present abysmal figure, which implies a near halving of trust over the life thus far of the Blair government. Whatever ministers say, in other words, the voters are becoming ever less inclined to believe in their selfless concern for the national interest. In particular, one may reasonably infer, if they say they want more of voters' money, they will face deep mistrust about how the proceeds will be used. Actually, another survey in a different context showed that, if asked the right way, people say they're willing to pay higher tax, including income tax. Last year's Fabian Society commission of inquiry into tax came up with old-fashioned, even socialistic, answers. But they were conditional on the belief that ministers can be trusted to give consumers of public services a better deal. An earmarked tax-rise for the NHS got 80% support. Public desperation is already changing the context. Anxiety levels about health and transport in particular have now reached new peaks. Slowly but inexorably, the inviolable sanctity of the NHS as presently conceived is being challenged by intolerable waiting-lists and death-rates few other European countries suffer. The need for private money, essentially from the users of the service, subject to every kind of necessary means test, will become more glaring. Equally, the railway system cannot survive without public-private partnerships, organised on a basis that corrects the biggest scandal of the Major government, its rush to privatise at whatever price as long as the ideological pledge was met. So the voters are ready for reform. They want to see investment and delivery on a level France and Germany regard as routine. Some of this will be with private money. But they're also ready for more public investment. What they await is a government that can break through the familiar contradiction, found in every survey on the subject, which reveals most respondents wanting better services and lower taxes at the same time, the Gordian knot that Gordon now seeks help in cutting. The apparent challenge is to his arithmetic. But the real one is to his credibility. How can he persuade the country that their taxes really are worth paying? For in a sense, the debate is already over. Better services, in these elementary parts of civilised life, have now become such a paramount need that they've transcended the pressure for lower tax. We are a European not an American society, and demand the outcomes, if not always the methods, of social democracy. The demonstration effect of five years' Labour government has been, ironically, to prove the urgency of that priority by failing to deliver it. What we know about political alienation is that much the greatest withdrawal of trust is due to the breaking of promises and the failure of delivery. Most other things, as the BSA survey suggests, are chaff in the media wind. So Gordon's discussion of forbidden subjects may be interesting. But not as a mask for what politicians should be doing, and are widely seen not to have done.
|
1georgemonbiot
| 1Society
|
Nick Raynsford's alibi is unchallengeable. The minister was not trying to cover up his decision to allow a unique listed building in Oxford to be moved, to make way for a business school funded by the arms broker Wafic Said. He had failed to inform the local MP simply because he was away in Egypt, leading a trade mission. It's still not clear why the government refused to examine an application to dismantle one of the country's most important industrial monuments, or why the prime minister's office felt compelled to intervene in such a trivial matter as the timing of a planning decision. But the most interesting question has yet to be asked: what was the British planning minister doing on a trade delegation to Egypt? The answer suggests that Mr Raynsford's alibi is rather more heinous than the alleged crime. Mr Raynsford was leading a delegation of 27 corporations. Among them were some of the most controversial multinationals stationed in this country: Balfour Beatty, Enron, Laing, Mott MacDonald, Thames Water and WS Atkins. The projects they visited included Egypt's most contested development scheme: the $90bn Toshka programme to divert the Nile. Environmentalists warn that it will devastate the river's ecology, financial consultants warn that it will have a similar impact on the country's economy. It's the sort of scheme, in other words, which, were it to have been proposed in Britain, should have been subject to the fiercest scrutiny by planning officials at the Department of the Environment (DoE), overseen by Mr Raynsford. Interestingly, the major beneficiary of the trade mission appears to have been not a British company, but a Norwegian one. Soon after the tour, Kvaerner revealed that it had landed a 266m contract to build a pumping system at Toshka. Kvaerner's otherwise inexplicable presence on a British trade tour might have had something to do with the fact that it had seconded more of its employees into the DoE than any other company. So why was Mr Raynsford, rather than a minister from the Department of Trade and Industry, helping these companies to sell their wares in Egypt? Well, Nick Raynsford has a curious double role. He is minister for planning, which means he is the regulator of development in Britain. But he is also minister for construction, which means he is the promoter of development in Britain. He routinely resolves this conflict of interests in favour of the industry he's supposed be regulating. Mr Raynsford has gone to some lengths to show construction companies whose side he is on. "I see my job," he told Building magazine, as "creating a climate in which the industry can do well." To this end, his division has sought repeatedly to undermine government policy. It has sponsored, for example, a public relations offensive for the quarrying industry called Minerals 98. One of its purposes was to help companies lobby against the tax on roadstone that another division of the environment department had proposed. At Labour's 1998 local government conference, Mr Raynsford argued against the environment department's plans for a tax on out-of-town parking places and in support of the superstores' objections to them. He has promised the British Council of Shopping Centres that he will seek to speed up major new retail schemes. Last week, he undermined the government's commitments on climate change by watering down the rules on energy efficiency in new homes, arguing that the standards were "an undue burden on builders". But perhaps most alarming is his alleged role in the debate about the Ilisu dam in Turkey: the devastating ethnic cleansing project that will drive 78,000 Kurds out of their cultural heartland. It was Mr Raynsford, according to Whitehall sources, who persuaded Tony Blair to back the project. Why should he have done so? Well, in September 1999 he led a trade mission to Turkey. The consortium he accompanied was seeking to land 4bn-worth of contracts for rebuilding after the earthquake. The consortium was fronted by Balfour Beatty, which also happens to be the firm hoping to build the Ilisu dam. Three months later, the British government announced that it was "minded to grant" export credit for the Ilisu scheme. Is it possible that Mr Raynsford was told by the Turkish government that British rebuilding contracts were conditional on support for the dam? The real scandal surrounding the Oxford business school is that everything Mr Raynsford says about it is probably true. There were no peculiar measures taken to approve the development; there was nothing unusual about the government's decision not to review the case. Decisions to turn a blind eye to the destruction of our heritage and environment are taken on behalf of the construction industry every week, by the man who is supposed to be policing it.
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article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of George Monbiot .
|
Nick Raynsford's alibi is unchallengeable. The minister was not trying to cover up his decision to allow a unique listed building in Oxford to be moved, to make way for a business school funded by the arms broker Wafic Said. He had failed to inform the local MP simply because he was away in Egypt, leading a trade mission. It's still not clear why the government refused to examine an application to dismantle one of the country's most important industrial monuments, or why the prime minister's office felt compelled to intervene in such a trivial matter as the timing of a planning decision. But the most interesting question has yet to be asked: what was the British planning minister doing on a trade delegation to Egypt? The answer suggests that Mr Raynsford's alibi is rather more heinous than the alleged crime. Mr Raynsford was leading a delegation of 27 corporations. Among them were some of the most controversial multinationals stationed in this country: Balfour Beatty, Enron, Laing, Mott MacDonald, Thames Water and WS Atkins. The projects they visited included Egypt's most contested development scheme: the $90bn Toshka programme to divert the Nile. Environmentalists warn that it will devastate the river's ecology, financial consultants warn that it will have a similar impact on the country's economy. It's the sort of scheme, in other words, which, were it to have been proposed in Britain, should have been subject to the fiercest scrutiny by planning officials at the Department of the Environment (DoE), overseen by Mr Raynsford. Interestingly, the major beneficiary of the trade mission appears to have been not a British company, but a Norwegian one. Soon after the tour, Kvaerner revealed that it had landed a 266m contract to build a pumping system at Toshka. Kvaerner's otherwise inexplicable presence on a British trade tour might have had something to do with the fact that it had seconded more of its employees into the DoE than any other company. So why was Mr Raynsford, rather than a minister from the Department of Trade and Industry, helping these companies to sell their wares in Egypt? Well, Nick Raynsford has a curious double role. He is minister for planning, which means he is the regulator of development in Britain. But he is also minister for construction, which means he is the promoter of development in Britain. He routinely resolves this conflict of interests in favour of the industry he's supposed be regulating. Mr Raynsford has gone to some lengths to show construction companies whose side he is on. "I see my job," he told Building magazine, as "creating a climate in which the industry can do well." To this end, his division has sought repeatedly to undermine government policy. It has sponsored, for example, a public relations offensive for the quarrying industry called Minerals 98. One of its purposes was to help companies lobby against the tax on roadstone that another division of the environment department had proposed. At Labour's 1998 local government conference, Mr Raynsford argued against the environment department's plans for a tax on out-of-town parking places and in support of the superstores' objections to them. He has promised the British Council of Shopping Centres that he will seek to speed up major new retail schemes. Last week, he undermined the government's commitments on climate change by watering down the rules on energy efficiency in new homes, arguing that the standards were "an undue burden on builders". But perhaps most alarming is his alleged role in the debate about the Ilisu dam in Turkey: the devastating ethnic cleansing project that will drive 78,000 Kurds out of their cultural heartland. It was Mr Raynsford, according to Whitehall sources, who persuaded Tony Blair to back the project. Why should he have done so? Well, in September 1999 he led a trade mission to Turkey. The consortium he accompanied was seeking to land 4bn-worth of contracts for rebuilding after the earthquake. The consortium was fronted by Balfour Beatty, which also happens to be the firm hoping to build the Ilisu dam. Three months later, the British government announced that it was "minded to grant" export credit for the Ilisu scheme. Is it possible that Mr Raynsford was told by the Turkish government that British rebuilding contracts were conditional on support for the dam? The real scandal surrounding the Oxford business school is that everything Mr Raynsford says about it is probably true. There were no peculiar measures taken to approve the development; there was nothing unusual about the government's decision not to review the case. Decisions to turn a blind eye to the destruction of our heritage and environment are taken on behalf of the construction industry every week, by the man who is supposed to be policing it.
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1georgemonbiot
| 1Society
|
State and corporate power are fusing almost everywhere on earth, but in Italy they have condensed into the stocky figure of a single man. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, is worth around 10bn. He has interests in just about every lucrative sector of the Italian economy. His control of most of the private media (through his businesses) and most of the public media (through the government) means that he can exercise a dominion unprecedented in a democratic nation over the thoughts and feelings of his people. He has been convicted in the past for bribery, tax fraud and corruption but by amending the law has had those convictions overturned and his business activities legalised. His government is sustained by parties which describe themselves as "post-fascist"; he himself has spoken of the "superiority" of western civilisation. This is the man who is now Tony Blair's closest political ally in Europe. After their meeting on Friday, Sr Berlusconi told the press that "we see eye to eye on all the matters that were raised". Blair added: "Some of these old distinctions - left and right - are no longer in my view as relevant as they were maybe 30, 40 years ago." Blair and Berlusconi are now the only European leaders who seem prepared to support a US attack on Iraq. Both men have introduced repressive legislation restricting civil liberties. Both have granted big business the concessions it demands. At the European summit in Barcelona next month, they will be forming an alliance with Jos Maria Aznar, the rightwing Spanish prime minister, in the hope of forcing France and Germany to accept new measures demanded by the corporations. Among their proposals on Friday was the deregulation of employment. "Europe's labour markets," Blair wrote in Italy's Corriere della Sera, "need to be more flexible. Businesses are still encumbered by unnecessary regulation." The paper they published called on member states to introduce "more flexible types of employment contracts"; to replace labour laws with "soft regulation"; and to increase "the effectiveness of public employment services... by opening this market to the private sector". This is just the latest means by which Blair has chosen to antagonise workers in the United Kingdom. Last week the steelworkers struggling to keep their jobs here discovered that the government has been helping a foreign company to secure and then to finance the acquisition of the vast steelworks in Romania. The Department of Trade and Industry appears to be about to renew the UK's exemption from the European working time directive, which means that this country will remain the only one in Europe that permits some employers to force people to work more than 48 hours a week. Last year, the official figures for the number of deaths at work rose by 32%. For the past four years, the government has promised the immediate introduction of new safety laws and a new offence of corporate killing. Neither has materialised. With Berlusconi's help, Tony Blair is seeking to prevent the European Union from banning the anti-competitive deals which permit the private takeover of public services. The result is that public sector workers will continue to lose pay, pensions and holidays as private operators change their terms of employment. The government is now proposing to deny agency workers the legal protections afforded to employees. Those who contest these policies, the prime minister suggested a fortnight ago, are "wreckers" and "small c conservatives". So the abiding mystery surrounding labour relations in the United Kingdom is this: given that the government, both in declaration and in practice, is the enemy of workers' movements, why do they continue to fund it? About one-third of the Labour party's funding comes from the unions. Many of their members are beginning to wonder what they are buying. Last summer the GMB halved its annual donation to the party, in protest against privatisation. Both Unison, the biggest donor, and the firefighters' union are currently reviewing their support. The election of Bob Crow as leader of the RMT last week may suggest that the unions are beginning to desert the party they built. But this will happen slowly, if it happens at all. Most union leaders, while fiercely critical of Blair's policies, insist that they retain more influence over the government by lobbying from within. It is hard to see what the evidence might be. In his foreword to the 1998 Fairness at Work white paper, Tony Blair insisted that the policies it contained would "draw a line under the issue of industrial relations law... Even after the changes we propose, Britain will have the most lightly regulated labour market of any leading economy in the world". Blair has proved true to his word. The government will implement those European directives which it has failed to undermine. It may introduce a few concessions for workers in privately financed hospitals. But otherwise Labour, as Blair has warned, has nothing to offer. The Confederation of British Industry, which does not give the party a penny, swings far more weight with Tony Blair than all the hard-earned millions scraped together by the people whom Labour is supposed to represent. It would make as much sense now for the workers to give their money to the Tories. It is time, in other words, for the trades unions to embrace their role as wreckers. The party they created has disowned them, so they must disinherit it. They must destroy the system which guarantees that power remains the preserve of the parties of big business. It doesn't really matter which of Britain's small progressive parties - the Greens, the Socialist Alliance, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, even the Liberal Democrats - they choose to support instead. What counts is that there is an effective radical opposition, which has the resources to start snatching millions of votes from Labour. Political parties, like companies, always move towards those from whom they wish to take trade. One of the reasons why Labour has crept so far to the right is that this is the territory on which it must fight its only serious competitor. Damage limitation, which is the most the unions who work within government can hope to achieve, does not precipitate change. Workers' representatives will swing no serious political weight until they can force the government to respond to their agenda, as opposed to being forced to respond to the government's. Even the GMB, which is using the funds it has withdrawn from Labour to advertise its dissatisfaction, is wasting its money: Blair knows that he has nothing to fear from it as long as there is no radical alternative to this government. It is not hard to see why the unions are reluctant to let go. Labour was their creation, and its construction was an extraordinary achievement. But the creature has lumbered away from them, and it works now for those they sought to oppose. Only by building a new one can they hope to lure it back.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of George Monbiot .
|
State and corporate power are fusing almost everywhere on earth, but in Italy they have condensed into the stocky figure of a single man. Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, is worth around 10bn. He has interests in just about every lucrative sector of the Italian economy. His control of most of the private media (through his businesses) and most of the public media (through the government) means that he can exercise a dominion unprecedented in a democratic nation over the thoughts and feelings of his people. He has been convicted in the past for bribery, tax fraud and corruption but by amending the law has had those convictions overturned and his business activities legalised. His government is sustained by parties which describe themselves as "post-fascist"; he himself has spoken of the "superiority" of western civilisation. This is the man who is now Tony Blair's closest political ally in Europe. After their meeting on Friday, Sr Berlusconi told the press that "we see eye to eye on all the matters that were raised". Blair added: "Some of these old distinctions - left and right - are no longer in my view as relevant as they were maybe 30, 40 years ago." Blair and Berlusconi are now the only European leaders who seem prepared to support a US attack on Iraq. Both men have introduced repressive legislation restricting civil liberties. Both have granted big business the concessions it demands. At the European summit in Barcelona next month, they will be forming an alliance with Jos Maria Aznar, the rightwing Spanish prime minister, in the hope of forcing France and Germany to accept new measures demanded by the corporations. Among their proposals on Friday was the deregulation of employment. "Europe's labour markets," Blair wrote in Italy's Corriere della Sera, "need to be more flexible. Businesses are still encumbered by unnecessary regulation." The paper they published called on member states to introduce "more flexible types of employment contracts"; to replace labour laws with "soft regulation"; and to increase "the effectiveness of public employment services... by opening this market to the private sector". This is just the latest means by which Blair has chosen to antagonise workers in the United Kingdom. Last week the steelworkers struggling to keep their jobs here discovered that the government has been helping a foreign company to secure and then to finance the acquisition of the vast steelworks in Romania. The Department of Trade and Industry appears to be about to renew the UK's exemption from the European working time directive, which means that this country will remain the only one in Europe that permits some employers to force people to work more than 48 hours a week. Last year, the official figures for the number of deaths at work rose by 32%. For the past four years, the government has promised the immediate introduction of new safety laws and a new offence of corporate killing. Neither has materialised. With Berlusconi's help, Tony Blair is seeking to prevent the European Union from banning the anti-competitive deals which permit the private takeover of public services. The result is that public sector workers will continue to lose pay, pensions and holidays as private operators change their terms of employment. The government is now proposing to deny agency workers the legal protections afforded to employees. Those who contest these policies, the prime minister suggested a fortnight ago, are "wreckers" and "small c conservatives". So the abiding mystery surrounding labour relations in the United Kingdom is this: given that the government, both in declaration and in practice, is the enemy of workers' movements, why do they continue to fund it? About one-third of the Labour party's funding comes from the unions. Many of their members are beginning to wonder what they are buying. Last summer the GMB halved its annual donation to the party, in protest against privatisation. Both Unison, the biggest donor, and the firefighters' union are currently reviewing their support. The election of Bob Crow as leader of the RMT last week may suggest that the unions are beginning to desert the party they built. But this will happen slowly, if it happens at all. Most union leaders, while fiercely critical of Blair's policies, insist that they retain more influence over the government by lobbying from within. It is hard to see what the evidence might be. In his foreword to the 1998 Fairness at Work white paper, Tony Blair insisted that the policies it contained would "draw a line under the issue of industrial relations law... Even after the changes we propose, Britain will have the most lightly regulated labour market of any leading economy in the world". Blair has proved true to his word. The government will implement those European directives which it has failed to undermine. It may introduce a few concessions for workers in privately financed hospitals. But otherwise Labour, as Blair has warned, has nothing to offer. The Confederation of British Industry, which does not give the party a penny, swings far more weight with Tony Blair than all the hard-earned millions scraped together by the people whom Labour is supposed to represent. It would make as much sense now for the workers to give their money to the Tories. It is time, in other words, for the trades unions to embrace their role as wreckers. The party they created has disowned them, so they must disinherit it. They must destroy the system which guarantees that power remains the preserve of the parties of big business. It doesn't really matter which of Britain's small progressive parties - the Greens, the Socialist Alliance, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, even the Liberal Democrats - they choose to support instead. What counts is that there is an effective radical opposition, which has the resources to start snatching millions of votes from Labour. Political parties, like companies, always move towards those from whom they wish to take trade. One of the reasons why Labour has crept so far to the right is that this is the territory on which it must fight its only serious competitor. Damage limitation, which is the most the unions who work within government can hope to achieve, does not precipitate change. Workers' representatives will swing no serious political weight until they can force the government to respond to their agenda, as opposed to being forced to respond to the government's. Even the GMB, which is using the funds it has withdrawn from Labour to advertise its dissatisfaction, is wasting its money: Blair knows that he has nothing to fear from it as long as there is no radical alternative to this government. It is not hard to see why the unions are reluctant to let go. Labour was their creation, and its construction was an extraordinary achievement. But the creature has lumbered away from them, and it works now for those they sought to oppose. Only by building a new one can they hope to lure it back.
|
1georgemonbiot
| 1Society
|
There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time, adopt it as a universal truth. Few misconceptions are as widespread as the idea that the war against cancer is being won. It's hardly surprising, for scarcely a week goes by without a promise that deliverance is just around the corner. Yesterday, for example, we learnt that a new injection might cure lymphomas. The day before, the government announced that a further 90m would help to eliminate intestinal tumours. Cancer, most commentators agree, is all but dead. So it's perplexing to discover that cancer in industrialised countries is not falling, but rising. While lung, cervical, uterine and stomach cancers are declining, and treatments for testicular cancer and childhood leukaemia have greatly improved, cancer overall has increased by 60% in the past 50 years. Breast cancer has almost doubled. Prostate cancer has risen by 200%, testicular cancer in young men by 300%. In the US, childhood brain cancers and leukaemias have been advancing by 1.8% a year since 1973. In Britain, 40% of us are likely to contract cancer at some stage in our lives. These increases are often ascribed to better detection and an ageing population. But the figures are age-adjusted: a 60-year-old today is 200% more likely to contract prostate cancer than a 60-year-old would have been in 1950. Reported cancers have continued to rise after the universal deployment of new screening techniques: this is not an artefact of diagnosis. Cancer is thriving. According to Samuel Epstein, professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois, the reason is obvious. Since 1940, the world's production of synthetic organic chemicals has risen 600-fold, exposing our bodies to a massive toxic load. There is plenty of evidence to support his contention. Last year, for example, a US study found that children living beside busy roads were six times as likely to suffer from cancer as children living in quiet areas. This is hardly surprising: the two most carcinogenic compounds ever detected are both produced by diesel engines. An English study published in 1997 showed that children living within five kilometres of oil refineries and chemical plants were more likely to contract cancer than those living further away. Figures released by the US Environmental Protection Agency last year suggest that as many as 7% of all cancers are caused by dioxins, mostly from incinerators. A Danish study published in 1999 showed that women whose bodies contain high concentrations of the pesticide dieldrin are twice as likely to develop cancer. Other scientific papers have highlighted the dangers of herbicides, beef hormones, petrol additives, oral contraceptives, artificial sweeteners, PVC and scores of other chemicals. So I commend to you a fascinating document, published by the Department of Health, called the NHS Cancer Plan, which tells us how the government intends to eliminate cancer in England. It contains plenty of helpful advice on giving up smoking. It outlines a scheme for increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables children eat. But only one pollutant is mentioned as a possible cause of cancer: radon gas, which happens to be naturally occurring. It's not hard to see that both the major polluting industries and the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing cancer "cures" (they are often one and the same) have a certain interest in sustaining the status quo. But it strikes me that these might not be the only lobbyists the government is listening to. The big cancer charities also appear reluctant to take contamination seriously. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund's website records no matches for the word "pollution". The researcher Martin Walker reports that of the 110 research units cited in its 1998 scientific report, not one deals with chemical or environmental carcinogens. Last year the Cancer Research Campaign predicted that cancer would be cured by 2050, as a result of new genetic technologies. Its website mentions pollution, but dismisses concerns with the claim that "experts think that only 5% of preventable cancer deaths may be linked to environmental factors". The CRC's 10-page press release on poverty and cancer blames inequalities in treatment for differing rates of death, but says nothing about pollution, even though the poor are far more likely to live beside dirty factories and toxic dumps than the rich. Give them more money, the cancer charities claim, and they will find the magic formula which will save us all from a hideous death. But could it be possible that we are dying so that they might live?
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of George Monbiot .
|
There is no notion so flawed that society will not, at some time, adopt it as a universal truth. Few misconceptions are as widespread as the idea that the war against cancer is being won. It's hardly surprising, for scarcely a week goes by without a promise that deliverance is just around the corner. Yesterday, for example, we learnt that a new injection might cure lymphomas. The day before, the government announced that a further 90m would help to eliminate intestinal tumours. Cancer, most commentators agree, is all but dead. So it's perplexing to discover that cancer in industrialised countries is not falling, but rising. While lung, cervical, uterine and stomach cancers are declining, and treatments for testicular cancer and childhood leukaemia have greatly improved, cancer overall has increased by 60% in the past 50 years. Breast cancer has almost doubled. Prostate cancer has risen by 200%, testicular cancer in young men by 300%. In the US, childhood brain cancers and leukaemias have been advancing by 1.8% a year since 1973. In Britain, 40% of us are likely to contract cancer at some stage in our lives. These increases are often ascribed to better detection and an ageing population. But the figures are age-adjusted: a 60-year-old today is 200% more likely to contract prostate cancer than a 60-year-old would have been in 1950. Reported cancers have continued to rise after the universal deployment of new screening techniques: this is not an artefact of diagnosis. Cancer is thriving. According to Samuel Epstein, professor of environmental medicine at the University of Illinois, the reason is obvious. Since 1940, the world's production of synthetic organic chemicals has risen 600-fold, exposing our bodies to a massive toxic load. There is plenty of evidence to support his contention. Last year, for example, a US study found that children living beside busy roads were six times as likely to suffer from cancer as children living in quiet areas. This is hardly surprising: the two most carcinogenic compounds ever detected are both produced by diesel engines. An English study published in 1997 showed that children living within five kilometres of oil refineries and chemical plants were more likely to contract cancer than those living further away. Figures released by the US Environmental Protection Agency last year suggest that as many as 7% of all cancers are caused by dioxins, mostly from incinerators. A Danish study published in 1999 showed that women whose bodies contain high concentrations of the pesticide dieldrin are twice as likely to develop cancer. Other scientific papers have highlighted the dangers of herbicides, beef hormones, petrol additives, oral contraceptives, artificial sweeteners, PVC and scores of other chemicals. So I commend to you a fascinating document, published by the Department of Health, called the NHS Cancer Plan, which tells us how the government intends to eliminate cancer in England. It contains plenty of helpful advice on giving up smoking. It outlines a scheme for increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables children eat. But only one pollutant is mentioned as a possible cause of cancer: radon gas, which happens to be naturally occurring. It's not hard to see that both the major polluting industries and the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing cancer "cures" (they are often one and the same) have a certain interest in sustaining the status quo. But it strikes me that these might not be the only lobbyists the government is listening to. The big cancer charities also appear reluctant to take contamination seriously. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund's website records no matches for the word "pollution". The researcher Martin Walker reports that of the 110 research units cited in its 1998 scientific report, not one deals with chemical or environmental carcinogens. Last year the Cancer Research Campaign predicted that cancer would be cured by 2050, as a result of new genetic technologies. Its website mentions pollution, but dismisses concerns with the claim that "experts think that only 5% of preventable cancer deaths may be linked to environmental factors". The CRC's 10-page press release on poverty and cancer blames inequalities in treatment for differing rates of death, but says nothing about pollution, even though the poor are far more likely to live beside dirty factories and toxic dumps than the rich. Give them more money, the cancer charities claim, and they will find the magic formula which will save us all from a hideous death. But could it be possible that we are dying so that they might live?
|
9royhattersley
| 1Society
|
On the evidence of his article in last Thursday's Guardian, when Peter Mandelson calls for New Labour to "renew" itself, he really means that he wants the party within the party to go on behaving as it always did. Not even the cliches have changed and the old vacuities are repeated in their well-worn form. No one can complain about the demand for more "investment in infrastructure". Indeed its shortcoming as a defining policy is its universal popularity. The real problem, which politicians must face, is how to bring that desirable aim about. To write "Who cares whether it is publicly or privately financed as long as it actually happens and is well managed?" is a perfect example of how to ask a question and beg it at the same time. Mandelson seems unable to realise that those of us who believe that the public services should be publicly financed are not crazy ideologues. We subscribe to RH Tawney's view that questions of nationalisation are best decided after examination of specific industries rather than by ringing declarations of principle. In some areas of the economy, the high levels of investment and good management that Mandelson craves are more likely to be provided by public rather than by private enterprise. Ironically, that view reflects New Labour's pragmatic demand to support "what works". It is the government - with its doctrinal faith in the market and free enterprise - that has elevated prejudice above experience. As I began to read Mandelson's article I hoped that he had at last recognised that simple truth. Transport was omitted from the list of government triumphs. That omission illustrated, at least by implication, an increasingly obvious fact. Most of the government's successes - redistribution in favour of the working poor - have been Old Labour successes. Almost all the failures (the railways being a perfect example) have been New Labour failures. Although his silence on the subject of transport suggests that Mandelson realises what went wrong, most of his article reflects a depressing willingness to make the same mistakes again. Of course, the railway system suffered from 18 years of Tory neglect. But New Labour has four years of complacent inactivity to live down. The mistakes began in an area of politics in which Mandelson used to specialise - public perception. Back in 1995, it was assumed that the key middle-class voters in marginal constituencies were against nationalisation in any form. The promise to bring Railtrack back into public ownership had to be broken in order to demonstrate a clean break with Old Labour. Incredibly, the prime minister actually said so on the Frost programme yesterday. Never mind the evidence, read the opinion polls. Unfortunately the opinion polls got it wrong. So did the focus groups. New Labour was (and for all I know may still be) committed to "continuous democracy" - an election-winning technique invented by Dick Morris, one of President Clinton's confidants. According to his theory, a government that wants a second term must make a new announcement every day and the announcement must always coincide with the majority view of the voting public. Leadership thus becomes a dangerous extravagance. Philip Gould imported the "rule of 50%" from America and advised the PM about which policies he should adopt in order to keep a majority of the volatile voters on his side. At the time when the government should have been pouring money into the railways, Gould concluded that the general public were not very worried about transport. I expect that he said the subject had a "low salience". Perhaps he was right at the time. It has a high salience now. Ministers have taken to whispering that the Railtrack catastrophe is all John Prescott's fault. He is an ideal scapegoat - Old Labour in attitude and appearance if not in philosophy, on the wrong side of 60 and destined for oblivion. He was certainly in charge during the years of complacent neglect, but nobody who has ever talked to him for more than five minutes could possibly doubt his enthusiasm for more investment in transport. Perhaps he was overruled. And still the platitudes are trotted out as an alternative to thought. "We should adopt the fiscal and exchange rate policies that puts the needs of investment before a consumer boom." I doubt if even Nigel Lawson, who chose the opposite in 1987, now disagrees. But how do we achieve the desired objective in those public services where returns on capital are low and shareholders demand - as the Company Act allows - that their interests are put first? Perhaps the strategic plan for railways, due to be published today, will answer that question convincingly. If it does, it will either break new economic ground or repudiate New Labour thinking.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Roy Hattersley .
|
On the evidence of his article in last Thursday's Guardian, when Peter Mandelson calls for New Labour to "renew" itself, he really means that he wants the party within the party to go on behaving as it always did. Not even the cliches have changed and the old vacuities are repeated in their well-worn form. No one can complain about the demand for more "investment in infrastructure". Indeed its shortcoming as a defining policy is its universal popularity. The real problem, which politicians must face, is how to bring that desirable aim about. To write "Who cares whether it is publicly or privately financed as long as it actually happens and is well managed?" is a perfect example of how to ask a question and beg it at the same time. Mandelson seems unable to realise that those of us who believe that the public services should be publicly financed are not crazy ideologues. We subscribe to RH Tawney's view that questions of nationalisation are best decided after examination of specific industries rather than by ringing declarations of principle. In some areas of the economy, the high levels of investment and good management that Mandelson craves are more likely to be provided by public rather than by private enterprise. Ironically, that view reflects New Labour's pragmatic demand to support "what works". It is the government - with its doctrinal faith in the market and free enterprise - that has elevated prejudice above experience. As I began to read Mandelson's article I hoped that he had at last recognised that simple truth. Transport was omitted from the list of government triumphs. That omission illustrated, at least by implication, an increasingly obvious fact. Most of the government's successes - redistribution in favour of the working poor - have been Old Labour successes. Almost all the failures (the railways being a perfect example) have been New Labour failures. Although his silence on the subject of transport suggests that Mandelson realises what went wrong, most of his article reflects a depressing willingness to make the same mistakes again. Of course, the railway system suffered from 18 years of Tory neglect. But New Labour has four years of complacent inactivity to live down. The mistakes began in an area of politics in which Mandelson used to specialise - public perception. Back in 1995, it was assumed that the key middle-class voters in marginal constituencies were against nationalisation in any form. The promise to bring Railtrack back into public ownership had to be broken in order to demonstrate a clean break with Old Labour. Incredibly, the prime minister actually said so on the Frost programme yesterday. Never mind the evidence, read the opinion polls. Unfortunately the opinion polls got it wrong. So did the focus groups. New Labour was (and for all I know may still be) committed to "continuous democracy" - an election-winning technique invented by Dick Morris, one of President Clinton's confidants. According to his theory, a government that wants a second term must make a new announcement every day and the announcement must always coincide with the majority view of the voting public. Leadership thus becomes a dangerous extravagance. Philip Gould imported the "rule of 50%" from America and advised the PM about which policies he should adopt in order to keep a majority of the volatile voters on his side. At the time when the government should have been pouring money into the railways, Gould concluded that the general public were not very worried about transport. I expect that he said the subject had a "low salience". Perhaps he was right at the time. It has a high salience now. Ministers have taken to whispering that the Railtrack catastrophe is all John Prescott's fault. He is an ideal scapegoat - Old Labour in attitude and appearance if not in philosophy, on the wrong side of 60 and destined for oblivion. He was certainly in charge during the years of complacent neglect, but nobody who has ever talked to him for more than five minutes could possibly doubt his enthusiasm for more investment in transport. Perhaps he was overruled. And still the platitudes are trotted out as an alternative to thought. "We should adopt the fiscal and exchange rate policies that puts the needs of investment before a consumer boom." I doubt if even Nigel Lawson, who chose the opposite in 1987, now disagrees. But how do we achieve the desired objective in those public services where returns on capital are low and shareholders demand - as the Company Act allows - that their interests are put first? Perhaps the strategic plan for railways, due to be published today, will answer that question convincingly. If it does, it will either break new economic ground or repudiate New Labour thinking.
|
9royhattersley
| 1Society
|
No sensible person can honestly believe that New Labour made a corrupt bargain with either Enron or Arthur Andersen. Since my relationship with the party is that of a forsaken lover, cynics might argue that I would be the last to know. But, from my position of detached ignorance, I assert that there was neither an explicit nor an implied compact between the government and the companies. I am equally sure that the help that the opposition received before 1997 - both in money and in kind - did not make ministers feel unreasonably well disposed towards the two donors after the election was won. There was no political or legal wrongdoing - at least on the part of the politicians. Their corruption was intellectual. Labour's involvement with Enron was small beer - though that may be an inappropriate metaphor with which to describe the sponsorship of one of those ghastly champagne receptions which the party organises from time to time. The important relationship was between ministers and Arthur Andersen. Just at the moment when the new government was worrying about how it could finance the improvement in public services, the mighty firm of international accountants explained how lead could be turned into gold. The prime minister wanted to believe that the private finance initiative would solve his problems. So the alchemists - who had failed to notice that DeLorean was a crook - were rehabilitated as prophets of the third way. Arthur Andersen's timing was impeccable. The PFI report was published at the moment when the government wanted both to hold down public expenditure and demonstrate its faith in private enterprise. Recruiting private companies to build and run hospitals was an ideal way of demonstrating that New Labour was business friendly. Tony Blair actually believed that private management would improve the performance of the public sector. The real complaint against the PM is that, despite the evidence, he still refuses to accept that the simplistic and self-serving Arthur Andersen prescription is wrong. He defends their conclusion by citing work on the same subject by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, a similarly prejudiced source. At the weekend Stephen Byers told a Labour conference that the government would not allow vested interests to stand in the way of PFI. Does he not realise that vested interests invented it? John Prescott, following hard on Byers's heels, tried to justify PFI, by announcing that it was simultaneously both the most prudent and the only way of financing hospital building. Neither of those conflicting claims can be justified. There was no reason why the government could not have financed a new hospital programme out of public funds. It chose not to. And PFI - like the mortgage schemes with which Prescott recklessly compared it - is a very expensive way to join bricks to mortar. Most families buy their houses with a mortgage because no alternative is available. Only Labour wilfully increases the long-term costs. A PM who is so proud of reducing the national debt can hardly boast about mortgaging hospitals. To him PFI is more than a financial expedient. It represents all his hopes of entwining the private and public sectors of the economy into a combination of compassion and competence. That idea comes into the same category as Thomas Hardy's poem about the oxen kneeling in their stalls at midnight on Christmas Eve. It is such a charming thought that we can only regret that it is sentimental nonsense. It has been a bad week for the reputation of hybrid companies. Edexcel - the exami nation board which sets unanswerable questions - is both a limited company and a charity. Although it ploughs its profits back into education it operates like a commercial company in order that it can respond to the theoretically redeeming pressure of free enterprise. It now admits that it neglected investment in new technology - the characteristic error of obsession with short-term profits. And one employee attributes all its mistakes to replacement of "the education ethos" with a need "to compete for market share". Arthur Andersen and Tony Blair please note. The PM cannot fail to notice, but he will not change his mind. To accept reality would be to deny the theory on which New Labour was built and by which it was governed. Socialism, in all its forms, has to be rejected and the competitive market embraced. When the evidence suggests that the pursuit of that general principle produces a worse result than the acceptance of ancient truths, the hard evidence is ignored. It is not the sort of scandal about which the opposition complains. They are part of the conspiracy. But it is a far worse crime than accepting a few thousand pounds from a crooked energy company and using it to finance a party.
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article_from_author
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Roy Hattersley .
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No sensible person can honestly believe that New Labour made a corrupt bargain with either Enron or Arthur Andersen. Since my relationship with the party is that of a forsaken lover, cynics might argue that I would be the last to know. But, from my position of detached ignorance, I assert that there was neither an explicit nor an implied compact between the government and the companies. I am equally sure that the help that the opposition received before 1997 - both in money and in kind - did not make ministers feel unreasonably well disposed towards the two donors after the election was won. There was no political or legal wrongdoing - at least on the part of the politicians. Their corruption was intellectual. Labour's involvement with Enron was small beer - though that may be an inappropriate metaphor with which to describe the sponsorship of one of those ghastly champagne receptions which the party organises from time to time. The important relationship was between ministers and Arthur Andersen. Just at the moment when the new government was worrying about how it could finance the improvement in public services, the mighty firm of international accountants explained how lead could be turned into gold. The prime minister wanted to believe that the private finance initiative would solve his problems. So the alchemists - who had failed to notice that DeLorean was a crook - were rehabilitated as prophets of the third way. Arthur Andersen's timing was impeccable. The PFI report was published at the moment when the government wanted both to hold down public expenditure and demonstrate its faith in private enterprise. Recruiting private companies to build and run hospitals was an ideal way of demonstrating that New Labour was business friendly. Tony Blair actually believed that private management would improve the performance of the public sector. The real complaint against the PM is that, despite the evidence, he still refuses to accept that the simplistic and self-serving Arthur Andersen prescription is wrong. He defends their conclusion by citing work on the same subject by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, a similarly prejudiced source. At the weekend Stephen Byers told a Labour conference that the government would not allow vested interests to stand in the way of PFI. Does he not realise that vested interests invented it? John Prescott, following hard on Byers's heels, tried to justify PFI, by announcing that it was simultaneously both the most prudent and the only way of financing hospital building. Neither of those conflicting claims can be justified. There was no reason why the government could not have financed a new hospital programme out of public funds. It chose not to. And PFI - like the mortgage schemes with which Prescott recklessly compared it - is a very expensive way to join bricks to mortar. Most families buy their houses with a mortgage because no alternative is available. Only Labour wilfully increases the long-term costs. A PM who is so proud of reducing the national debt can hardly boast about mortgaging hospitals. To him PFI is more than a financial expedient. It represents all his hopes of entwining the private and public sectors of the economy into a combination of compassion and competence. That idea comes into the same category as Thomas Hardy's poem about the oxen kneeling in their stalls at midnight on Christmas Eve. It is such a charming thought that we can only regret that it is sentimental nonsense. It has been a bad week for the reputation of hybrid companies. Edexcel - the exami nation board which sets unanswerable questions - is both a limited company and a charity. Although it ploughs its profits back into education it operates like a commercial company in order that it can respond to the theoretically redeeming pressure of free enterprise. It now admits that it neglected investment in new technology - the characteristic error of obsession with short-term profits. And one employee attributes all its mistakes to replacement of "the education ethos" with a need "to compete for market share". Arthur Andersen and Tony Blair please note. The PM cannot fail to notice, but he will not change his mind. To accept reality would be to deny the theory on which New Labour was built and by which it was governed. Socialism, in all its forms, has to be rejected and the competitive market embraced. When the evidence suggests that the pursuit of that general principle produces a worse result than the acceptance of ancient truths, the hard evidence is ignored. It is not the sort of scandal about which the opposition complains. They are part of the conspiracy. But it is a far worse crime than accepting a few thousand pounds from a crooked energy company and using it to finance a party.
|
9royhattersley
| 1Society
|
Tony Blair ought to be hugging himself with delight. The events of Budget week (putting aside the mild embarrassment they may have occasioned by confirming that Gordon Brown really runs the country) immensely enhanced the prime minister's reputation among people who once doubted his intellectual capacity to steer a steady political course. Indeed, the whole health service package - the way the money will be spent as well as raised - came very near to vindicating his theory of government. Last week, the third way arrived in Whitehall. Like the idea or not, critics can no longer dismiss it as a name looking for a theory to which it can attach itself. On Wednesday morning, the front pages of the Tory newspapers read like the lurid bits in the Book of Revelation. The great beast - better known as old Labour - had risen out of the earth and the Two Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse, Tax and Spend, were galloping through suburban England. But by Thursday, there was a new heaven and a new earth. The same newspapers announced that the health service reforms - on which the increased national insurance contributions were to be spent - replicated Tory plans to bring the discipline of the market into the provision of medical care. The Blair philosophy is to mix and hope that there is a match. I remain entirely sceptical about the possibility of the health service crisis being resolved by a free enterprise solution. It costs more to build a hospital by the private finance initiative than it does to pay for it out of public funds and the quality of service usually deteriorates when entrepreneurs replace public servants. The idea that by "introducing the market into state monopolies", risk is transferred from government to private companies is a myth. A hospital could not be allowed to go bankrupt and out of business. The rigours of competition will not make surgeons perform appendicectomies more quickly. None of those objections to "privatising the health service" is ideological. They are all an accountant's complaints. John Redwood (not a doctrinal socialist) will forgive me for repeating a comment he made to me after we appeared together on Question Time. The private sector had, he said, "taken the government for a ride" by pretending it would accept the risks of involvement in public services. It would accept the profits and claim compensation for the losses. Perhaps the prime minister was initially happy to be conned. The arrangement allowed him to point to his partnership with business as proof that he was truly New Labour. But you do not have to be old Labour to object to the government throwing money away. The only item of old Labour ideology that really matters is the commitment to greater equality. The budget, the biggest overt redistribution of income for 20 years, proclaimed as well as implemented that principle. The debate about how the money is spent ought to be more practical than philosophic. If private enterprise can make an egalitarian health service more efficient, its involvement should be welcomed. If it cannot, it must be rejected. The examination of the Blair government's record has been profoundly prejudiced by the notion that its critics are filled by a nostalgia for what used to be. And the artificial division between old and new has been exploited by a prime minister who recognised the electoral appeal of a fresh start. The budget was right because it redistributed the nation's income - an objective associated with past Labour governments more as a result of what they preached than as a consequence of what they practised. The health service reforms may be a mistake not because they are, in Labour terms, an innovation, but because they seem unlikely to achieve their stated objective. Foolishly, critics of privatisation have allowed themselves to be represented as public enterprise Bourbons, who have forgotten how dissatisfied we all were with the monolithic state-owned utilities. When prominent members of the present cabinet were arguing for the nationalisation of 100, or was it 1,000, commanding heights of the economy, I was doing my best to prevent the government wasting its money on acquiring the shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Public versus private ought to be a question of judgment, not faith. Yet anyone who questions the transcendental efficiency of private enterprise is caricatured as a Stalinist obsessed with state control. It is the supporters of the "project" who are addicted to an unreasonable theory. They believe, despite all the evidence, that private enterprise can solve all the public sector's problems. There are legitimate reservations about the proposed health reforms that are purely pragmatic. But they will be described as doctrinaire because they are advanced by pragmatists who are labelled old rather than New Labour. If there is to be a sensible debate on these subjects, there needs to be an end to adjectives.
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
|||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Roy Hattersley .
|
Tony Blair ought to be hugging himself with delight. The events of Budget week (putting aside the mild embarrassment they may have occasioned by confirming that Gordon Brown really runs the country) immensely enhanced the prime minister's reputation among people who once doubted his intellectual capacity to steer a steady political course. Indeed, the whole health service package - the way the money will be spent as well as raised - came very near to vindicating his theory of government. Last week, the third way arrived in Whitehall. Like the idea or not, critics can no longer dismiss it as a name looking for a theory to which it can attach itself. On Wednesday morning, the front pages of the Tory newspapers read like the lurid bits in the Book of Revelation. The great beast - better known as old Labour - had risen out of the earth and the Two Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse, Tax and Spend, were galloping through suburban England. But by Thursday, there was a new heaven and a new earth. The same newspapers announced that the health service reforms - on which the increased national insurance contributions were to be spent - replicated Tory plans to bring the discipline of the market into the provision of medical care. The Blair philosophy is to mix and hope that there is a match. I remain entirely sceptical about the possibility of the health service crisis being resolved by a free enterprise solution. It costs more to build a hospital by the private finance initiative than it does to pay for it out of public funds and the quality of service usually deteriorates when entrepreneurs replace public servants. The idea that by "introducing the market into state monopolies", risk is transferred from government to private companies is a myth. A hospital could not be allowed to go bankrupt and out of business. The rigours of competition will not make surgeons perform appendicectomies more quickly. None of those objections to "privatising the health service" is ideological. They are all an accountant's complaints. John Redwood (not a doctrinal socialist) will forgive me for repeating a comment he made to me after we appeared together on Question Time. The private sector had, he said, "taken the government for a ride" by pretending it would accept the risks of involvement in public services. It would accept the profits and claim compensation for the losses. Perhaps the prime minister was initially happy to be conned. The arrangement allowed him to point to his partnership with business as proof that he was truly New Labour. But you do not have to be old Labour to object to the government throwing money away. The only item of old Labour ideology that really matters is the commitment to greater equality. The budget, the biggest overt redistribution of income for 20 years, proclaimed as well as implemented that principle. The debate about how the money is spent ought to be more practical than philosophic. If private enterprise can make an egalitarian health service more efficient, its involvement should be welcomed. If it cannot, it must be rejected. The examination of the Blair government's record has been profoundly prejudiced by the notion that its critics are filled by a nostalgia for what used to be. And the artificial division between old and new has been exploited by a prime minister who recognised the electoral appeal of a fresh start. The budget was right because it redistributed the nation's income - an objective associated with past Labour governments more as a result of what they preached than as a consequence of what they practised. The health service reforms may be a mistake not because they are, in Labour terms, an innovation, but because they seem unlikely to achieve their stated objective. Foolishly, critics of privatisation have allowed themselves to be represented as public enterprise Bourbons, who have forgotten how dissatisfied we all were with the monolithic state-owned utilities. When prominent members of the present cabinet were arguing for the nationalisation of 100, or was it 1,000, commanding heights of the economy, I was doing my best to prevent the government wasting its money on acquiring the shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Public versus private ought to be a question of judgment, not faith. Yet anyone who questions the transcendental efficiency of private enterprise is caricatured as a Stalinist obsessed with state control. It is the supporters of the "project" who are addicted to an unreasonable theory. They believe, despite all the evidence, that private enterprise can solve all the public sector's problems. There are legitimate reservations about the proposed health reforms that are purely pragmatic. But they will be described as doctrinaire because they are advanced by pragmatists who are labelled old rather than New Labour. If there is to be a sensible debate on these subjects, there needs to be an end to adjectives.
|
9royhattersley
| 1Society
|
These are difficult days for doctors. Harold Shipman was recognised as an aberration, but almost every week since his conviction there has been a new headline about what sceptics regard as characteristic medical incompetence or malpractice. Pathologists steal body parts. General practitioners declare themselves plastic surgeons and leave women scarred for life. Paediatricians' cardiac experiments result in the death of 35 children. Radiologists fail to notice cancer symptoms in 82 women examined in the breast screening programme. The revelations of the radiologists' failure came at a bad time for the profession. The Kennedy report into the Bristol baby deaths had revealed a "secret society culture" in which people advance "in their careers by not rocking the boat". As if to confirm that analysis, the General Medical Council behaved like the membership committee of a country club, exactly the complaint that was made against Bristol doctors who should have exposed the cardiac experiments. The errant radiologists were found guilty but not struck off. I know that the majority of doctors are conscientious and overworked. During the six weeks before my mother's death, I witnessed the devotion with which the staff at a great northern hospital cared for a ward of geriatrics whose conditions were beyond surgery but who responded to the palliative treatment which made their last days bearable. It made me proud to support the National Health Service. But I still understand why patients, or more likely their anxious relatives, are in a mood to inquire into the record of a surgeon before the knife goes in. Some patients always did. The articulate, self-confident middle classes always talked on equal terms with doctors. In my asthmatic childhood, we never sent for Dr Stevens to give me the early morning adrenalin injection until the grate had been cleared and a new fire laid. I do not recall the date of my emancipation. But I do remember that when it was thought, wrongly, that I must have my gall bladder removed, David Owen offered to make inquiries about the surgeon in whose hands my life would be. His words were: "If somebody is going to cut a two-foot hole in your stomach, you need to know that he's up to the job." Alan Milburn's independent office for information on health care performance will give the reticent masses a chance to influence their own surgical destiny. It may improve the levels of performance. And it will help to provide the feeling of confidence so important during the time that the trolley is being wheeled from the ward to the theatre. Everyone who believes that we should empower "the people of England who have not spoken yet" will welcome the idea. So will the more sensible doctors. Few patients now are prepared to carry notes of their condition from one doctor to another without tearing open the sealed envelope. The age of deference is not quite dead. But it is dying. No general practitioner or cardiac surgeon has anything to gain from it being replaced, among the timid patient population, by an age of resentment. And that is what would happen following the recent revelations if the tragedies were brushed aside as mistakes which doctors must be allowed to deal with themselves. Worse would follow. Patients who dared not argue with their doctors face to face would increasingly sue for negligence (whether their complaint was justified or not) as the only way of breaking into the magic circle. The critics are right to say that the publication of complicated information has its dangers. Misinterpretation by the uninitiated is always too easy. So it is important that the medical performance statistics, unlike the schools' examination results figures, are not used as if they were scores in a competition which ends with a championship trophy. With the promised help of the professional associations that can be avoided. Lord Hunt, the junior health minister said so on the radio, and I always accept what he says. Anyone who was able simultaneously to be the secretary of both the Association of Health Authorities and the Sparkbrook constituency Labour party must be a man of formidably eclectic talent. When he was a councillor and I was an MP in Birmingham's inner city, I doubt we met many people who would openly challenge a doctor's opinion or performance. The dissatisfied patients accepted whatever was prescribed and complained to us afterwards. Politicians, quite rightly, are not surrounded by mystique. Doctors, quite wrongly, too often are. The acceptance that even one small part of the profession shall be monitored will help to destroy the myths. Knowledge is power. The more it is spread the better. What about lawyers next?
|
article_from_author
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} .
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{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Roy Hattersley .
|
These are difficult days for doctors. Harold Shipman was recognised as an aberration, but almost every week since his conviction there has been a new headline about what sceptics regard as characteristic medical incompetence or malpractice. Pathologists steal body parts. General practitioners declare themselves plastic surgeons and leave women scarred for life. Paediatricians' cardiac experiments result in the death of 35 children. Radiologists fail to notice cancer symptoms in 82 women examined in the breast screening programme. The revelations of the radiologists' failure came at a bad time for the profession. The Kennedy report into the Bristol baby deaths had revealed a "secret society culture" in which people advance "in their careers by not rocking the boat". As if to confirm that analysis, the General Medical Council behaved like the membership committee of a country club, exactly the complaint that was made against Bristol doctors who should have exposed the cardiac experiments. The errant radiologists were found guilty but not struck off. I know that the majority of doctors are conscientious and overworked. During the six weeks before my mother's death, I witnessed the devotion with which the staff at a great northern hospital cared for a ward of geriatrics whose conditions were beyond surgery but who responded to the palliative treatment which made their last days bearable. It made me proud to support the National Health Service. But I still understand why patients, or more likely their anxious relatives, are in a mood to inquire into the record of a surgeon before the knife goes in. Some patients always did. The articulate, self-confident middle classes always talked on equal terms with doctors. In my asthmatic childhood, we never sent for Dr Stevens to give me the early morning adrenalin injection until the grate had been cleared and a new fire laid. I do not recall the date of my emancipation. But I do remember that when it was thought, wrongly, that I must have my gall bladder removed, David Owen offered to make inquiries about the surgeon in whose hands my life would be. His words were: "If somebody is going to cut a two-foot hole in your stomach, you need to know that he's up to the job." Alan Milburn's independent office for information on health care performance will give the reticent masses a chance to influence their own surgical destiny. It may improve the levels of performance. And it will help to provide the feeling of confidence so important during the time that the trolley is being wheeled from the ward to the theatre. Everyone who believes that we should empower "the people of England who have not spoken yet" will welcome the idea. So will the more sensible doctors. Few patients now are prepared to carry notes of their condition from one doctor to another without tearing open the sealed envelope. The age of deference is not quite dead. But it is dying. No general practitioner or cardiac surgeon has anything to gain from it being replaced, among the timid patient population, by an age of resentment. And that is what would happen following the recent revelations if the tragedies were brushed aside as mistakes which doctors must be allowed to deal with themselves. Worse would follow. Patients who dared not argue with their doctors face to face would increasingly sue for negligence (whether their complaint was justified or not) as the only way of breaking into the magic circle. The critics are right to say that the publication of complicated information has its dangers. Misinterpretation by the uninitiated is always too easy. So it is important that the medical performance statistics, unlike the schools' examination results figures, are not used as if they were scores in a competition which ends with a championship trophy. With the promised help of the professional associations that can be avoided. Lord Hunt, the junior health minister said so on the radio, and I always accept what he says. Anyone who was able simultaneously to be the secretary of both the Association of Health Authorities and the Sparkbrook constituency Labour party must be a man of formidably eclectic talent. When he was a councillor and I was an MP in Birmingham's inner city, I doubt we met many people who would openly challenge a doctor's opinion or performance. The dissatisfied patients accepted whatever was prescribed and complained to us afterwards. Politicians, quite rightly, are not surrounded by mystique. Doctors, quite wrongly, too often are. The acceptance that even one small part of the profession shall be monitored will help to destroy the myths. Knowledge is power. The more it is spread the better. What about lawyers next?
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
A report out yesterday showed that people value parks almost as highly as they value local primary schools. Taking this passion as a starting point, the report goes on to suggest new ways of running green spaces that don't rely on councils doing anything sensible or efficient. Generally, a development like that would raise the spectre of privatisation and such, but since nobody's ever going to pay to go into a park and there's no enthusiasm for flogging them off to build bijou residences, this really might be as it seems. Communities genuinely prize these spaces; so much, in fact, that they'd rather look after them with volunteer park-tender organisations than leave them to the fate of the neglected municipal pools, with crumbling tiles and floating verrucas. Now, it's true that councils do a rubbish job of looking after common land. Parkies are such Beano relics that if you saw one you'd think it was a paedophile in disguise. If you ask me, we should take the primary-school parallel one stage further, and introduce faith-based parks, where high standards are maintained by a bunch of people busting a gut to behave well because they're all pretending to be Anglicans. But it's still strange that parks arouse such passion, since nobody uses them. Actually, that's not strictly true - there are two days at the beginning of summer when people pile in at lunchtime and sit gingerly on the grass, convinced against the evidence of all their five senses that they're perched on dog shit and will probably get that disease that sends you blind. (Note to the irregular park user: there has been a revolution in poo-tidying - it isn't like the 80s any more.) Otherwise, though, you can go weeks, indeed, whole seasons, without seeing anybody at all. Regular people don't use parks: alcoholics use parks, and dogs use parks, accompanied by their owners for the sole purpose of making sure they cross the road safely. And yet such niggardly effort as is expended by councils is directed exclusively at making life difficult for winos (by closing the park at dusk) and dogs (by making all the best bits no-dog areas). This is an outrage that, were I to dwell on it, would make my head explode. Still, people are inordinately proud and protective over these spaces they never go in. I have yet to meet a single person from Sheffield who doesn't tell me that their home city has more area covered by national park than any other. The only piece of successful direct action I've ever witnessed came about when Southwark council tried to introduce the nightly locking of Warwick Gardens. (There was a sit-in of 20 people, the council relented, the local paper rejoiced, it was a mini-adventure.) A New Labour policy wonk told me, in all seriousness, that the proudest moment of his career was when he saved Peckham Rye from developers as a young councillor. The first step in the ABC of creating a futuristic dystopia for the purposes of film or literature is always to concrete over the green areas. The second thing people who don't like Tokyo tell you about Tokyo is that it has no parks. (The first thing is that you can buy schoolgirls' knickers in vending machines. I still don't know whether that's true.) These places are not prized for their practical use or, if they are, only by a very small percentage of those who prize them. Although undeveloped land manifestly does bring benefits, you'd only have to suggest a wind farm on Hampstead Heath to discover how minor a consideration the green argument is. Commons are cherished as symbols, and they manage, with very little effort beyond being green, to symbolise an awful lot. They remind us that, contrary to the messages sent out by relentless privatisation, certain things will never be for sale, simply because they're not for sale. The more expensive land gets, the more important a message this is. Commons reinforce a sense of community not because we meet on them and chat, but because they are jointly owned. Sure, hospitals and schools are jointly owned also, but that feels like cooperation with the practical purpose of pooling resources. With parks, we share and cooperate for no better reason than that we feel like it. There is a lofty satisfaction to be got from the creation and protection of beauty for its own sake. Once, this made people want to build. We've lost our enthusiasm for the folly and the cathedral - now we want to un-build. Add to that the fact that parks are no longer covered in canine detritus (go on, go for a walk if you don't believe me!) and they really convey a message of peerless social importance. I've half a mind to knock down my flat and make an ornamental garden.
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12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
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article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
The row about the allocation of lottery money is - like the one about the rights and wrongs of Goldie Hawn's botox injections - one that started in the Daily Mail and should have ended there. It all began with the 340,000 grant to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns. The objection to this was kept fairly oblique, but the bare bones of it seemed to be that while the recipients were plenty poor enough for a grant, they were insufficiently white. To this injury to right-thinking citizens has been added a further 145,000, the insult here being that the recipient group is "linked" to one Gerry German. His offence? No, it isn't his name (you can't blame a man for his name - though if he were called Harry Hun, maybe we could put that to a vote). It's apparently his history as a "race zealot", evinced by the fact that he was part of the Commission for Racial Equality during the 1980s, when it banned the Robertson golliwog for being an offensive racial caricature (when truthfully, it was ... what? A charming and side-splitting toy, of course). Now, the organisation in line for the cash is the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, whose stated aims are pretty difficult to object to, put like that. The objection is that German the firebrand is its co-founder, and that seems enough to demonstrate, once more, that this money is being spent on causes with an overt dubious political agenda. The mooted solution is to give buyers the chance to state their preferred charity on the ticket itself. My gut reaction is that this can't possibly work. First, of the 28p from every Lotto pound that goes to charity, only 9p is available to the government for redistribution (the rest goes to other bodies, including the Arts Council and the Sports Council). Of that, only a minuscule proportion, 2% tops, is spent on anything even approaching controversy. Even in the crazy mean-mindedness of the Mail's worldview, they can't seriously believe that people resent making the odd contribution of 0.18 pence to anti-racist organisations. Second, if you're going to be picky about what lottery-ticket buyers want their money spent on, then it might be worth polling them about how much they would choose to spend on high art (the Arts Council - which doesn't extend to museums and galleries, those are covered by the Heritage fund - gets 4.7p per pound. That's a hell of a lot, given that its areas of concentration - opera, poetry, theatre - are such special interest pursuits). Third, the charities that would get the money if ticket-holders were consulted would inevitably be the same ones that have least problem raising money in the first place. The only charities in this country that can drum up money really easily are those supporting cancer research, children and dogs (I guess the Daily Mail might want to be able to specify the colour of the children, though I'm not sure how you'd phrase that; comically, the colour of the dogs would never be an issue). Cancer is a wonderful disease because it doesn't discriminate, which is why it's so easy to get celebrities involved with it. Children and dogs are cute. Most other things - from Christian Aid to Amnesty, World Wildlife to Wounded Warriors Welfare - make a statement about faith, politics or social priorities. These aren't statements that everyone necessarily wants to make, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be accommodated within a wider fund that a lot of people are happy to contribute to. Unglamorous, minority-interest, perhaps ideologically complicated charities are exactly the ones that should benefit from the lottery since, let's face it, they're never going to get Geri Halliwell to launch them a phone-in. And yet, at the core of the Mail's grimly bigoted objections, there is an unfortunate truth. If a substantial number of Lotto players disagree with where the money goes, yet have no means of influencing the spending, then this isn't a game, it's a tax. What else could you call a sum skimmed off a citizen's spending and redistributed by a government? A gift? Once you've admitted that it's a tax, you have to clarify what it's a tax on - it's a tax on being poor. Sure, it might also snag some of the stupid rich (Hugh Grant was snapped buying a Lotto ticket only last week), but the real devotees of the lottery are those to whom the fantasy of the win is attractive enough to off-set its laughable improbability - the more you need the money, the more likely you are to waste it. In other words, it's a total reversal of the principle of taxation, and that can't stand. So, ticket-holders must be allowed to choose their charities, and if there's a huge cash injection into cancer research, nobody could call that a disaster. Perhaps the government could dip into proper tax to make up the shortfall for the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation groups. Or it could really branch out, and stop deporting people. It might be ethically wrong to ignore the wishes of the lottery punters, but there's no law against a centre-left government adopting a centre-left policy.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
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article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks. Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images. Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all. In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate. But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger? It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties. But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life? On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
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article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
I always thought Fathers4Justice would fall out when that fella climbed the Tower Bridge crane with the distinct intimation of his bollocks poking out of his over-pants. That's pretty bad, isn't it? That can't have been in the committee meeting: let's dress up like Spider-Man (Dangerdad! To the rescue! Earthbound women can't stop us, just watch them try!), climb up something high (have a go at that, single mumslag), compromise national security (what if we'd been al-Qaida?) and then make ourselves look irredeemably ludicrous with the small matter of the too-tight tights and the insufficiently capacious superhero undercrackers. Lobby groups have fallen out over less; Ukip fell out over Kilroy-Silk. Nope. They weathered that storm. Everybody laughed. They stood firm. And what finally does for them is the threat to kidnap Leo Blair. I don't think I'm risking the youngling's security by saying, boys, you're better than this. I always thought that when the papers got hold of a possible kidnap story - a Beckham child, for instance - it was because one of the tot's parents had an autobiography due out. So far as I know, neither Blair has any literature in the pipeline, though with Cherie's Married To The Prime Minister currently standing at 14,217 in the online charts, she might like to consider kidnapping one of her children to mark her next publishing venture. Perhaps she'd like to kidnap Euan and send clippings of his facial furniture to the press, as proof it was him. That would indeed be evil genius. I'd read almost anything she wrote after that. Sorry, I was ignoring Fathers4Justice. This happens to them a lot, I feel sure, otherwise they wouldn't be such nutjobs. The "moderate" centre of the organisation never wanted to kidnap Leo at all. It was unkind; plus, if they were any good at kidnapping children, they'd be able to get ahold of their own, instead of climbing cranes. However, as is so often the case with grass-roots pressure groups (look at the WI - they're always being investigated by Special Branch), an extremist wing hatched this evil plan. It has been suggested by various pundits that this was not a plan so much as an "inebriated flight of fancy of three men in a pub" (the Independent). Two reasons why this cannot possibly be the case: first, one of the men's names was Jolly Stanesby. If you are a running joke, liable to get pissed and talk overblown idiocy in a saloon environment, the first thing you do is change your name from Jolly to, I don't know, Mask. Or Leopard. Plus, if you're a drunken fantasist, and Special Branch comes round your house, you don't say, "They were just warning me not to do anything silly." You'd say, "They pinned me down! And then they punctured my big toe with a compass and told me to join their dark society in a brotherhood of toe-blood!" These men, in other words, were definitely intending to kidnap somebody, even if the finer details have been lost to history. Matt O'Connor is right to close it down. Hopefully, this splinter will reopen as Fathers4Child-Snatching. Then we really will see some bollocks.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
I'm trying to work out what my objection is to doing sporting activities on behalf of charities. At first I thought it was unrelated to the charitable act itself - this was when I got caught last weekend in the middle of some charity cyclists, and they a) were very annoying cyclists, constantly making merry and observing poor lane discipline; b) were all wearing T-shirts that matched, like some kind of stag weekend, only not, obviously, drunk; and c) had festooned those T-shirts with some really irritating wordplay like The Only Way Is Forward (on the front) and Let's See The Back Of Sickle-Cell Disease (on the back - and it's not that I can't apprehend the seriousness of sickle cell disease: it's the jollity. I can't stand joy!). But that's not it at all. Someone then floated past me the idea that I might do a trek in Peru, to raise money for breast cancer. I'm wholeheartedly in favour of raising money for breast cancer, and I think I probably like trekking, and I like Peru, yet the idea appalled me, which you have to put down to the trial of asking your friends for money. The contract becomes: you, friend, should sponsor me for some effort I might put in, but really it would be nudging at the boundaries of fellowship to expect you to care whether I trek or cycle or hop to Peru, though for some reason it is necessary for me to do so - we can't just all, you know, put our hands in our pockets and give away some money. The implication is that the friend won't engage in charitable giving independently of you. Furthermore, that your physical toil is of so great a merit that nobody need trouble themselves as to how much you're giving, they must just stand back and applaud you, perhaps by flapping fivers in your face. And furthermore (I'm sure this is how it works) some of the money raised will help get you to Peru, since I'm pretty sure you don't walk there, and even if you don't use your friends' money for this but your own, wouldn't the breast cancer cause have been better served by you and your friends just giving it some money without involving Peru? And isn't it patronising to the friends? If you want your friends to pay for your sweat, in the service of some charitable goal for which you'll, ultimately, end up taking the credit, why not offer to scrub their stairs or help them move? That's before you even get on to the cause, which has to be uncontroversial, because you'd anticipate asking everybody you'd ever met to sponsor you, so it couldn't be, you know, Ban Trident or Excise American Fundamentalists From African Aid Programmes. And that's fine, since most diseases and causes are fairly uncontroversial, but there's something about that ideological flattening-out that feels so depressingly apple pie and third way and ITV-on-a-Saturday-Night. Again, just give away some money! Let your friends choose their own cause. They might like controversy. Yes, this argument relies on me, right now, giving some money to a breast cancer charity. And also, you're quite right, to one for sickle-cell anaemia, too.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
Aren't you glad you bothered to vote, when new legislation is coming so thick and fast and excitingly? I am talking about dogs; and I'm being sarcastic. At least one of those two statements would hold true almost every time I have my mouth open, but that's another story. These are the proposals: that dog owners, being in the possession of a nuisance barker, would face a 5,000 fine, possible imprisonment, eviction from council housing or an Asbo or both. Punishment that harsh always has the ring of the hypothetical to me - at the end of droll stories about people selling their votes on eBay, responsible newscasters generally pointed out that you could face a 5,000 fine or imprisonment or both for misusing a vote. Yeah, right, we thought. In the words of the great Sharon Stone in her fabled no-underwear film, "What are you gonna do, arrest me for smoking?" Still, whenever a new piece of legislation comes out, it's worth wondering why, unless we're to believe that lawmakers just like to keep busy. Apparently, noisy dogs are second only to loud music in the list of aural complaints people have. Even a dog-lover would admit that was bad, although it smacks faintly of the statistic that suicide is the second biggest killer of young men. There isn't that much to choose from, is there? Only singers and dogs feel the need to express themselves with long bursts of unarticulated noise. We all have something - a histrionic personality, an ear for rousing choral music, an urge to reproduce - that will at some point be a nuisance to our neighbours. Ergo, when they make a noise that irritates us, it's a boon, since it's money in the civic bank for when we want to make a noise that irritates them. I had this theory brutally tested when my downstairs neighbour held a sing-along-a-Sound-of-Music party in her garden, but it held. Clearly, though, the majority view is that one has a right to expect an environment no noisier than mild hubbub. To explain a new law, however, you need to ask not only how bad is the problem, but also whether it's got worse. Are there more domestically kept dogs than there have been in the past? No, the dog population is in steady decline. There are more cats, but they don't make much noise, although they do (in my view) look at you funny. There are more urban foxes, which make more noise copulating than a dog could if it were trying to bark a greeting to its cousin in Scotland, but that's by the by. There are no more dogs. Are dog owners less responsible than before? Hard to tell - if all society is going to antisocial hell in a handcart, dog owners would hardly be exempt. But having said that, the highest level of ownership is among 45-54-year-olds, so we're not dealing with the binge-drinking, street-brawling, Turkey-Twizzler-munching youths for whom the whole concept of Asbo was invented. Here's an idea - maybe dogs bark more than they used to; maybe they're going through some kind of moral disintegration of their own, mirroring the steady march of self-interest they see in the wider society with the only form of delinquency they know, unless you count biting and bolting and chasing livestock. Instinct tells me this isn't the case, but I can scarcely hear my instinct over all this canine yodelling. Maybe, as a nation, we're making less informed breed choices, taking fewer walks, failing to train the beasts properly. Maybe the government needs a few windfall 5,000 fines, to make up for the gossamer lightness of our tax burden. Maybe prisons aren't full enough, and they're looking for a new band of people to incarcerate; maybe council houses are too full, and they're looking for a new cause for eviction (although, in fact, 70% of dogs live in owned houses which makes them the ABC1s of the pet world). Maybe there's an anti-dog conspiracy fuelled by people like Alastair Campbell, who I can take one look at and know isn't a dog-person. Maybe it's a veiled threat to Roy Hattersley (toe the line, buster, or your noisy pal gets it). Or, just possibly, we're failing to adapt properly to our increasingly concentrated living arrangements. Downsizers make the news for their funny views, but the trend is still towards urban living. We talk a lot about what modifications this might demand in terms of public services, transport infrastructure, housing and such, but we could gainfully explore what changes are required on an individual level. Changes such as chill out, buy some earplugs, stop bellyaching. We'll be fining people for having noisy infants next, and then there really will be trouble.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
It has been clinically proven that acupuncture actually works. Medical research always puzzles me, especially in the arena of pain relief. The centrepiece of the "God, it really does work, that hocus-pocus" research was that it altered the parts of the brain responsible for pain management, in some cases reducing pain by up to 15%. Immediately, I'm thinking: a) How do you quantify a 15% reduction in this area - by a 15% noise reduction in "ouch"?; and b) It doesn't sound much, does it? You wouldn't buy ibuprofen that claimed to "reduce your headache by a statistically significant but still not very large amount". It's bound to be good for business, this news, and I couldn't be more glad for its practitioners. I've known for years how effective acupuncture is. I've been to a guy who packed me off home with a needle he'd forgotten sticking out of my head, like a Teletubby. I've been to another guy who punctured somebody else's lung by accident, and had to resort to regular, western medicine and call an ambulance. I told my mother, who also visits this guy, and she just shrugged and said, "Well, if you're sticking needles in people, mistakes like that are bound to happen." This is how slavishly loyal you get to an acupuncturist, once you realise it really works. He could puncture my lung any day. Still, they have a bad reputation, I believe, for two reasons: first, all alternative medicines are bracketed together; second, the people who visit them are often seen as flaky, self-indulgent individuals, who don't actually have anything wrong with them, other than a simmering sense of malaise that comes from having more money than sense. In fact, alternative medicines are as different from one another as any of them is from conventional medicines. In the line of journalistic duty, you understand (I don't have more money than sense, oh no), I've been to a homeopath and a naturopath, a pranic healer and a colonic irrigator (these two in the same week; imagine the cleanliness of my innards by the end of it). I've done Australian flower remedies and the Bach sort, and been Ayurvedic'd to within an inch of my interior life. Much as I distrust the information that comes from one person's experience only, I still think it worth sharing my findings: any benefit derived from detoxing is entirely to do with the fact that you're not allowed to get drunk while doing it; homeopathy really is hocus-pocus; pranic healing makes my blood boil (with rage, not for cleansing purposes), but otherwise has zero impact; colonic irrigation is for people with eating disorders whose whole week will be lifted by the entirely misleading loss of a pound or two; flowers are for idiot hippies; and Ayurvedic doctors keep a drawerful of antibiotics for when people are properly ill. Oh, and acupuncture really works. The reputations of people who swear by alternative therapies are grounded in facts rather than prejudice. Few of these treatments have had their worth tested in clinical trials, so the patients must, by definition, lack scepticism and sense. But there is more than logic at play when you feel your fury rise at the Cherie Blairs of this world getting tangled up with the Carole Caplins. When you opt out of conventional medicine, you are saying one of a number of things. Either "there's nothing really wrong with me, and the doctor will just laugh"; or "I'm a hypochondriac, and am only interested in consulting someone who definitely won't be able to tell me whether I am dying or not"; or "I invest a lot of energy in a nebulous quest for inner purity, because I'm selfish, and consequently my life lacks meaning." Whichever statement applies, the whole business is, ethically, worse than opting out of the NHS and going private - at least then you're still following the conventional formula "Am ill, would like to be better". When you opt out in favour of a homeopath, you engage in exactly the same manoeuvre of buying yourself out of the nationalised system but without even the excuse of a decent illness. And yet (this is a bit sweeping, but true) the people who do frequent alternative therapies are the same people who would reject Bupa out of hand on lefty grounds. An instructive parallel would be sending your child to an expensive school in which the tyranny of knowledge had been jettisoned in favour of learning to make trousers out of leaves. Just because it's daft doesn't mean it's not the political equivalent of Harrow. And now I've talked myself out of ever going back to the acupuncturist, on the day I see my first concrete evidence, beyond the abatement of pathetic symptoms, that it works. How irritating.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
I complain a lot (in my own time ...) about the proliferation of stories concerning IVF and fertility in general, since I can generally detect a conservative and/or misogynistic subtext to them, a niggling "you can't have it all, girls" message in every anecdotal conception trauma dressed up as news. But at the very least, you can find a correlation between the rising prominence of IVF in the news agenda and its increasing occurrence in the health service. The number of women having IVF each year has reached the region of 30,000. Regardless of the spin you put on their individual stories (selfish, NHS-draining feminist hellcats or regular people having a medical procedure?), their number is substantial enough to warrant a place in cultural debate. The same couldn't be said for "the young career women who are putting motherhood on ice", a story from the weekend papers about women who are freezing their eggs so they have time to have a career and find a perfect mate, rather than getting a career, then settling for the first chap who comes along with passable motility. This was trumpeted with remarkable prominence in the Independent on Sunday. Clinics "around the country" were reporting "increasing numbers" of women who chose the freezing for "lifestyle", rather than medical, reasons. It sounds like a bit of a trend, doesn't it, something to maybe keep an eye on, if only from an anthropological point of view. You have to dive in a really committed way into the text before you get to any figures. By "around the country" they mean that nine clinics are offering this treatment. By "increasing numbers", they mean that eight out of 26 women, in the instance they gave, were undergoing it for lifestyle reasons. If each clinic has the same number of ball-busting, career-loving lifestyle-seekers, that is still only 72 women. In the whole of Great Britain. I bet there are more women who practise fish taxidermy, who go naked curling, who re-enact famous battles of the English civil war every weekend. The egg-freezing business might lack the spontaneity that some fondly attach to the miracle of birth, but if this is a trend, then so is a polyester bed-jacket with puppies appliqued on to the collar. You can do this with practically any birth-based "craze" you come across in the media - the women who leave it too late to find a partner and then engage in "sperm banditry" (conceiving without checking whether it's OK with the sperm manufacturer); the women who leave it a little bit late, then have a premature menopause and find it's suddenly way too late. Always skip to the figures: most of the time, they barely count as a handful. If you file the nuts and bolts of conception under "personal choice", it all seems very strange. Personal choices obviously do make the news, but only if a lot of people are making the same ones. If, on the other hand, you file unusual conception methods under "crime or misdemeanour", their status in the agenda suddenly makes sense. Aberrant behaviour doesn't need the meat of numbers to make it interesting, it's interesting all on its own. These stories can only loom so large on the landscape if the subtext exists that they are unnatural, wrong and, crucially, a matter of public rather than private interest. The boundary between public and private can't get any more blurred than it does in childbirth. The law takes it as given that, at a certain point in gestation, the foetus has rights distinct from those of its parents and at that point, any choices made by said parents could no longer be called "personal". But the law at least has the grace to formalise that boundary: to determine a time at which abortion is no longer permissible, to establish the furthest acceptable limits of genetic engineering, and so on. The media has no such compunction. It simply decides, according to nothing more rigorous than whim, the point at which a woman's choice becomes a matter of public interest. It then magnifies those choices until they seem ludicrously prevalent to avoid the obvious question we might otherwise ask: "Why are you banging on about this so much?" The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that, for all the lip service paid to a woman's right to choose, there is still deep-seated reluctance to cede fertility control to the individual. Unless, of course, that individual happens to be male. In that case, he could be laying down sperm for the future in the freezers of his local KwikSave. Not until it was such a trend that there was no room for the fishfingers would you hear a squeak about it.
|
12zoewilliams
| 1Society
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Zoe Williams on the topic of Society.
|
As longer licensing hours draw closer, the binge-drink panic movement gathers vim - at the weekend, it was revealed that many pubs intend to "exploit" the binge-drink culture, by encouraging punters to drink more. Their methods are nefarious - they might "upsell" singles to doubles with such satanic whispers as "why not make that a double?" Dave Daley, head of the National Association of Licensed House Managers, muttered darkly, "How we make our money is to make people binge drink: the more people drink, the more I get as a bonus ... The difference between us and other selling operations is that we're selling a drug." This piece, in the Observer, was accompanied by a first-hand account of a journalist who was served, with a friend, "64 units by the same barmaid, no questions asked". Enough alcohol to kill; though it's worth noting that if a person was drinking those units rather than just ordering them, they would get pretty legless before they died. (My memory of being a barmaid was that you stopped serving someone once they could no longer articulate what they wanted. We weren't expected to count drinks - otherwise we wouldn't have been barmaids, we'd have been playing championship bridge.) It's true that people selling legal drugs are subject to restrictions that people selling board games aren't. Cigarette companies aren't allowed to advertise; alcohol companies have, as a gesture of goodwill, started putting "please drink responsibly" on billboards, which is a bit like showing a Land Rover coursing through a snowscape chasing a spy and saying "please cycle more" at the end. If you're flogging something actively damaging to health, you can't be too gung-ho in telling everyone what fun it is. But pubs seeking to sell more are doing what any business does: taking an existing market and trying to milk it for all it's worth. Trying to make a special exception for things that are bad for you - booze, fags, fast food - is daft. All excess consumption is, on some level - physiological, psychological, environmental, or all three - bad for everyone, except the seller. The reason we and the government try to make a special case out of health-related selling is because of the NHS, which is the ultimate victim of this aggressive marketing. Its existence is an anomaly - it functions best in the circumstances in which it was created, viz, a more frugal time when people would of course become ill but could be relied on not to try to kill themselves every weekend. It is ideologically out of step with the market principles we thank for our high living standards. If we wanted to be rational and consistent, which thank God we don't, we would can it and open up the illness game to regular forces. It's not only health we get exercised about. Similar moral objections emerge around bookselling giants, which "cynically" try to sell more books with dirty-tricks campaigns like putting a lot of bright pink ones in their windows and discontinuing the boring ones. Sure, this is what a shoe shop would do, but books are different because they are "worthy" - they have an inherent ethical weight that their manufacturers and distributors ought to respect by not behaving like manufacturers or distributors. In both instances, the revelation is the same: we aren't as comfortable with the free-market economy as we thought. We claim to have embraced, or at least accepted, it but when it comes to matters of importance, the integrity and protection of the body or mind, we return to an anachronistic model of commerce in which both sides are flush with responsibility and respect, though not with cash. So this anti-pub furore, though daft, is also endearing. We can say what we like about modernity, but we aren't as far gone as we thought.
|
10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart on the topic of Society.
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
|
10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart on the topic of Society.
|
A Lib Dem MP asked the prime minister yesterday to get the voting age reduced to 16. Matthew Green said at that age young people were thought old enough to marry, to have children, to pay taxes and to join the armed forces. "Yet they are not allowed to vote until they are 18," he expostulated. Mr Blair, with all the weary wisdom of a man whose house contains several teenagers, which can be like having a flying saucer full of space aliens living in your home, except that they say less and eat more, said: "I am not sure that all those things a 16-year-old can do, we'd always want them to do." This was thought to be a reference to Euan Blair, who was found face down in Leicester Square at the age of 16, in a pose which suggested he had not spent the previous few hours mulling over his choice of candidate. In this he resembled several MPs who, at much the same time of night, cannot attribute their fatigue to the fact that they have spent an age working out exactly which way to vote. It was remarked at the time that Euan Blair's friends appear to have deserted him. This is not a problem for members of parliament. Kindly whips will pick them up from the floor, shout in their ears, and if necessary kick them all the way to the correct lobby. Sometimes they wind up kicking members of the press as well, who are likely to be in a similar condition. (Though of course even while inebriated, we are always sober enough to write a coruscating 500 word denunciation of parents who let their teenage children get drunk in Leicester Square.) The problem is that MPs themselves are now far too young. Just as one generation cannot remember the war, and a later one has no recollection of the winter of discontent, so these young shavers have no memory of shroud-waving. Shroud-waving was a proud tradition during the 1992-1997 Major government, a time which to most MPs seems as distant as the pre-Devonian period. This was nominally to do with the NHS, and was based on the assumption that ministers are personally to blame for every failure of the service, as if, like Roman emperors, they could end or save someone's life with a twitch of the thumb. "Is the prime minister aware that my constituent Mr Brown went to the outpatient department for help with an ingrowing toenail, and was found five weeks later, his face a hideous green and a nest of maggots feasting on his decomposed belly?" they would inquire. The prime minister would reply that he would look into this particular case, but that hon members should be aware that the staff of the NHS did a magnificent job in difficult circumstances, and that the other party's plans would lead to a mass extermination which would make the Black Death look like a touch of flu. Yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith waved the case of 94-year-old Mrs Rose Addis, who, we are told, had to wait days for a bed at a London hospital. "Her clothes had not been changed. Her daughter had to borrow a bowl of water to wash the blood that had become caked on her mother's hands and feet." This was a superb example of traditional shroud-waving, as admired by connoisseurs as a majestic pass by a bullfighter. Mr Blair did not disappoint. He gave a traditional reply to the flapping linen: "The Conservatives want to use these cases ... to run the NHS down. They want to say it has failed, therefore get rid of the health service on which people are depending." In other words, the Tories complain about people getting poor treatment because they want to make sure they get no treatment at all. A 16-year-old could see what nonsense that is, but then, thanks to Mr Blair, they don't yet have the vote.
|
10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart on the topic of Society.
|
John Prescott paid a welcome visit to the House of Commons yesterday to launch his department's new white paper, Our Towns And Cities: The Future. This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium which is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren. In New Labour's dream world, canals are for strolling by, past bustling pavement cafes where laughing groups of people drink cappuccino in the sun. And they're definitely not full of dead cats, condoms or rusted supermarket trollies. The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens, nothing tangible is planned. But, we are promised, there will be "innovative developments", "local strategic partnerships" and "urban policy units". Town councils will have "new powers to promote wellbeing". As members of society, people will need to be able "to achieve their full potential" while "protecting the environment, both local and global." To make sure this happens, the government's "policies and programmes are the building blocks," and just in case we might think this may never happen, we're promised that "visions for the future will be developed". There will be a "key focus" here and a "coordinated effort" there. The government, in its wisdom, has "established a framework". The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect's drawings, in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas, with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths. But Mr Prescott's statement, far from being the jumble of words we have come to expect, was an oral version of the same thing. I have noticed that the time to become suspicious about this government is when it breaks into capital letters. This invariably represents not the real world, but some new initiative, programme or quango. He is setting up Regional Centres of Excellence. He has established a Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. He is considering an Urban Policy Board, and a Cabinet Committee is to hold an Urban Summit in the year 2002. Let's not forget the Integrated Transport White Paper, the New Deal for Communities and the Social Exclusion Unit. Capital letters were all over the shop, each in charge of a resonant abstraction. We hacks were abjured yesterday by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's press secretary to mark the difference between scepticism and cynicism. My attitude to Mr Prescott's statement was a balanced mixture of both. At one point, for example, he reminded us that Lord Rogers had said, "people make cities, but cities make citizens". Tories giggled at this, crying "wozzat mean?" "Think about it!" he bellowed back, though I'm afraid I was none the wiser. You could say, "people make cars, but cars make drivers", or "people make alcohol, but alcohol makes alcoholics". This kind of talk spreads among the very people who use it. Mr Prescott got confused about the technical terms for a city. "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town." Faced with these massive piles of abstract thought, there was little the Tory spokesman, Archie Norman could say or do. "The only time we ever see the deputy prime minister," he grumped, "is when he has a glossy brochure or a disaster to announce." Or, I reflected yesterday, possibly both at the same time.
|
10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart on the topic of Society.
|
They say that if you get trapped in quicksand you should not struggle. You must remain very still and wait for help. Nobody has told Stephen Byers. The wretched transport minister has been flailing around for weeks now. It's a horrible sight. Every wave of the arms takes him an inch further down into the inky morass. And nobody has thrown him a rope. The onlookers are all on firm, safe ground, gazing at the dreadful spectacle. Take Harry Cohen, the MP for Leyton. He was one of the many Labour MPs who were in the chamber for transport questions, no doubt to give Mr Byers the support he so badly needs. There was no sign of his celebrated press secretary, Jo Moore. Possibly she had decided that this would prove to be a good day to bury a bad minister. Mr Cohen was in no mood to offer any support at all. He was furious about the public-private partnership for the London Underground. No wonder. He is a London MP. It's his constituents who will suffer. The scheme was, he said, "shaping up to be a disaster". The deals were so appalling that contractors could underperform for years and still get big bonuses. Then after seven years of incompetence, they could re-negotiate their contracts from a monopoly position. What's more they would stick to their own priorities, which had nothing to do with the priorities of passengers. Mr Byers must have felt like a man in a mire who expected planking to be laid out for his escape, but instead felt the tentacle of an octopus wrap around his leg. He blathered about 15bn investment in 13 years, but didn't answer Mr Cohen's charges. Next it was the Tories' turn to make him squirm some more. Sir Sidney Chapman made the point that investment in the tube had been far less since 1997 than it had been in the equivalent period before 1997. Would Mr Byers confirm that? Did he confirm it? Oh, grow up. He renewed his struggles. "I think the issue is ..." he began to Tory jeers and Labour silence. "I will answer that question on my own terms!" he said, to louder Tory jeers, and, in its own way, even louder Labour silence. But he had not finished waving his limbs at us. Thrash, bang, wallop, arghhhh! "We don't want a future of all our yesterdays, in which people blame each other! It is not a time to re-write history, but to look forward and deliver the investment Londoners so badly need!" A time to look forward? Not a time to dwell on all our yesterdays and blame the Tories for everything? What is the party for if it isn't about re-writing history? As Paul Flynn MP once wrote: "In New Labour it is only the future that is certain. The past is continually changing." Mr Byers would really love to blame the inactivity of John Prescott for all his travails, but that's not allowed. The hubbub grew. Vincent Cable, a Lib Dem, asked if it was true that government money for public transport would in future be tied to binding arbitration to stop strikes. Mr Byers gathered about himself what dignity a drowning man can manage, and announced: "The prime minister's official spokesman, and the prime minister himself, which is probably more important ..." The rest of his reply was drowned in mocking cries of "No, he isn't", "don't be silly" and so on. At this point I looked up at the civil servants who have the unhappy task of staffing the press office for Mr Byers. Of the four of them, three were laughing. You know that when the civil service joins in the general delight, the sand is about to close over your head.
|
10simonhoggart
| 1Society
|
Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Simon Hoggart on the topic of Society.
|
Dr Taylor will see you very soon, and you can have an hour with him," I was told. You don't hear that in the NHS very often, but then very few doctors are standing for parliament. Compared to a busy consultant, candidates have time on their hands. Dr Richard Taylor is standing for the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern party. Astonishingly, he might win, defeating David Lock, a government minister. Martin Bell thinks he will win, and is coming to speak for him. Whatever happens, Dr Taylor will hugely influence the result, and thus scare all the mainstream parties. If an independent can scoop up buckets of votes over a hospital, what next? Schools, incinerators, the Stop People Parking In Our Street After Six O'clock party? There's something engagingly amateurish about the enterprise. That clunky party name for one thing. Any half decent spin doctor would have called it Kidderminster Independent Candidates Killing A State Shutdown, providing a nifty acronym. Then there's the battle bus, which turns out to be a flat bed truck, draped with a few posters and pulled by a tractor, though that is to be replaced by a Land Rover. Dr Taylor is a mild, thoughtful man, though moved to something near fury by the reduction of his beloved hospital to a shell operation. Patients suffering anything serious have to go to Worcester, which for some is more than 30 miles away. Every politician has an oratorical style, which in his case I'd call "bedside manner", though when he gets really angry it's closer to a ringside manner. Dr Taylor, a Labour voter four years ago, decided to go political in April 1999 and after two elections, the party is by far the largest single group on the local council. I suspect Mr Lock may have slightly underestimated his opponent. Like many older doctors, Richard Taylor loves the health service. "In its hey day, the NHS was magnificent. Then we had the chance of making it so good that private practice would have become a complete irrelevance." That kind of talk has got him labelled a "medical dinosaur", a "militant" and a "meddling amateur", though in my experience such abuse makes meddling amateurs even keener to keep on meddling. I went to see Mr Lock, a man who has the burden of being Lord Irvine's representative on earth, or at least in the Commons. He was excited. "Dr Taylor admitted at a public meeting last night that it would be dangerous to bring A&E back to Kidderminster. He's led everyone up the garden path. There is no longer any point in his campaign." I phoned Dr Taylor. "The spin doctors are turning nasty," he said. "I merely pointed out that it would be difficult to bring it back. That's not the same thing." He is learning the first rule of politics: what you say doesn't matter; it's what your opponents can claim you say which counts. Mr Lock assured me that the hospital was raised by only one voter in 10. But when he knocked on the door of someone labelled "firm Labour" on his canvassing sheet, the man said, "I've been Labour thick and thin, right and wrong, all my life. But this hospital thing, it's a very sore point round here..." When Dr Taylor went to a school to talk to parents, one woman told how her little boy had had a burst appendix, and she'd had to go to Worcester with him, and couldn't get home at all, so her husband had to leave work and look after the other three... Luck counts for a lot in elections, and yesterday at least, Dr Taylor had it in spades.
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett on the topic of Society.
|
There is nothing like a party conference for reminding you that politicians are not as other men and women. It is not only, as Tony Booth remarked this week, that politicians are now under the control of androids intent on world domination - the strange otherliness of our leaders is evident in so many other ways, from the curious "tough on smiles, tough on the causes of smiles" expressions Labour ministers adopted for this conference, to their peculiar use of the English language. Does anyone apart from politicians (both conservative and modernising), use the word "prudent"? Does anyone else, even when speechifying, say "I say in all frankness..."? On the subject of drugs, the current administration becomes almost baroque in its expressions of horror. Keynoting away, Blair raged against the "drugs menace", and the drugs industry - as he put it, "the most chilling, evil industry the world has to confront". Even outside the conference hall, any mention of drugs can be depended on to work our modernisers into a passion of denunciation. They never talk about the need to restrict drug use, or discourage it, or understand it, but must always refer to "the war against drugs", for all the world as if this were a simple, Good versus Bad conflict in which we are all - except for the doomed druggies themselves - eager combatants. Presumably, the lurid language is supposed to convey the extremity of the problem - invariably depicted as a grubby stew of crackheads, playground zombies, dead people in toilets. Before his conference speech, in an interview with the Mirror's Paul Routledge, Tony Blair explained why he wants to extend drug testing of "people who are arrested and charged". "Did you know," Blair said, "that in some areas 50% of people who are arrested have drugs in their system? I don't know about you, but that petrifies me." We must hope he does not decide to extend the scheme to people who are invited to receptions at No 10, or some of his most modern guest lists might be decimated. Drugs, as some bishops and even some opposition politicians, are aware, are not always, indubitably a "menace". You don't have to like them, or take them, to acknowledge that rather a lot of people are doing so now without sliding into the vileness of the gutter and thence into a criminal life from which they can only be rescued by the ludicrously named czar and his legions of drug-testers. But maybe Tony Blair is more innocent than the Bishop of Edinburgh. Maybe he is not, in all frankness, aware that much, if not most, of the modern British creativeness, from Britpop to Britart, to British fashion, with all of which his government so longs to be identified, is the work of artists who have had drugs in their system. Some of these creative people, such as Noel Gallagher, the No 10 invitee, are brazen about it. Some, dashingly, write novels and make films about it. Others, though more discreet about their part in the "drugs menace", feel no sense of shame, or stigma. Cool Britannia, as Labour used to like to call it, is drug fuelled. Maybe testing should be extended to all those who pass through the doors of London's Groucho Club? But if the war on drugs is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it must venture still further, into the recesses of uncool Britannia. We already know, thanks to It Girl Tara, Lord Freddie Thing and the Parker Bowles son, that drugs are as much a feature of junior upper class life, as they are of gangs on sink estates. A recent report suggested that 43% of sixth-formers at independent schools have tried drugs, principally cannabis. They simply do not believe it is harmful. Perhaps they have concluded that their parents suffer more obvious ill effects from alcohol than from drugs. For middle-class people, many of them with impressionable children (people not wholly unlike the Blair family), also play their part in the evil industry. Successful lawyers, financiers, businessmen, government lobbyists - all, otherwise, of the utmost, Blairite probity, are at it too - seemingly convinced that theirs is a recreational habit, which will not end up with car crime and a compulsory blood test. It may not be easy to persuade them, or their world-weary children, otherwise. When Tony Blair talks about his war on drugs - all drugs - it's hard to imagine to which constituency he is appealing. Too many people now appreciate that there are differences between hard and soft drugs and yet more complex differences in individual susceptibilities to the same drugs. Some people can't stop drinking and smoking, either. Even those of us who have been robbed by drug addicts might feel that our interests would be better served by an end to prohibition, or partial prohibition, than a futile and costly "war". Blair's bellicosity cannot disguise the fact that his scheme is wholly unrealistic. Why does he want to test people? "We should be looking at the whole question of bail for cocaine and heroin users," he told Routledge, "because the evidence is that if people are put on bail they just go back to crime to feed their habit. Far better to get them into treatment." Treatment in prison? According to some estimates, half the prison population has a drug problem. It would be like drying out alcoholics in a brewery. The explosion in drug abuse and drug-related crime is alarming, and a severe challenge, but it cannot be seen in isolation as the preserve of a weak-willed underclass and nothing to do with Brit Award winners, models and other modern-approved personalities who don't try to conceal their drug use. Increasing numbers of establishment figures - doctors, editors and police officers among them - are now arguing for the decriminalisation of soft drugs. If Blair is to wage all-out war, he must purge these collaborators and appeasers from his acquaintance. The next Cool Britannia party might be just him and Ann Widdecombe. Enjoy
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
|
article_from_author_topic
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Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett on the topic of Society.
|
Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently, bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following. Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places. Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard". Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way. Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?" (Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.) Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, "parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers". Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children". In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex. Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners." If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner. Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people. Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better. Back on song, Blair tries to woo us back Whatever the TUC felt about the content of Mr Blair's address to them on Monday, they should surely feel flattered to have been the beneficiaries of what seems to me to have been, if not one of the great Blair speeches, certainly a hint that we may expect, come conference, a return to glorious, shameless form. The glimpse of a Blair in full song was there not only in his bold reworking of Shakespeare - "I come here to praise Warwick not bury it. To advocate social partnership not belittle it" - but in a plangent bit of phrasing that seems to be his very own: "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back." Assuming Mr Blair did not copy this off the inside of a greetings card with a little bear on the front holding a pale blue balloon and saying "Sorry!", it suggests an intriguing new shift in his rhetorical style, from the visionary who gave us a "new young country" to a sadder but wiser kind of guy who hopes we can learn to love again. A bit like Steps in Since You Took Your Love Away: "I need to find a way back, And I don't know if I'm strong enough ... You took your love, oh baby, no I need you." Could Blair's TUC phrase even be a quote from one of his own, as yet unpublished, songs? "Even if I've never been away, it's time to show I'm back, ooh yeah baby, Even if we used to disagree, There's nothing I can do about Iraq, I'm sorry baby ..." Can't wait.
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett on the topic of Society.
|
Mindful of the desire of the new commissioner for children, Professor Al Aynsley-Green, for all young people in England to know of his existence, I told the nearest child that she now had her own, dedicated tsar, one determined to raise debate "on the construct of children and childhood in society". He was ready and apparently eager to hear her views. On any subject. Children's participation would be vital to his work. Within a few minutes, the first letter was ready for forwarding. "To the childrens zar" [it began], "I think we should have loads more sweets and crisps. Sincerely, A Kid." The second letter requested longer school holidays, the third no more homework, and the fourth, more pizza restaurants. Given the Zar's record, you feel that he might not be entirely unsympathetic to proposals that would make the world a better place for year 3. After all, as he this week told children at a London primary school, he voluntarily watches Dick and Dom. A couple of years ago, as the government's clinical director for children, he suggested that children in hospital should be tempted with snack boxes including crisps and chocolate. There was no point in offering guacamole, he pointed out; the children wouldn't eat it: "I make no apology for including a Mars bar and crisps, because it's what children like." Sadly for his client base, Professor Aynsley-Green is not empowered to hold back the tide of guacamole now advancing from Jamie Oliver's busy blender, in order to replace it with his own crisp and Mars bar snack boxes. Actually, looking at his role as children's commissioner, he appears to have very few powers at all. He will not, for example, be able to help individual children from being put in custody in Britain, where, as the UN pointed out last year, 27 of them have died since 1990. He cannot stop badly behaved 10-year-olds from being named and shamed on the front pages of their local paper, with the encouragement of the home secretary, who warned young misbehavers this week, "Your photo could be all over the local media; your local community will know who you are ...." Similarly, it will be beyond him to protect children from being assaulted by their parents, who are authorised under the government's recently introduced moderate-slapping legislation to use violence against minors (including babies) as long as they don't leave marks. With the wisdom that comes of having presided over the Islington children's homes scandal, the children's minister, Margaret Hodge, reassured everyone last year that "there is a world of difference between a light smack and violence and abuse". No doubt many of the children whose aggressive, prematurely sexualised, "challenging" behaviour was described by Ofsted this week would applaud this recognition that a little light violence is only to be expected when tempers get frayed. In an opening contribution to his debate on the "construct of children and childhood in society", Aynsley-Smith observed that English society lacks a "warmth" towards children evident in other European countries. Though the popularity of programmes offering advice on child-rearing and the emergence of celebrity nannies such as Gina Powell and Jo Frost surely suggests that parents nowadays are not so much cold as anxious and confused about how to engage with their children. And why shouldn't they be, when you consider the government's simultaneous support for child-whacking (Mr Blair has personally endorsed the loving smack) and persecution of little blighters who go round frightening other people? If the commissioner's job is designed to stop him placing boundaries on such lamentably inconsistent behaviour, he is at least empowered to represent the views of its victims. Do our children feel better for a good slap? Would they like to eat more guacamole? Is there anything about being a child now that the children's commissioner really ought to know? We would be interested in your children's thoughts; contributions welcome at the usual address.
|
0catherinebennett
| 1Society
|
Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
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Generate an article based on the writing style of Catherine Bennett on the topic of Society.
|
Has a glass ever looked more half-full? And yet, at the same time, more half-empty? Those of us who have doubted Tony Blair's wisdom in applying this form of efficacy-evaluation to the political mainstream can only concede its aptness to the work of the national lottery commission, and hang our heads. For it is, in its way, a perfect summary of the lottery outcome. On the one hand the glass is half-full: Branson, the crown prince of gittishness, has lost. On the other, the glass is half-empty: Camelot, a practised gang of profiteers, has won. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, do you Tone? Well, you do actually. That little tear glistening in the corner of one of Branson's eyes, as he took in the tragic scale of this abrupt fortune-reversal, was the funniest thing since the death of little Nell. Then again, the revival of Camelot's fortunes must be terribly distressing for New Labour. It is only five years, after all, since the first waves of revulsion caused by Camelot's surging, 1m-a-week profits had Blair and his shadow cabinet queueing up to denounce Camelot and promise their own, cleansing reforms. "Camelot has a licence to print tickets and another to print money", objected Jack Cunningham, then shadow heritage spokesman, who went on to describe the operator as "another private monopoly set up by a Conservative government". In his celebrated "People's Lottery" speech, Tony Blair confirmed that he would open bids for a non-profit-making operator in 2000, "so we can release more money for the benefit of good causes". He pointed out that "No other country in Europe runs a private profit-making lottery". Meanwhile, Chris Smith, shadow heritage secretary, declared that Labour would make sure that, "the lottery serves the people". He said: "The government promised that the lottery would benefit every man, woman and child in Britain. Instead, the distribution of money has become a joke." Since when the joke has got progressively more side-splitting. In fact the story of Labour and the lottery is, in some ways, even more comically terrible than that of Labour and the dome. Labour had not, in opposition, set its face against the dome. And where the dome builders were culpably vainglorious, the lottery commissioners seem to have been plain thick. The great similarity between these two calamities, of course, is that no one of political consequence is going to be held accountable for the mess. Just as the dome emerged as a natural disaster, a force of nature no man could possibly have tamed, so the awarding of the lottery licence is already being portrayed as a task so impossibly huge and complex - think of all those awesome piles of papers! Think of all those big sums! - that we should be grateful that anyone has been found to run it at all, even the beastly old monopoly we all despised back in 1995. Like the genesis of the dome, the selection of a lottery licence will turn out to be so Byzantine a procedure that its complexities can never be satisfactorily explained. We shall never know, for example, why Smith chose to fill his spanking new quango, the national lottery commission, with five people who so consummately lacked any sign of having the "wider range of knowledge, experience, and expertise" that this body was supposed to "bring to bear on lottery regulation". The emergence of Dame Helena Shovelton will remain, for ever, a mystery. Perhaps the commission's task might have been easier had it received more bids. But when the deadline fell, it had just two to consider: one from the fat cats, one from the Cheshire. Branson, recently dubbed Sir Richard by Blair and appointed to Smith's creative industries taskforce, would describe winning the lottery as "the most important thing in my life". Why did he want it so? Not, we know, out of "self-glorification", because Branson has decided to sue Tom Bower, his unauthorised biographer, for supplying this explanation. But if not self-glorification, then what? The simple desire to do good? Possibly. Then again, a job as Britain's Lord Bountiful could not adversely affect Branson's other interests, all of which depend on the bearded person of Branson for their successful branding. Far from instilling doubts about his motivation, the potent Branson brand seemed to appeal powerfully to the commission's chairman Dame Helena and her band of Shoveltons. So much so, that when the dame announced in August that neither bid would do, it was Branson, alone, who got a second chance, a piece of favouritism which would have most toddlers reeling with sympathetic indignation. Branson exulted that his success would make it "worthwhile being born". Camelot, having been everywhere obituarised, successfully sought a judicial review. At this point another cabinet minister might have disbanded his commission and started again. Smith did not. In court, his commission defended itself on the grounds that its process had been like "an architectural competition", in which the People's Lottery had produced a building that was "very nearly there" (a claim which hardly conforms with this week's revised "risky" verdict). The judge, as we know, disagreed, describing the commission's behaviour as "conspicuously unfair", "unlawful" and "an abuse of power". Astonishingly, Dame Helena did not instantly resign. Quite the opposite: she defended her decision, and was, even more incredibly, supported by Smith - who presum ably believes that "conspicuously unfair" conduct is something that might afflict anyone. Only after a week did Dame Shovelton resentfully agree to go, attributing her departure - in a very dome-like way - to "media vilification". Her four, equally conspicuously unfair colleagues (for the judgment had been unanimous) chose - presumably with Smith's blessing - to remain. It must have been obvious to Lord Burns, Shovelton's successor, that the commission was now irredeemably discredited as well as none too bright - but thanks to the earlier prevarication and mistakes, there was now no time to replace these incompetents. The appointment of new commissioners, Lord Burns said, "would delay the process by several months ... the risks regarding that are much greater than the risks in carrying on". Well, we shall see. Burns will just have to hope that a spokesman for the People's Lottery was being honest, in October, when he said: "We have absolute confidence that Lord Burns will be fair and impartial." Branson is not famed, however, for shrinking from litigation. On the contrary. According to Bower, Branson considered seeking a judicial review back in 1994, when he was first refused the lottery licence. This week he was already asking "do we or do we not go to court?" If he does go, then the referral of this extraordinary mess back to courts will be no more than the logical continuation of a saga which seems, in the absence of any competent leadership from those nominally in charge, to have been settled from the start, by the wrangling of professional lawyers. The commission made its initital "conspiciously unfair" decision with the approval of the treasury solicitors. This was overturned in court after successful argument by Camelot's QC. Lord Burns' deliberations have been overseen by the city firm, Freshfields, which has also, by coincidence, previously worked for Branson, Camelot and GTech. And, some may think, why not? Given a choice between Shovelton and Smith and these brainy solicitors and barristers, which would you choose? Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker, given the obvious shortage of suitably qualified public figures, if we just abandoned the pretence of democratically elected government, and appointed a bunch of tip-top lawyers to do the job instead? Then you think of Lord Falconer and Lord Irvine, Lord Grabiner and Lady Kennedy - and remember, that's exactly what Blair is doing. It's just that he hasn't quite finished. Statements The lottery commission<br />Hilary Blume: why I resigned Related stories<br /> Explained: the lottery bids <br />November 10 2000: The debate between who will run the lottery continues Useful links National lottery<br />The Lottery Commission<br />Camelot <br />People's Lottery
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3jonathanfreedland
| 1Society
|
By now, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need. No one can seriously be against it. Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing "child poverty". The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all like kids. Except maybe we don't. For there is too much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not look after, and perhaps does not even like, children. At its mildest, it's the shock any visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we give to kids here. It can be formal: the "Sorry, no children" signs that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent. At its most extreme, there is the staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer - and what lies beneath. For even in those places far away from the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their childhood. Of course it is essential that British kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play, draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom, as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them. We can hardly blame the schools; they are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the same game - depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a Stars in their Eyes "kids special" where the sight of a hair-gelled nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their child to victory - and to imagined riches for their own pockets. But let's not be snobbish about this. Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would doubtless cite "irony" in defence of its Little Friends comedy show, which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them about their sex lives and beginning one question, "My Dad says he'd bet his cock... " This horrible little programme is queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a childish need - to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks - and exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them as old before their years. Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist provide healthy, valuable sex education - but which look sleazy and pressuring to the naked eye. "Why don't you have a boyfriend," nags Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful instructive tale: "He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to lose him." And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys and its "seven ways to make him come back for more". The advice inside may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having it - but these magazines are making good money out of that angst. Or it can be the new US-made Bratz dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are miniature J-Los and Beyoncs. They are sexualised, and so cannot help but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror "a society in which we're treating really young children as if they were much older". It's hard to work out what's behind this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose, mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces "Fuckface" or "Two-Faced Cunt" seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual objects. For artists and magazine editors, this doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos, unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites, neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need - of a society that will care for them properly.
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article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Jonathan Freedland on the topic of Society.
|
By now, we should be feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need. No one can seriously be against it. Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing "child poverty". The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all like kids. Except maybe we don't. For there is too much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not look after, and perhaps does not even like, children. At its mildest, it's the shock any visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we give to kids here. It can be formal: the "Sorry, no children" signs that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent. At its most extreme, there is the staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer - and what lies beneath. For even in those places far away from the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their childhood. Of course it is essential that British kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play, draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom, as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them. We can hardly blame the schools; they are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the same game - depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a Stars in their Eyes "kids special" where the sight of a hair-gelled nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their child to victory - and to imagined riches for their own pockets. But let's not be snobbish about this. Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would doubtless cite "irony" in defence of its Little Friends comedy show, which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them about their sex lives and beginning one question, "My Dad says he'd bet his cock... " This horrible little programme is queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a childish need - to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks - and exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them as old before their years. Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist provide healthy, valuable sex education - but which look sleazy and pressuring to the naked eye. "Why don't you have a boyfriend," nags Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful instructive tale: "He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to lose him." And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys and its "seven ways to make him come back for more". The advice inside may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having it - but these magazines are making good money out of that angst. Or it can be the new US-made Bratz dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are miniature J-Los and Beyoncs. They are sexualised, and so cannot help but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror "a society in which we're treating really young children as if they were much older". It's hard to work out what's behind this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose, mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces "Fuckface" or "Two-Faced Cunt" seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual objects. For artists and magazine editors, this doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos, unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites, neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need - of a society that will care for them properly.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
There are two risks that every reader of this column runs. The certain risk is that you will grow old. The contingent risk is that you may suffer some catastrophic accident that renders you disabled or incapable. This may happen before you are old though it is much more likely when you are already old. A fifth of Britain's pensioners are incapable of looking after themselves; injury as much as infirmity is the cause. The philosophic and political question is how should society respond. The conservative view is that such risks should be each individual's responsibility, and that the only intervention by the state should be to underwrite the circumstances of the very poorest who simply do not have the wherewithal to look after themselves. The liberal view is that because old age is certain and the consequences of a catastrophic and unpredictable accident are just that - catastrophic and realistically uninsurable - then these are definitive areas where the responsibility should be collective. The division is decisive; it defines a crucial difference between Left and Right. In Britain the conservative view has held sway for 20 years. The large moral proposition about the superiority of individual responsibility has been supported by two important sub-propositions. The first is that the delivery of support for the elderly by the state is often inefficient, and is better performed by the private sector; even the state's 'promise' about providing a good pension is fragile and better respected by the private sector. The second is that the state cannot afford - given an increasingly ageing population - to undertake collective responsibility for personal care and guarantee the value of the basic state pension even if it wanted. We must abandon universal provision and substitute targeted, means-tested provision only for the very needy. Thus the state pension has been allowed to become worth progressively less, indexed only to the growth of prices generally rather than wages. A safety net, the Minimum Income Retirement Guarantee, is de facto replacing the universal provision element of the state pension, meaning that individuals, from young disabled to elderly, who need personal care have been means tested to ensure only the poor get their care paid for. But last Thursday came a crucial dent in the conservative consensus. Liberal Democrat members of the Scottish Executive, under pressure from their party in the Scottish Parliament, forced the Labour leader of the Executive and Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish, into an extraordinary U-turn. Scotland is now committed to the universal provision of free personal care for the elderly, and a study group is to report by August on how to proceed. Scotland is demonstrating that it belongs to the European liberal mainstream, and is declaring independence from conservative England. More ominously for New Labour, it is yet more evidence that the custodianship of Britain's progressive tradition is passing from them. For New Labour strongly and passionately disagrees with universal and collective provision for old age and its consequences. It is readier to build a stronger safety-net for low-income groups than the Tories would consider, but its position is conservative even if at the liberal end of that spectrum. It has refused to consider the central recommendation of the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the elderly that it set up after the election: that personal care for the elderly should be provided by the state free of charge with only living or 'hotel' costs to be means-tested. Instead, in its new Health and Social Care Bill, New Labour wants to standardise nationally the current lottery of means-tested charging, currently varying between local authorities, and wind down a worthwhile universal basic state pension. In this area, Labour is becoming the party of One Nation conservatism. The Liberal Democrats are assuming the mantle of championing the liberal and centre-Left propositions on collective responsibility. The case for universal provision of free personal care for the elderly was made eloquently by the Royal Commission. 'Long term care,' it reported, 'is a contingency not a probability. Neither its incidence nor the scale of care needed are predictable. It is equitable and proper for the state to meet at least one element of the catastrophic costs for everyone. And the costs in the future in relation to people's likely means will remain catastrophic.' It rejected outright the notion that individuals could take responsibility for the cost of personal care that might follow a catastrophe, because this was not a risk the mainstream insurance industry was prepared to accept. Indeed, standard insurance for personal care in old age is prohibitively expensive. As for the argument about open-ended public expense with an ageing population, the Commission was simply scornful. It dismissed the widespread notion that the country is labouring under a demographic time bomb; Britain's pensioner population is growing, but not greatly in relation to the numbers of people of working age. In any case, the costs of providing long-term care for pensioners and the disabled are not great (800 million to 1,200m), and affordable if we choose. The report was completed before the emergence of a structural budget surplus, which further weakens the argument about unaffordability. The moral and practical imperative, the Commission felt, was to offer personal care free, with individuals still paying for living and housing costs while means-testing protected the poorest. In short, the key conservative arguments - individual responsibility, the relative efficiency of the private sector, the ageing population and the cost to the Exchequer - cut no ice. In this area the balance of the argument was to act collectively. Yet apart from some concessions on lifting the threshold of wealth before the means test applies, the Government has been stoutly opposed to any reform. But now it confronts the move in Scotland, which if it isn't fudged, is a direct challenge to its stance. In my view, the argument extends to the basic old-age pension. The state 'pension promise' has not been solid. But then the private sector-pension 'promise' is a lot less solid than the propaganda assumes, being subject to the vagaries of stock-market performance, annuity rates and, as 900,000 holders of Equitable Life pension plans found out, to pension fund mismanagement. What future pensioners need is neither to be wholly reliant on the state nor on the market, but to have their risks balanced. Just as everyone has the right to free universal personal care, so everyone has the right to a solid universal state pension whose level is automatically linked to the rise in general living standards. We should rely on a combination of our savings, our employers' pension scheme and a good state pension for income in old age - and not try to pretend that the private sector provides a free option. Because it doesn't. The Government may boast about healthy public finances, but if the consequence is to displace risk on to those incapable of accepting it then the boast is hollow. Universal personal care and a universal state pension are hallmarks of a society that understands the limits of individual responsibility. Congratulations to Scotland's Liberal Democrats. Without them the proposition would be dead. And welcome devolution.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
There are two risks that every reader of this column runs. The certain risk is that you will grow old. The contingent risk is that you may suffer some catastrophic accident that renders you disabled or incapable. This may happen before you are old though it is much more likely when you are already old. A fifth of Britain's pensioners are incapable of looking after themselves; injury as much as infirmity is the cause. The philosophic and political question is how should society respond. The conservative view is that such risks should be each individual's responsibility, and that the only intervention by the state should be to underwrite the circumstances of the very poorest who simply do not have the wherewithal to look after themselves. The liberal view is that because old age is certain and the consequences of a catastrophic and unpredictable accident are just that - catastrophic and realistically uninsurable - then these are definitive areas where the responsibility should be collective. The division is decisive; it defines a crucial difference between Left and Right. In Britain the conservative view has held sway for 20 years. The large moral proposition about the superiority of individual responsibility has been supported by two important sub-propositions. The first is that the delivery of support for the elderly by the state is often inefficient, and is better performed by the private sector; even the state's 'promise' about providing a good pension is fragile and better respected by the private sector. The second is that the state cannot afford - given an increasingly ageing population - to undertake collective responsibility for personal care and guarantee the value of the basic state pension even if it wanted. We must abandon universal provision and substitute targeted, means-tested provision only for the very needy. Thus the state pension has been allowed to become worth progressively less, indexed only to the growth of prices generally rather than wages. A safety net, the Minimum Income Retirement Guarantee, is de facto replacing the universal provision element of the state pension, meaning that individuals, from young disabled to elderly, who need personal care have been means tested to ensure only the poor get their care paid for. But last Thursday came a crucial dent in the conservative consensus. Liberal Democrat members of the Scottish Executive, under pressure from their party in the Scottish Parliament, forced the Labour leader of the Executive and Scotland's First Minister, Henry McLeish, into an extraordinary U-turn. Scotland is now committed to the universal provision of free personal care for the elderly, and a study group is to report by August on how to proceed. Scotland is demonstrating that it belongs to the European liberal mainstream, and is declaring independence from conservative England. More ominously for New Labour, it is yet more evidence that the custodianship of Britain's progressive tradition is passing from them. For New Labour strongly and passionately disagrees with universal and collective provision for old age and its consequences. It is readier to build a stronger safety-net for low-income groups than the Tories would consider, but its position is conservative even if at the liberal end of that spectrum. It has refused to consider the central recommendation of the Royal Commission on Long Term Care for the elderly that it set up after the election: that personal care for the elderly should be provided by the state free of charge with only living or 'hotel' costs to be means-tested. Instead, in its new Health and Social Care Bill, New Labour wants to standardise nationally the current lottery of means-tested charging, currently varying between local authorities, and wind down a worthwhile universal basic state pension. In this area, Labour is becoming the party of One Nation conservatism. The Liberal Democrats are assuming the mantle of championing the liberal and centre-Left propositions on collective responsibility. The case for universal provision of free personal care for the elderly was made eloquently by the Royal Commission. 'Long term care,' it reported, 'is a contingency not a probability. Neither its incidence nor the scale of care needed are predictable. It is equitable and proper for the state to meet at least one element of the catastrophic costs for everyone. And the costs in the future in relation to people's likely means will remain catastrophic.' It rejected outright the notion that individuals could take responsibility for the cost of personal care that might follow a catastrophe, because this was not a risk the mainstream insurance industry was prepared to accept. Indeed, standard insurance for personal care in old age is prohibitively expensive. As for the argument about open-ended public expense with an ageing population, the Commission was simply scornful. It dismissed the widespread notion that the country is labouring under a demographic time bomb; Britain's pensioner population is growing, but not greatly in relation to the numbers of people of working age. In any case, the costs of providing long-term care for pensioners and the disabled are not great (800 million to 1,200m), and affordable if we choose. The report was completed before the emergence of a structural budget surplus, which further weakens the argument about unaffordability. The moral and practical imperative, the Commission felt, was to offer personal care free, with individuals still paying for living and housing costs while means-testing protected the poorest. In short, the key conservative arguments - individual responsibility, the relative efficiency of the private sector, the ageing population and the cost to the Exchequer - cut no ice. In this area the balance of the argument was to act collectively. Yet apart from some concessions on lifting the threshold of wealth before the means test applies, the Government has been stoutly opposed to any reform. But now it confronts the move in Scotland, which if it isn't fudged, is a direct challenge to its stance. In my view, the argument extends to the basic old-age pension. The state 'pension promise' has not been solid. But then the private sector-pension 'promise' is a lot less solid than the propaganda assumes, being subject to the vagaries of stock-market performance, annuity rates and, as 900,000 holders of Equitable Life pension plans found out, to pension fund mismanagement. What future pensioners need is neither to be wholly reliant on the state nor on the market, but to have their risks balanced. Just as everyone has the right to free universal personal care, so everyone has the right to a solid universal state pension whose level is automatically linked to the rise in general living standards. We should rely on a combination of our savings, our employers' pension scheme and a good state pension for income in old age - and not try to pretend that the private sector provides a free option. Because it doesn't. The Government may boast about healthy public finances, but if the consequence is to displace risk on to those incapable of accepting it then the boast is hollow. Universal personal care and a universal state pension are hallmarks of a society that understands the limits of individual responsibility. Congratulations to Scotland's Liberal Democrats. Without them the proposition would be dead. And welcome devolution.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
When I was a child, I was perplexed by the story of the emperor with no clothes. It was so obvious that he was naked I couldn't imagine why everybody colluded in the pretence he wasn't, and why any emperor should want to sustain the pretence, anyway. The spell was always broken by somebody artless blurting out the truth, but I never understood why it fell to the artless to say what should have been obvious to all. Last week, I was reminded of my childhood perplexities by another set of impossibilities that seem impervious to the intrusion of reality, the belief in the face of all evidence that the private sector is necessarily and always more efficient than the public sector. This emperor is also stark naked, but the Labour party and senior British officials, along with the reflex instincts of the opinion-forming classes, refuse to acknowledge what is staring them in the face. Nor do you have to be artless to draw attention to the nudity. You just have to read the business pages assiduously. For one of the great postwar financial and industrial scandals is continuing to work itself out before our eyes. Had it happened in the public sector, it would have been proof positive of its endemic hopelessness, but so far it has attracted little outrage. It's a private sector affair, after all. The financial losses, waste and emerging cases of massive fraud in the wake of the telecoms bubble, with almost nothing to show for it in terms of technological innovation or creation of a broadband optic-fibre network, are some of the greatest calamities of industrial policy ever witnessed. The inefficiency exceeds by many multiples the losses in the former nationalised industries, yet this reality has left the conventional wisdom wholly unaffected. The Treasury blithely continues to justify public private partnerships by loading on to the public sector assumptions that it will be hopeless in any economic endeavour, while building in parallel assumptions that the private sector will be super-efficient. Yet the recent evidence is that the equation should be the other way round, certainly in those sectors which, for compelling reasons of public interest or natural economies, have to be performed as monopolies. Last week's news that another former high-flying telecoms company, Energis, is fighting for its life together with the crisis in the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) allow for no other conclusion. The story, hard now to believe, was that the inefficient state should not stand in the way of the efficient private sector's ambitions to exploit the digital revolution. As a result, all the old rules about telephone and cable networks being natural monopolies should be suspended. Lusty entrepreneurial companies would exploit a multiplicity of old and new networks to carry the expected boom in internet traffic. Some would use the electricity network (Energis); some would build new optic-fibre cable networks (NTL and Global Crossing); others would deploy a mixture of mobile phone and existing cable (BT). There was an orgy of roads being dug up at the behest of the companies (local authorities were forbidden to refuse their applications, whatever the consequences of traffic gridlock), but the result would be many high-tech networks offering the consumer choice and access to cheap state-of-the-art technology. Private good; public bad. What we have instead is a monumental dbcle and a discovery that old rules hold. The companies themselves borrowed hugely, promising their backers that their existing traffic would be followed by even more growth. But now it is emerging that some falsified their claims, especially those with US interests; blocks of alleged traffic were swapped to boost their profits, now the subject of a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. There never was enough traffic to justify so much network building and as reality has dawned the companies are left with debt they cannot service. Global Crossing has already gone bust; Energis has been fighting off the same fate; NTL, a byword for high prices and inefficiency, is a 50-50 call; Cable and Wireless is under investigation by the US Sec... and so it goes on. As for the acquisitions and deals made at the height of the boom, most have proved no less disastrous. KPMG Consulting estimates that more than a third of the international deals (most of them in telecoms) are now being unwound, and the chief executives involved have all moved on, doubtless handsomely enriched, as are their investment bankers. Yet the wider community is immeasurably poorer. It is our pension-fund savings that have been ransacked; we end up having to pay high prices for poor cable service and the country, despite billions being spent, is little closer to having a national optic-fibre network than it was five years ago. Put all that into an evaluation of private sector strengths in any proposed public private partnership computation and the public sector would win hands down. Logic dictated that we only ever needed one network. Because this, perforce, would be a monopoly, and because the public interest in it being cheap and universal is so overwhelming, necessarily it had to financed and owned by the state. Access to the network should, of course, be wholly liberalised; cable companies could transmit their programmes through it as could anybody else. It would be a public asset serving a multitude of private interests, but which private interests could not themselves build, anathema to the current conventional wisdom now proved so devastatingly wrong. The same elementary mistake has been made over air traffic control. The partial privatisation of Nats to seven British airlines was hailed last summer as a major breakthrough. Nats under public management was plainly incapable of managing large projects as well as the private sector, so that once under private control it would be able to lower its fees charged to the airlines by 5 per cent a year because of the consequent efficiency savings. But after 11 September, Nats has plunged from projected profits into projected losses as airline traffic has fallen away. Conventional wisdom once again is shown to be wrong. The much vaunted private sector has proved incapable of sustaining Nats' finances to allow it to continue with its investment programme upon which the safe and efficient use of British airspace depends. Neither the airlines nor the banks have put up extra cash; they are not in a position to do so because of the economic downturn. It has fallen to the Government, which alone has injected 30 million of extra cash. But on top, Nats will have to raise prices by 5 per cent a year rather than cut them. Nor is it certain, as we report in the Business Section today, that the Civil Aviation Authority will permit the price rises, in which case the Government will have to step in again. Under public ownership, the management of British airspace was independent from the vagaries of the business cycle; under even partial private ownership, it has been indissolubly linked to it, an act of palpable madness. The safe management of our airspace, like the provision of a single, universal cable network, is a public good that cannot be privatised. Inevitably, the Government has had to intervene to secure the public interest. It is not the private sector's fault that there is a mess; it should never have been asked or allowed to assume these responsibilities in the first place. Whatever operational efficiencies it might offer are overwhelmed by the wider public interest demands of the sector in which it is operating. The ideological belief that the private sector is inevitably better cannot be challenged, for all its nudity. In middle age, I finally understand what the child could not. Collective lunacy does descend on groups of people with no one capable of exposing the charade. The tragedy is that is what is happening to our airspace and our telecommunications companies is no fairy tale. It is for real.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
When I was a child, I was perplexed by the story of the emperor with no clothes. It was so obvious that he was naked I couldn't imagine why everybody colluded in the pretence he wasn't, and why any emperor should want to sustain the pretence, anyway. The spell was always broken by somebody artless blurting out the truth, but I never understood why it fell to the artless to say what should have been obvious to all. Last week, I was reminded of my childhood perplexities by another set of impossibilities that seem impervious to the intrusion of reality, the belief in the face of all evidence that the private sector is necessarily and always more efficient than the public sector. This emperor is also stark naked, but the Labour party and senior British officials, along with the reflex instincts of the opinion-forming classes, refuse to acknowledge what is staring them in the face. Nor do you have to be artless to draw attention to the nudity. You just have to read the business pages assiduously. For one of the great postwar financial and industrial scandals is continuing to work itself out before our eyes. Had it happened in the public sector, it would have been proof positive of its endemic hopelessness, but so far it has attracted little outrage. It's a private sector affair, after all. The financial losses, waste and emerging cases of massive fraud in the wake of the telecoms bubble, with almost nothing to show for it in terms of technological innovation or creation of a broadband optic-fibre network, are some of the greatest calamities of industrial policy ever witnessed. The inefficiency exceeds by many multiples the losses in the former nationalised industries, yet this reality has left the conventional wisdom wholly unaffected. The Treasury blithely continues to justify public private partnerships by loading on to the public sector assumptions that it will be hopeless in any economic endeavour, while building in parallel assumptions that the private sector will be super-efficient. Yet the recent evidence is that the equation should be the other way round, certainly in those sectors which, for compelling reasons of public interest or natural economies, have to be performed as monopolies. Last week's news that another former high-flying telecoms company, Energis, is fighting for its life together with the crisis in the National Air Traffic Services (Nats) allow for no other conclusion. The story, hard now to believe, was that the inefficient state should not stand in the way of the efficient private sector's ambitions to exploit the digital revolution. As a result, all the old rules about telephone and cable networks being natural monopolies should be suspended. Lusty entrepreneurial companies would exploit a multiplicity of old and new networks to carry the expected boom in internet traffic. Some would use the electricity network (Energis); some would build new optic-fibre cable networks (NTL and Global Crossing); others would deploy a mixture of mobile phone and existing cable (BT). There was an orgy of roads being dug up at the behest of the companies (local authorities were forbidden to refuse their applications, whatever the consequences of traffic gridlock), but the result would be many high-tech networks offering the consumer choice and access to cheap state-of-the-art technology. Private good; public bad. What we have instead is a monumental dbcle and a discovery that old rules hold. The companies themselves borrowed hugely, promising their backers that their existing traffic would be followed by even more growth. But now it is emerging that some falsified their claims, especially those with US interests; blocks of alleged traffic were swapped to boost their profits, now the subject of a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. There never was enough traffic to justify so much network building and as reality has dawned the companies are left with debt they cannot service. Global Crossing has already gone bust; Energis has been fighting off the same fate; NTL, a byword for high prices and inefficiency, is a 50-50 call; Cable and Wireless is under investigation by the US Sec... and so it goes on. As for the acquisitions and deals made at the height of the boom, most have proved no less disastrous. KPMG Consulting estimates that more than a third of the international deals (most of them in telecoms) are now being unwound, and the chief executives involved have all moved on, doubtless handsomely enriched, as are their investment bankers. Yet the wider community is immeasurably poorer. It is our pension-fund savings that have been ransacked; we end up having to pay high prices for poor cable service and the country, despite billions being spent, is little closer to having a national optic-fibre network than it was five years ago. Put all that into an evaluation of private sector strengths in any proposed public private partnership computation and the public sector would win hands down. Logic dictated that we only ever needed one network. Because this, perforce, would be a monopoly, and because the public interest in it being cheap and universal is so overwhelming, necessarily it had to financed and owned by the state. Access to the network should, of course, be wholly liberalised; cable companies could transmit their programmes through it as could anybody else. It would be a public asset serving a multitude of private interests, but which private interests could not themselves build, anathema to the current conventional wisdom now proved so devastatingly wrong. The same elementary mistake has been made over air traffic control. The partial privatisation of Nats to seven British airlines was hailed last summer as a major breakthrough. Nats under public management was plainly incapable of managing large projects as well as the private sector, so that once under private control it would be able to lower its fees charged to the airlines by 5 per cent a year because of the consequent efficiency savings. But after 11 September, Nats has plunged from projected profits into projected losses as airline traffic has fallen away. Conventional wisdom once again is shown to be wrong. The much vaunted private sector has proved incapable of sustaining Nats' finances to allow it to continue with its investment programme upon which the safe and efficient use of British airspace depends. Neither the airlines nor the banks have put up extra cash; they are not in a position to do so because of the economic downturn. It has fallen to the Government, which alone has injected 30 million of extra cash. But on top, Nats will have to raise prices by 5 per cent a year rather than cut them. Nor is it certain, as we report in the Business Section today, that the Civil Aviation Authority will permit the price rises, in which case the Government will have to step in again. Under public ownership, the management of British airspace was independent from the vagaries of the business cycle; under even partial private ownership, it has been indissolubly linked to it, an act of palpable madness. The safe management of our airspace, like the provision of a single, universal cable network, is a public good that cannot be privatised. Inevitably, the Government has had to intervene to secure the public interest. It is not the private sector's fault that there is a mess; it should never have been asked or allowed to assume these responsibilities in the first place. Whatever operational efficiencies it might offer are overwhelmed by the wider public interest demands of the sector in which it is operating. The ideological belief that the private sector is inevitably better cannot be challenged, for all its nudity. In middle age, I finally understand what the child could not. Collective lunacy does descend on groups of people with no one capable of exposing the charade. The tragedy is that is what is happening to our airspace and our telecommunications companies is no fairy tale. It is for real.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
If there is one golden thread connecting Old and New Labour, it is the commitment to the National Health Service. There is no member of the Cabinet who does not believe in the Bevanite conception of the NHS - a service providing equality of treatment free to every Briton, regardless of age, race, class, gender or geography. Despite New Labour's temporising elsewhere, we should take it at its word on the NHS. The problem is not the shared goal, it is the means. And here the Government's lack of an overarching philosophy and political coherence is undermining its capacity to achieve the end that it wants. Promises of more spending, shorter waiting-lists and a tougher regime for consultants are all welcome as far as they go, but the problems are much more deep-seated. The NHS is suffering a gathering crisis of legitimacy. Patients and the public at large want a voice and a systematic framework in which they can trust that high quality health care is assured over time. Yet what is on offer is an increasingly politicised service where effective decision-making is still tightly held at the centre and where some of the policies, notably the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as it operates in health, are undermining the equality and evenness of provision that the Government seeks. Three recent events underline the problem; more lie ahead. There is the exercise in public consultation - the so-called health census - to inform the National Plan for Health that has been exposed as little more than a PR stunt. There is the extraordinary fight to prevent the downgrading of Kidderminster General Hospital (part of a larger PFI deal for the nearby Worcester Royal Infirmary), where 19 out of 42 seats on the local district council are held by independent, newly elected councillors who, as members of 'Health Concern', are pledged to fight the plans and are bringing their protest to London next week in a street march. And there is the growing public dismay at medical incompetence, highlighted again by last week's Ritchie Report into Rodney Ledward, the Kent consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician who, over a 16-year career, maimed and harmed any number of women through botched operations. At first glance, these cases might seem unconnected, yet what binds them together is the great accountability gap that sits in the NHS as a brooding cancer. As long as it remains unaddressed, it will expose the contradictions that beset the Government's NHS policies. The unprecedented scale of the consultation exercise being mounted before the publication of the National Plan for Health in July is a tacit recognition of the accountability gap. The country's surgeries and supermarkets have been flooded by 12 million leaflets inviting us to identify the three key things we want from the NHS. These have to be completed and sent back by Monday at the latest, a week from start to finish. However, as Mori's Bob Worcester has said, this is not a serious exercise in finding out what the public wants or the trade-offs it might make between varying claims on NHS resources; that would require intense quantitative and qualitative research. Rather, it is a high-profile exercise in trying to demonstrate that the Government is 'listening', even though it knows the results will be unrepresentative and profoundly compromised by the tight time-scale. But it needs to show that readiness because nothing less will do in today's democratic climate. Automatic deference to authority is steadily weakening. We live in more democratic times, where everybody believes their voice should be heard. Legitimacy, by government, line manager or NHS consultant has to be earned. The Ledward case, together with the palpable weakness of both NHS managers and the General Medical Council alike in dealing with this rogue consultant, is another nail in that coffin. Ledward, like Harold Shipman, may be an exception, but the reality is that the system did not catch either early enough and in today's climate such deficiencies are no longer acceptable. The Ritchie Report assembles an impressive list of reforms, bolstering NHS complaints procedures which should be extended to the private sector and calling for beefed-up powers for the General Medical Council. And the Government has responded by saying either reform is in train or it will be. But as with the census, the larger democratic point is missed. The reason why the health ombudsman is weak, complaints procedures are feeble and regulation is delegated to the medical profession in the shape of the General Medical Council is not some accident - it is because the British doctrine is that accountability lies with the Minister in Parliament and that any other mechanism might challenge that ultimate authority. Thus the ombudsman is kept weak because he or she might challenge the authority of the Minister. There is a linear connection between British constitutional arrangements and Ledward's capacity to practise. This doctrine is not going to be challenged by New Labour. Instead, the party rel ishes the control it confers; the centre can thus control the terms of the health debate while offering a patina of accountability through consultation exercises like the national census or patients' focus groups. This allows polices like the PFI to be protected, which would not otherwise survive the scrutiny of the democratic rough house. Yet Kidderminster gives the lie even to this proposition. To scale down Kidderminster General so that it no longer offers in-patient beds, and diverting patients to Worcester, whose Royal Infirmary is being replaced with a PFI hospital that can only afford three-fifths of the existing acute beds, is outrageous. This is not a plan to improve Worcester's health provision that has been driven by Worcester's health needs, settled by open argument. Rather, it is a top-down scheme imposed upon the county by the exigencies of offering private contractors their appropriate financial returns within impossibly tight public-sector expenditure constraints. Yet the democratic voice cannot be suppressed. Alan Milburn dares not visit Worcester for fear the cameras might catch him with the protesters; next week, the stakes will be higher again as they carry their protest to London. And this is not the Socialist Workers Party; this is middle England in force. The Government really does want to deliver a better NHS. New money, new schemes and renegotiating the deal with consultants are helpful, but they will not crack the problem. To do that it must close the accountability deficit, with all that implies - delegating power, toughening up regulations, offering elections to health boards and accepting that if the PFI changes the fundamental character of the hospital service, then it must be reformed. It means nothing less than a democratic constitution for the health service, the case the commission I chaired recommended six weeks ago. Our case gets stronger by the day.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
If there is one golden thread connecting Old and New Labour, it is the commitment to the National Health Service. There is no member of the Cabinet who does not believe in the Bevanite conception of the NHS - a service providing equality of treatment free to every Briton, regardless of age, race, class, gender or geography. Despite New Labour's temporising elsewhere, we should take it at its word on the NHS. The problem is not the shared goal, it is the means. And here the Government's lack of an overarching philosophy and political coherence is undermining its capacity to achieve the end that it wants. Promises of more spending, shorter waiting-lists and a tougher regime for consultants are all welcome as far as they go, but the problems are much more deep-seated. The NHS is suffering a gathering crisis of legitimacy. Patients and the public at large want a voice and a systematic framework in which they can trust that high quality health care is assured over time. Yet what is on offer is an increasingly politicised service where effective decision-making is still tightly held at the centre and where some of the policies, notably the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) as it operates in health, are undermining the equality and evenness of provision that the Government seeks. Three recent events underline the problem; more lie ahead. There is the exercise in public consultation - the so-called health census - to inform the National Plan for Health that has been exposed as little more than a PR stunt. There is the extraordinary fight to prevent the downgrading of Kidderminster General Hospital (part of a larger PFI deal for the nearby Worcester Royal Infirmary), where 19 out of 42 seats on the local district council are held by independent, newly elected councillors who, as members of 'Health Concern', are pledged to fight the plans and are bringing their protest to London next week in a street march. And there is the growing public dismay at medical incompetence, highlighted again by last week's Ritchie Report into Rodney Ledward, the Kent consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician who, over a 16-year career, maimed and harmed any number of women through botched operations. At first glance, these cases might seem unconnected, yet what binds them together is the great accountability gap that sits in the NHS as a brooding cancer. As long as it remains unaddressed, it will expose the contradictions that beset the Government's NHS policies. The unprecedented scale of the consultation exercise being mounted before the publication of the National Plan for Health in July is a tacit recognition of the accountability gap. The country's surgeries and supermarkets have been flooded by 12 million leaflets inviting us to identify the three key things we want from the NHS. These have to be completed and sent back by Monday at the latest, a week from start to finish. However, as Mori's Bob Worcester has said, this is not a serious exercise in finding out what the public wants or the trade-offs it might make between varying claims on NHS resources; that would require intense quantitative and qualitative research. Rather, it is a high-profile exercise in trying to demonstrate that the Government is 'listening', even though it knows the results will be unrepresentative and profoundly compromised by the tight time-scale. But it needs to show that readiness because nothing less will do in today's democratic climate. Automatic deference to authority is steadily weakening. We live in more democratic times, where everybody believes their voice should be heard. Legitimacy, by government, line manager or NHS consultant has to be earned. The Ledward case, together with the palpable weakness of both NHS managers and the General Medical Council alike in dealing with this rogue consultant, is another nail in that coffin. Ledward, like Harold Shipman, may be an exception, but the reality is that the system did not catch either early enough and in today's climate such deficiencies are no longer acceptable. The Ritchie Report assembles an impressive list of reforms, bolstering NHS complaints procedures which should be extended to the private sector and calling for beefed-up powers for the General Medical Council. And the Government has responded by saying either reform is in train or it will be. But as with the census, the larger democratic point is missed. The reason why the health ombudsman is weak, complaints procedures are feeble and regulation is delegated to the medical profession in the shape of the General Medical Council is not some accident - it is because the British doctrine is that accountability lies with the Minister in Parliament and that any other mechanism might challenge that ultimate authority. Thus the ombudsman is kept weak because he or she might challenge the authority of the Minister. There is a linear connection between British constitutional arrangements and Ledward's capacity to practise. This doctrine is not going to be challenged by New Labour. Instead, the party rel ishes the control it confers; the centre can thus control the terms of the health debate while offering a patina of accountability through consultation exercises like the national census or patients' focus groups. This allows polices like the PFI to be protected, which would not otherwise survive the scrutiny of the democratic rough house. Yet Kidderminster gives the lie even to this proposition. To scale down Kidderminster General so that it no longer offers in-patient beds, and diverting patients to Worcester, whose Royal Infirmary is being replaced with a PFI hospital that can only afford three-fifths of the existing acute beds, is outrageous. This is not a plan to improve Worcester's health provision that has been driven by Worcester's health needs, settled by open argument. Rather, it is a top-down scheme imposed upon the county by the exigencies of offering private contractors their appropriate financial returns within impossibly tight public-sector expenditure constraints. Yet the democratic voice cannot be suppressed. Alan Milburn dares not visit Worcester for fear the cameras might catch him with the protesters; next week, the stakes will be higher again as they carry their protest to London. And this is not the Socialist Workers Party; this is middle England in force. The Government really does want to deliver a better NHS. New money, new schemes and renegotiating the deal with consultants are helpful, but they will not crack the problem. To do that it must close the accountability deficit, with all that implies - delegating power, toughening up regulations, offering elections to health boards and accepting that if the PFI changes the fundamental character of the hospital service, then it must be reformed. It means nothing less than a democratic constitution for the health service, the case the commission I chaired recommended six weeks ago. Our case gets stronger by the day.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
It is a telling comment on our times that it was a very rich American that gave the very rich British a lesson in philanthropy. The super-rich have done well from the Eighties and Nineties but they have not reciprocated in kind in Britain. As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civic engagement and philanthropy by the rich. If anything, the opposite is true. Sir Paul Getty's life was a tribute to the futility of regarding personal wealth as an end in itself. Riches literally killed him - his death at 70 last Thursday was largely the result of having broken his health in the 1960s and 1970s by using heroin and cocaine without limit because he could and because he needed to. When your living needs are met many times over for the rest of your life without your having to lift a finger, then any sentient body starts to ponder what it is all about. And, after 20 years of answering the question by being out of his head, Sir Paul in the later stages of his life came up with a different answer. It was to give. He described himself as a professional philanthropist, and last week's obituaries lavishly named him as probably Britain's greatest of the breed. Whether it was the 50 million to the National Gallery or his last gift to St Paul's Cathedral, the list of his beneficiaries is impressive. Over 20 years he gave away some 120m. But in the context of a fortune worth an estimated 1.6 billion and an annual income of around 80m, he probably gave away no more, on average, than 10 per cent of his income every year. That's 10 per cent more than many other very rich people, and enough to make an enormous difference to the institutions who received it - but it was a level of giving that made only the slightest dent on his fortune. His philanthropy gave him a sense of purpose without seriously damaging his wealth, and it oiled the wheels of a lot of worthy causes and left the country culturally the better. We should expect all our rich to behave the same. That Sir Paul was so unusual is an indictment of both the way in which the rich define themselves in relation to society and of our diminished expectation of what that relationship should be. Sir Paul should be the norm, not the fted exception. But Sir Paul also gives a clue as to why this should be. He was an American who loved England, and carried the best American attitudes to giving to his adopted country. The American rich expect to be celebrated as being rich - it's a sign of industriousness, hard work and guile - but equally they expect to give some of their wealth away as part of the bargain with the society of which they are part. In Britain, the rich want to be able to enjoy their wealth with the same lack of guilt and even approbation - but they have no intention of putting anything back except under duress. Charitable giving runs at half the rate it does in the US, and is sustained by ordinary people in their millions; the British rich are scarcely in evidence. What has happened is that simultaneously with the collapse of religion has come the refusal of the rich to champion liberal and social democratic values. The result has been that we end up with the worst of both worlds. Christianity has very specific claims to make of the rich. God gave the world to all humanity, and every human being is equal in his eyes; Christ died to save everyone - the heart of the Easter message - and we can all expect to find life after death provided we try (even if we fail) to live up to Christian precepts. The rich are not a race apart. They must live by the same Christian values as all of us, including charity to their fellow men and women. This Christian egalitarianism was the hallmark of the early Church. The wealthy were expected to contribute more to the common good and they did - the idea of noblesse oblige which underpinned feudalism. It is an egalitarianism and commitment to fairness which surfaces again and again - in the medieval idea of the just wage or successive Papal encyclicals. After the English Civil War the Leveller movement famously invoked biblical texts to justify universal suffrage and redistribution of income - demands for which they were crushed by Cromwell. Yet when the English puritan tradition migrated to America and made exactly the same demands, the founding fathers responded with the American constitution and, as John Adams said, the promise of enough land in the New World for all without having to redistribute from rich to poor. The rich instead would give back of their own volition in a universe in which everybody was held to have a chance of being similarly rich - the American social bargain that excuses gross inequality even today. It took the rise of socialism to drive home a social bargain in Britain, but the rich never accepted its legitimacy. They resented progressive taxation of income and wealth to finance their contribution to the commonweal as an illegitimate confiscation of what their families owned by right. Yet for the majority in the country it was the long overdue assertion of what should always have been their obligation, and thus made what the rich kept for themselves - still substantial - legitimate. One-nation Tories insisted on the same basic bargain, while the rich smouldered in revolt fathering elaborate tax avoidance and evasion industries. Socialism was its own worst enemy; it preferred to characterise progressive taxation as a half-way house to full socialism rather than the new social bargain that it really was, thus fatally undermining the principle. A social bargain was defensible while a levelled-down society was not and Britain's rich have fought off all claims on their purse with righteous indignation. The substitution of the Labour party's Clause 4 with another that does not argue for the explicit public interest of a social bargain represented their most complete victory. So we arrive at today; executives clamouring for American levels of remuneration but not accepting either an American approach to giving or a European approach to taxation and with no live values based political coalition to fight back. Sir Paul loved England and its civilities - the ritual of a cricket match or the beauty of its long tended countryside. Yet what lies behind that has been a bitterly fought-for social bargain sustained by three traditions now in decline - Christianity, one-nation Toryism and socialism. It would be comforting to hope that we might produce some British philanthropists with Sir Paul's readiness to give, but until our society can find a legitimate way of talking the language of social bargains there is little chance. The country that Sir Paul loved is in peril.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
It is a telling comment on our times that it was a very rich American that gave the very rich British a lesson in philanthropy. The super-rich have done well from the Eighties and Nineties but they have not reciprocated in kind in Britain. As inequality of wealth balloons back to nineteenth-century levels there is no sign of nineteenth-century levels of civic engagement and philanthropy by the rich. If anything, the opposite is true. Sir Paul Getty's life was a tribute to the futility of regarding personal wealth as an end in itself. Riches literally killed him - his death at 70 last Thursday was largely the result of having broken his health in the 1960s and 1970s by using heroin and cocaine without limit because he could and because he needed to. When your living needs are met many times over for the rest of your life without your having to lift a finger, then any sentient body starts to ponder what it is all about. And, after 20 years of answering the question by being out of his head, Sir Paul in the later stages of his life came up with a different answer. It was to give. He described himself as a professional philanthropist, and last week's obituaries lavishly named him as probably Britain's greatest of the breed. Whether it was the 50 million to the National Gallery or his last gift to St Paul's Cathedral, the list of his beneficiaries is impressive. Over 20 years he gave away some 120m. But in the context of a fortune worth an estimated 1.6 billion and an annual income of around 80m, he probably gave away no more, on average, than 10 per cent of his income every year. That's 10 per cent more than many other very rich people, and enough to make an enormous difference to the institutions who received it - but it was a level of giving that made only the slightest dent on his fortune. His philanthropy gave him a sense of purpose without seriously damaging his wealth, and it oiled the wheels of a lot of worthy causes and left the country culturally the better. We should expect all our rich to behave the same. That Sir Paul was so unusual is an indictment of both the way in which the rich define themselves in relation to society and of our diminished expectation of what that relationship should be. Sir Paul should be the norm, not the fted exception. But Sir Paul also gives a clue as to why this should be. He was an American who loved England, and carried the best American attitudes to giving to his adopted country. The American rich expect to be celebrated as being rich - it's a sign of industriousness, hard work and guile - but equally they expect to give some of their wealth away as part of the bargain with the society of which they are part. In Britain, the rich want to be able to enjoy their wealth with the same lack of guilt and even approbation - but they have no intention of putting anything back except under duress. Charitable giving runs at half the rate it does in the US, and is sustained by ordinary people in their millions; the British rich are scarcely in evidence. What has happened is that simultaneously with the collapse of religion has come the refusal of the rich to champion liberal and social democratic values. The result has been that we end up with the worst of both worlds. Christianity has very specific claims to make of the rich. God gave the world to all humanity, and every human being is equal in his eyes; Christ died to save everyone - the heart of the Easter message - and we can all expect to find life after death provided we try (even if we fail) to live up to Christian precepts. The rich are not a race apart. They must live by the same Christian values as all of us, including charity to their fellow men and women. This Christian egalitarianism was the hallmark of the early Church. The wealthy were expected to contribute more to the common good and they did - the idea of noblesse oblige which underpinned feudalism. It is an egalitarianism and commitment to fairness which surfaces again and again - in the medieval idea of the just wage or successive Papal encyclicals. After the English Civil War the Leveller movement famously invoked biblical texts to justify universal suffrage and redistribution of income - demands for which they were crushed by Cromwell. Yet when the English puritan tradition migrated to America and made exactly the same demands, the founding fathers responded with the American constitution and, as John Adams said, the promise of enough land in the New World for all without having to redistribute from rich to poor. The rich instead would give back of their own volition in a universe in which everybody was held to have a chance of being similarly rich - the American social bargain that excuses gross inequality even today. It took the rise of socialism to drive home a social bargain in Britain, but the rich never accepted its legitimacy. They resented progressive taxation of income and wealth to finance their contribution to the commonweal as an illegitimate confiscation of what their families owned by right. Yet for the majority in the country it was the long overdue assertion of what should always have been their obligation, and thus made what the rich kept for themselves - still substantial - legitimate. One-nation Tories insisted on the same basic bargain, while the rich smouldered in revolt fathering elaborate tax avoidance and evasion industries. Socialism was its own worst enemy; it preferred to characterise progressive taxation as a half-way house to full socialism rather than the new social bargain that it really was, thus fatally undermining the principle. A social bargain was defensible while a levelled-down society was not and Britain's rich have fought off all claims on their purse with righteous indignation. The substitution of the Labour party's Clause 4 with another that does not argue for the explicit public interest of a social bargain represented their most complete victory. So we arrive at today; executives clamouring for American levels of remuneration but not accepting either an American approach to giving or a European approach to taxation and with no live values based political coalition to fight back. Sir Paul loved England and its civilities - the ritual of a cricket match or the beauty of its long tended countryside. Yet what lies behind that has been a bitterly fought-for social bargain sustained by three traditions now in decline - Christianity, one-nation Toryism and socialism. It would be comforting to hope that we might produce some British philanthropists with Sir Paul's readiness to give, but until our society can find a legitimate way of talking the language of social bargains there is little chance. The country that Sir Paul loved is in peril.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
The NHS is under-resourced. Every user knows it. Its staff know it. The political establishment accepts it. The Prime Minister has admitted as much. Britain has fewer doctors and hospital beds per head than almost any other country in Europe. More needs to be spent, so when Blair committed himself last week to raising health expenditure to the European average by the end of the next parliament there should have been a national sense of relief. Instead it was an occasion for hand-wringing, Prime Ministerial wobble and general disbelief. It couldn't be done, it was said. There isn't and there won't be enough money. Blair was dodging difficult choices about which taxes to raise. The Conservatives insisted that the only means to this end was to allow the private sector to lead the charge, urging the reintroduction of tax relief for private health insurance. And then Number 10 seemed to get windy, briefing on Monday that it was only an aspiration - and conditional in any case on the economy doing well. But for once beleaguered liberal Britain should not look a gift horse in the mouth; this is an occasion for a cheer. The Prime Minister, despite his partial retreat, has set an important benchmark for the desirable growth of NHS spending, and by implication other key programmes such as education and transport. He has also put down a marker that the extraordinarily large Treasury surpluses projected in the years ahead will be spent on improving public services and not given away in tax cuts. And he has put the Tories on the spot; they have to match his commitment or demonstrate that private health insurance can achieve the same result - a demonstration that is beyond them. In the new politics of how to spend the budget surpluses, Blair - panicked perhaps by the hysterical reaction to the comparatively small rise in flu cases and media overkill - has set the political agenda. It is an important moment. The scale of the implied increase in NHS spending is vast. The 50 billion (in round numbers) spent on the NHS in Britain at the moment is 5.7 per cent of GDP; another 9bn - or 1 per cent of GDP - is spent on health privately. The crude European average is 8 per cent of GDP, but that is simply arrived at by adding up each country's average and dividing it by the total, so that Luxembourg's spending has the same importance as Germany's. If you weight the calculation by size of country, the real average of European health spending, according to the King's Fund, is 8.6 per cent of GDP. Because the Blair Government does not plan to expand the private health sector, it will have to pay to close the gap of 1.9 per cent of GDP itself - 17bn at today's prices. If it wants to do that over the next six years, health spending will have to rise by just under 8 per cent a year in real terms to 2006; if spending grows at only 5 per cent annum in real terms - the figure the Prime Minister cited - then it will take a full 12 years to reach the true European average. And if the Europeans further increase spending, then it will take longer still. It takes time to redress a generation of neglect. Can 8 per cent growth in NHS spending until 2006 be achieved without raising taxes? The straight answer is yes, even though it would push Gordon Brown's demanding framework for spending and borrowing to the limit. But spending in every other department could only grow in line with the growth of GDP, the reason for Cabinet restiveness last week. If this is a surprise, it is because almost nobody seems to have come to terms with the transformation in public finances under New Labour. The combination of Brown's 'stealth' taxes, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of GDP, sticking to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years of this parliament, economic growth of close to 2 per cent instead of recession in 1999, the fall in unemployment and continuing low inflation has been stunning. The current budget surplus last year was 7bn; it will more than double by 2003. Indeed if the long run economic growth rate is the 2.5 per cent now assumed by the Treasury, then as the TUC calculated in its submission to the Treasury's Spending Review last week, public spending could be raised another 12bn by 2004 and, on my calculations, to the necessary 17bn for the NHS by 2006 - and still leave the 7bn safety margin Brown had last year. If growth turns out lower, then the NHS budget can be protected by running down the safety margin; and in an economic downturn borrowing is allowed even under Brown's rules. A European class health service is ours for the having - and without raising taxes. The Conservative proposition that the alternative can be achieved through private insurance is for the birds and, while New Labour retreats and tem porises in so many areas of policy, it is good to see some iron in its soul over private medical insurance. It is expensive, focused on those who are good medical risks, and rarely extends to the over-75s who are most in need. Worse, even if it worked in building up the private sector, it would have the perverse result of driving up the NHS's cost as private contractors bid up wages to attract the limited number of trained staff. But the proof is in the pudding. Tax relief on medical insurance for the over-60s was introduced in 1990; but by 1997, when Labour abolished it, only 1 per cent more of the over-60s had taken advantage of the tax break. Moreover as the human genome project is completed, we will soon know each individual's DNA structure and predicted health experience; in this emerging world private insurance is madness, because those known to be poor risks will simply not be able to insure themselves at a reasonable premium. Poor Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, is stuck with a ludicrous, provenly unworkable policy that is out of kilter with the times - the mirror image of Labour's 1983 far-fetched commitment to extend nationalisation to promote economic efficiency. The only way to fund the NHS is through general taxation or comprehensive social insurance; the hypothecated health tax is another blind alley. If all NHS spending is dependent on a stand-alone or hypothecated tax, then its revenues will go up and down with the economic cycle; if only part is hypothecated, then by the second or third year it becomes impossible to disentangle what is new and what is old money. On the NHS New Labour is making a stand. What it needs to do next is to drop building privately financed hospitals with fewer beds, genuinely end the internal market and redress the system's disgraceful lack accountability - and we really could start cheering.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
The NHS is under-resourced. Every user knows it. Its staff know it. The political establishment accepts it. The Prime Minister has admitted as much. Britain has fewer doctors and hospital beds per head than almost any other country in Europe. More needs to be spent, so when Blair committed himself last week to raising health expenditure to the European average by the end of the next parliament there should have been a national sense of relief. Instead it was an occasion for hand-wringing, Prime Ministerial wobble and general disbelief. It couldn't be done, it was said. There isn't and there won't be enough money. Blair was dodging difficult choices about which taxes to raise. The Conservatives insisted that the only means to this end was to allow the private sector to lead the charge, urging the reintroduction of tax relief for private health insurance. And then Number 10 seemed to get windy, briefing on Monday that it was only an aspiration - and conditional in any case on the economy doing well. But for once beleaguered liberal Britain should not look a gift horse in the mouth; this is an occasion for a cheer. The Prime Minister, despite his partial retreat, has set an important benchmark for the desirable growth of NHS spending, and by implication other key programmes such as education and transport. He has also put down a marker that the extraordinarily large Treasury surpluses projected in the years ahead will be spent on improving public services and not given away in tax cuts. And he has put the Tories on the spot; they have to match his commitment or demonstrate that private health insurance can achieve the same result - a demonstration that is beyond them. In the new politics of how to spend the budget surpluses, Blair - panicked perhaps by the hysterical reaction to the comparatively small rise in flu cases and media overkill - has set the political agenda. It is an important moment. The scale of the implied increase in NHS spending is vast. The 50 billion (in round numbers) spent on the NHS in Britain at the moment is 5.7 per cent of GDP; another 9bn - or 1 per cent of GDP - is spent on health privately. The crude European average is 8 per cent of GDP, but that is simply arrived at by adding up each country's average and dividing it by the total, so that Luxembourg's spending has the same importance as Germany's. If you weight the calculation by size of country, the real average of European health spending, according to the King's Fund, is 8.6 per cent of GDP. Because the Blair Government does not plan to expand the private health sector, it will have to pay to close the gap of 1.9 per cent of GDP itself - 17bn at today's prices. If it wants to do that over the next six years, health spending will have to rise by just under 8 per cent a year in real terms to 2006; if spending grows at only 5 per cent annum in real terms - the figure the Prime Minister cited - then it will take a full 12 years to reach the true European average. And if the Europeans further increase spending, then it will take longer still. It takes time to redress a generation of neglect. Can 8 per cent growth in NHS spending until 2006 be achieved without raising taxes? The straight answer is yes, even though it would push Gordon Brown's demanding framework for spending and borrowing to the limit. But spending in every other department could only grow in line with the growth of GDP, the reason for Cabinet restiveness last week. If this is a surprise, it is because almost nobody seems to have come to terms with the transformation in public finances under New Labour. The combination of Brown's 'stealth' taxes, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of GDP, sticking to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years of this parliament, economic growth of close to 2 per cent instead of recession in 1999, the fall in unemployment and continuing low inflation has been stunning. The current budget surplus last year was 7bn; it will more than double by 2003. Indeed if the long run economic growth rate is the 2.5 per cent now assumed by the Treasury, then as the TUC calculated in its submission to the Treasury's Spending Review last week, public spending could be raised another 12bn by 2004 and, on my calculations, to the necessary 17bn for the NHS by 2006 - and still leave the 7bn safety margin Brown had last year. If growth turns out lower, then the NHS budget can be protected by running down the safety margin; and in an economic downturn borrowing is allowed even under Brown's rules. A European class health service is ours for the having - and without raising taxes. The Conservative proposition that the alternative can be achieved through private insurance is for the birds and, while New Labour retreats and tem porises in so many areas of policy, it is good to see some iron in its soul over private medical insurance. It is expensive, focused on those who are good medical risks, and rarely extends to the over-75s who are most in need. Worse, even if it worked in building up the private sector, it would have the perverse result of driving up the NHS's cost as private contractors bid up wages to attract the limited number of trained staff. But the proof is in the pudding. Tax relief on medical insurance for the over-60s was introduced in 1990; but by 1997, when Labour abolished it, only 1 per cent more of the over-60s had taken advantage of the tax break. Moreover as the human genome project is completed, we will soon know each individual's DNA structure and predicted health experience; in this emerging world private insurance is madness, because those known to be poor risks will simply not be able to insure themselves at a reasonable premium. Poor Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, is stuck with a ludicrous, provenly unworkable policy that is out of kilter with the times - the mirror image of Labour's 1983 far-fetched commitment to extend nationalisation to promote economic efficiency. The only way to fund the NHS is through general taxation or comprehensive social insurance; the hypothecated health tax is another blind alley. If all NHS spending is dependent on a stand-alone or hypothecated tax, then its revenues will go up and down with the economic cycle; if only part is hypothecated, then by the second or third year it becomes impossible to disentangle what is new and what is old money. On the NHS New Labour is making a stand. What it needs to do next is to drop building privately financed hospitals with fewer beds, genuinely end the internal market and redress the system's disgraceful lack accountability - and we really could start cheering.
|
11willhutton
| 1Society
|
Nothing more betrays the hollowness of New Labour's claim to be 'new' than its attitude towards reforming the state and its equivocation about democracy and the sanctity of the public realm. It just doesn't get it. Beyond a group of disillusioned intellectuals, it thinks, nobody cares about voting, accountability or the shape of the constitution. The national belly-laugh at the House of Lords' Appointments Commission's announcement of 15 new peers should begin to disabuse it. The patronising view that ordinary people have no interest in the hows and whys of their constitution has been punctured. These aren't people's peers; they are from exactly the same pool of great and good who have been occupying the red benches as life peers for the past 40 years. It wasn't meant to be like this. The commission is independent. It canvassed the country for applications. It has five criteria for selection for a peerage - independence, commitment to high standards in public life, a record of achievement, capacity to contribute to debates and the spare time to attend them - that seem reasonable. The peers to be produced by this rational process would be obviously superior either to the old hereditaries or party hacks. But the ill-judged aside of Lord Stevenson, chairman of the commission, that 'the human being should feel comfortable in the House of Lords', gave the game away. What is at issue, as Tom Paine, writing 200 years ago, saw more clearly than any other critic of the British constitution, is a structure and culture in which our governors still function as a class above the governed. As Paine put it, the invading Normans constructed a constitution that allowed the new French-speaking barons to deliberate and then do what they wanted to the subject English. That was the way the system essentially operated in 1800. Universal suffrage and the veneer of modern democracy have been bolted on to the same structures, so that much of what Paine inveighed against is still alive. For excellence and career achievement, along with feeling at home on the red benches, are utterly inadequate criteria for becoming a national legislator. I'm sure that Sir John Browne, chief executive of BP, or Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, will make wise and considered interventions in those debates where their expertise will be welcome. But the Lords could have availed itself of their wisdom without making them full-time legislators. It could easily and simply have asked them to become full-time members of its select committees or to give evidence on legislation. But the solution that has been adopted means that because the newly appointed peers have a track record of achievement in one area, they have the right of voting and speaking in all areas - from asylum-seekers to fox-hunting - despite the fact they are accountable to nobody for how they vote. This is an impossible principle to defend. Arguments that elections might be dangerous because turnout could be low, that the intake might be unpredictable, that the Lords will gain a legitimacy to rival the Commons and that party point-scoring will replace the considered tone of the Lords are spurious. They are dangers that have to be guarded against, but they cannot obstruct the basic position. In a democracy, legislators must be accountable to the people. Indeed, the proposition is even larger than that, a point well understood by Paine and his contemporaries in enlightenment Europe, who were delightedly shrugging off centuries of rule by monarch and church. Any community needs a functioning and efficient public realm where argument can be freely made, political support marshalled and those who make decisions can be held to account by those for whom they are made. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitution builders in Europe and the US did no more than try to construct a political architecture that could permit the expression of an accountable public realm, in which democracy and citizenship were key components. Britain has never tried self-consciously to build a constitution that entrenched and succoured the public interest. The political class has always taken the view that the constitution, designed by the Normans and amended by successive generations, is pretty much unimprovable. But the consequences of this failure are all around. We may not care much that we have the fewest elected officials per thousand of population of most democracies, but more worrying is our lack of commitment to the principle of voting and, beyond that, to an idea of a public sphere. Our spatchcock constitutional arrangements suffuse our public culture, and that culture itself is compromised by our lack of faith in a conception of 'publicness'. So it is that 3,166 people filled in the form to become a peer, thinking that nothing could be more normal than becoming a legislator via a university-type admissions system. So it is that we do not have the constitutional template properly to entrench the independence of a public corporation like the BBC. In our constitutional system, the public realm is the Crown in Parliament which controls all it surveys; there can be no true independence for anything within its embrace. So it is that the Government has constructed Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships without ever, until being challenged by Ken Livingstone, thinking carefully what the constitution of such arrangements might be that would entrench and safeguard the public interest. And even the concession that a PPP might have public-interest 'partnership' directors has been squeezed grudgingly from a disinterested Government. And so it is that even the principle of universal taxation has just been breached, with the Government conceding that business can choose what tax it pays instead of local authorities having the right to charge a supplementary business rate. We are back to pre-Civil War England. The hope was that when New Labour took office and launched its constitutional reform programme that it understood this was the means to the greater end, renewing and so reclaiming Britain's battered public realm. We were wrong. New Labour had no such ambition. But as the laughter over people's peers reverberates, maybe it will learn. If it wants fewer such cock-ups, it should understand the spirit of the times.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Will Hutton on the topic of Society.
|
Nothing more betrays the hollowness of New Labour's claim to be 'new' than its attitude towards reforming the state and its equivocation about democracy and the sanctity of the public realm. It just doesn't get it. Beyond a group of disillusioned intellectuals, it thinks, nobody cares about voting, accountability or the shape of the constitution. The national belly-laugh at the House of Lords' Appointments Commission's announcement of 15 new peers should begin to disabuse it. The patronising view that ordinary people have no interest in the hows and whys of their constitution has been punctured. These aren't people's peers; they are from exactly the same pool of great and good who have been occupying the red benches as life peers for the past 40 years. It wasn't meant to be like this. The commission is independent. It canvassed the country for applications. It has five criteria for selection for a peerage - independence, commitment to high standards in public life, a record of achievement, capacity to contribute to debates and the spare time to attend them - that seem reasonable. The peers to be produced by this rational process would be obviously superior either to the old hereditaries or party hacks. But the ill-judged aside of Lord Stevenson, chairman of the commission, that 'the human being should feel comfortable in the House of Lords', gave the game away. What is at issue, as Tom Paine, writing 200 years ago, saw more clearly than any other critic of the British constitution, is a structure and culture in which our governors still function as a class above the governed. As Paine put it, the invading Normans constructed a constitution that allowed the new French-speaking barons to deliberate and then do what they wanted to the subject English. That was the way the system essentially operated in 1800. Universal suffrage and the veneer of modern democracy have been bolted on to the same structures, so that much of what Paine inveighed against is still alive. For excellence and career achievement, along with feeling at home on the red benches, are utterly inadequate criteria for becoming a national legislator. I'm sure that Sir John Browne, chief executive of BP, or Professor Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, will make wise and considered interventions in those debates where their expertise will be welcome. But the Lords could have availed itself of their wisdom without making them full-time legislators. It could easily and simply have asked them to become full-time members of its select committees or to give evidence on legislation. But the solution that has been adopted means that because the newly appointed peers have a track record of achievement in one area, they have the right of voting and speaking in all areas - from asylum-seekers to fox-hunting - despite the fact they are accountable to nobody for how they vote. This is an impossible principle to defend. Arguments that elections might be dangerous because turnout could be low, that the intake might be unpredictable, that the Lords will gain a legitimacy to rival the Commons and that party point-scoring will replace the considered tone of the Lords are spurious. They are dangers that have to be guarded against, but they cannot obstruct the basic position. In a democracy, legislators must be accountable to the people. Indeed, the proposition is even larger than that, a point well understood by Paine and his contemporaries in enlightenment Europe, who were delightedly shrugging off centuries of rule by monarch and church. Any community needs a functioning and efficient public realm where argument can be freely made, political support marshalled and those who make decisions can be held to account by those for whom they are made. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constitution builders in Europe and the US did no more than try to construct a political architecture that could permit the expression of an accountable public realm, in which democracy and citizenship were key components. Britain has never tried self-consciously to build a constitution that entrenched and succoured the public interest. The political class has always taken the view that the constitution, designed by the Normans and amended by successive generations, is pretty much unimprovable. But the consequences of this failure are all around. We may not care much that we have the fewest elected officials per thousand of population of most democracies, but more worrying is our lack of commitment to the principle of voting and, beyond that, to an idea of a public sphere. Our spatchcock constitutional arrangements suffuse our public culture, and that culture itself is compromised by our lack of faith in a conception of 'publicness'. So it is that 3,166 people filled in the form to become a peer, thinking that nothing could be more normal than becoming a legislator via a university-type admissions system. So it is that we do not have the constitutional template properly to entrench the independence of a public corporation like the BBC. In our constitutional system, the public realm is the Crown in Parliament which controls all it surveys; there can be no true independence for anything within its embrace. So it is that the Government has constructed Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships without ever, until being challenged by Ken Livingstone, thinking carefully what the constitution of such arrangements might be that would entrench and safeguard the public interest. And even the concession that a PPP might have public-interest 'partnership' directors has been squeezed grudgingly from a disinterested Government. And so it is that even the principle of universal taxation has just been breached, with the Government conceding that business can choose what tax it pays instead of local authorities having the right to charge a supplementary business rate. We are back to pre-Civil War England. The hope was that when New Labour took office and launched its constitutional reform programme that it understood this was the means to the greater end, renewing and so reclaiming Britain's battered public realm. We were wrong. New Labour had no such ambition. But as the laughter over people's peers reverberates, maybe it will learn. If it wants fewer such cock-ups, it should understand the spirit of the times.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
New Year and the flying prime minister falls back to earth in Westminster. Now in the cold grey light of dismal January, Labour's second term begins in earnest. A tottering in-tray awaits, with transport at the top, the NHS just beneath and a score of pressing questions awaiting answers. As he examines the pile of paper, where is his route map through it all? What is his guiding principle? The old answer, what works, does not take him far when high profile bits of it are patently not working well. As the fog starts to clear, however, some new governing principles emerge, at the instigation and certainly with the approval of the prime minister himself. Rumblings of change are in the air. To left-of-centre critics Tony Blair used to say, tapping the side of his nose, "Wait for the second term. Mrs Thatcher didn't discover Thatcherism until well into hers." But disappointingly, the first months after a lack-lustre election ambled along in directionless confusion, saved only by September 11. It is since then that there have been startling changes of direction. Somewhere on his desk Tony Blair will come across Where Now for New Labour? by Anthony Giddens (published this week by the Fabians, the Policy Network and Polity Press). He will find it interesting reading, not because it gives him the answer to the question it poses. Quite the contrary. Inadvertently, it shows how far the government has already travelled since 1997. Five years is a very long time in politics. The world has moved on since the heyday of the third way, but its progenitor, Professor Giddens, is now urging Blair to slam on the brakes. Giddens was a founding father of New Labour: his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right shaped the third way path to victory. Drawing on Clinton's triumphant rebranding of the Democrats, he erected Tony Blair's big tent, stealing the Conservatives' prime turf. The third way was a beacon for left-of-centre parties around Europe. All had similar baggage to shed - heavy-handed statism, trade union producer interests and inflexibility in the face of new problems. The third way was a magic carpet for transporting the left into power: not tax and spend, not soft on crime, not hostile to business. It buried old ghosts and Giddens deserves much of the credit. It generated wide support, but its neutral message never struck deep roots. Now Giddens is warning against any departure from those original winning mantras - most of all on tax and spend. He attacks Gordon Brown's plans to raise tax to pay for public services. Denouncing "the myth of taxation", he describes how more money flows into the Treasury through the fruits of high employment and economic success than through raising tax rates. Raising rates to 50% for those earning over 100,000 would only bring in 3bn (actually a considerable sum). He points out that the top 1% of earners already contribute 20% of all income tax - an interesting fact. But stop and contemplate what it really reveals: the rich are not taxed through the nose, but they earn staggering sums of money compared to the rest. This thought, though, is illegitimate in third way thinking. Third wayers are never jealous of success. Third wayers believe in equality of opportunity: redistribution is only to pull the very poorest over the poverty threshold. Giddens's vision of a successful economy relies on large numbers in minimum wage jobs. Britain's employment record is better than most of Europe because of easy access to flexible, low-paid work. He does say that there needs to be more in-work training to help these people up ladders (currently few ever climb out of marginal work). True, people are better off in work but while a third of people, in and out of work, live beneath what most people regard as a decent standard of living, that does require any social democrat to consider the depth of British inequality. Somewhere at the heart of the third way was a fundamental unwillingness to face this unpalatable fact. While Giddens rightly attacks the old left for its mindless refusal to give the government credit for anything, he is himself too dismissive of other European countries' social polices that deliver fairer societies. Third way orthodoxy does not address an electorate now less tax-phobic than angry about public services. But Giddens sees the voter as an immutable beast: everything "must fall within the bounds of what is electorally feasible" as if leaders never shift the political climate. Yet those who voted for Thatcherism in election after election are not the same people who voted Blair back last year: people change, reacting to past errors, pursuing new goals. When Mrs Thatcher in her first budget cut top rates of income tax by a swingeing 38%, she knew the power of political symbolism. Sending out strong signals and sweeping the people along in her train, she changed the national mood in ways third wayers never dared try. That is why the third way is history. The government is daring to try. Third way bounds are everywhere being burst at last as Labour begins to believe in the reality of its own power. The tax taboo is broken, cannabis decriminalised, student fees rethought, gross fat cat salaries at least a little checked by shareholder votes, art galleries and museums free, Railtrack turned into a non-profit company, asylum seekers vouchers rescinded. None of these is an act of outrageous radicalism but all were once so unthinkable that any minister whispering the words was forced to humiliating public apology. The ice is cracking and in the thaw ministers are starting to think for themselves. Those who do so most, like Charles Clarke, are emerging as the winners over clones still mouthing dead mantras. Originality pays because ministers need to think aloud about serious problems. What is the emerging story? Good government was what New Labour promised, non-ideological, technocratic, what works. That is developing now into something more coherent: government is good. To make the case for higher taxes and better services, that key idea needs to lead the way. The market delivers prosperity best, the voluntary sector can refresh and inspire around the margins, but in the end the goods that only government can deliver are what everyone wants now. Well-managed and efficient, always room for improvement, public service is indispensable and precious. These are still only the green shoots of an ideology that profoundly divides right from left - but once it was a third way taboo. So as the PM ploughs through his in-tray he has an emerging progressive idea for the next decisions he must take. The third way was Bill Clinton's emblem - an election winner that left a tragically empty legacy: there is no "Clintonism". Blairism already deserves a place in the dictionary for his global vision: now he has to establish its meaning at home.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
New Year and the flying prime minister falls back to earth in Westminster. Now in the cold grey light of dismal January, Labour's second term begins in earnest. A tottering in-tray awaits, with transport at the top, the NHS just beneath and a score of pressing questions awaiting answers. As he examines the pile of paper, where is his route map through it all? What is his guiding principle? The old answer, what works, does not take him far when high profile bits of it are patently not working well. As the fog starts to clear, however, some new governing principles emerge, at the instigation and certainly with the approval of the prime minister himself. Rumblings of change are in the air. To left-of-centre critics Tony Blair used to say, tapping the side of his nose, "Wait for the second term. Mrs Thatcher didn't discover Thatcherism until well into hers." But disappointingly, the first months after a lack-lustre election ambled along in directionless confusion, saved only by September 11. It is since then that there have been startling changes of direction. Somewhere on his desk Tony Blair will come across Where Now for New Labour? by Anthony Giddens (published this week by the Fabians, the Policy Network and Polity Press). He will find it interesting reading, not because it gives him the answer to the question it poses. Quite the contrary. Inadvertently, it shows how far the government has already travelled since 1997. Five years is a very long time in politics. The world has moved on since the heyday of the third way, but its progenitor, Professor Giddens, is now urging Blair to slam on the brakes. Giddens was a founding father of New Labour: his 1994 book Beyond Left and Right shaped the third way path to victory. Drawing on Clinton's triumphant rebranding of the Democrats, he erected Tony Blair's big tent, stealing the Conservatives' prime turf. The third way was a beacon for left-of-centre parties around Europe. All had similar baggage to shed - heavy-handed statism, trade union producer interests and inflexibility in the face of new problems. The third way was a magic carpet for transporting the left into power: not tax and spend, not soft on crime, not hostile to business. It buried old ghosts and Giddens deserves much of the credit. It generated wide support, but its neutral message never struck deep roots. Now Giddens is warning against any departure from those original winning mantras - most of all on tax and spend. He attacks Gordon Brown's plans to raise tax to pay for public services. Denouncing "the myth of taxation", he describes how more money flows into the Treasury through the fruits of high employment and economic success than through raising tax rates. Raising rates to 50% for those earning over 100,000 would only bring in 3bn (actually a considerable sum). He points out that the top 1% of earners already contribute 20% of all income tax - an interesting fact. But stop and contemplate what it really reveals: the rich are not taxed through the nose, but they earn staggering sums of money compared to the rest. This thought, though, is illegitimate in third way thinking. Third wayers are never jealous of success. Third wayers believe in equality of opportunity: redistribution is only to pull the very poorest over the poverty threshold. Giddens's vision of a successful economy relies on large numbers in minimum wage jobs. Britain's employment record is better than most of Europe because of easy access to flexible, low-paid work. He does say that there needs to be more in-work training to help these people up ladders (currently few ever climb out of marginal work). True, people are better off in work but while a third of people, in and out of work, live beneath what most people regard as a decent standard of living, that does require any social democrat to consider the depth of British inequality. Somewhere at the heart of the third way was a fundamental unwillingness to face this unpalatable fact. While Giddens rightly attacks the old left for its mindless refusal to give the government credit for anything, he is himself too dismissive of other European countries' social polices that deliver fairer societies. Third way orthodoxy does not address an electorate now less tax-phobic than angry about public services. But Giddens sees the voter as an immutable beast: everything "must fall within the bounds of what is electorally feasible" as if leaders never shift the political climate. Yet those who voted for Thatcherism in election after election are not the same people who voted Blair back last year: people change, reacting to past errors, pursuing new goals. When Mrs Thatcher in her first budget cut top rates of income tax by a swingeing 38%, she knew the power of political symbolism. Sending out strong signals and sweeping the people along in her train, she changed the national mood in ways third wayers never dared try. That is why the third way is history. The government is daring to try. Third way bounds are everywhere being burst at last as Labour begins to believe in the reality of its own power. The tax taboo is broken, cannabis decriminalised, student fees rethought, gross fat cat salaries at least a little checked by shareholder votes, art galleries and museums free, Railtrack turned into a non-profit company, asylum seekers vouchers rescinded. None of these is an act of outrageous radicalism but all were once so unthinkable that any minister whispering the words was forced to humiliating public apology. The ice is cracking and in the thaw ministers are starting to think for themselves. Those who do so most, like Charles Clarke, are emerging as the winners over clones still mouthing dead mantras. Originality pays because ministers need to think aloud about serious problems. What is the emerging story? Good government was what New Labour promised, non-ideological, technocratic, what works. That is developing now into something more coherent: government is good. To make the case for higher taxes and better services, that key idea needs to lead the way. The market delivers prosperity best, the voluntary sector can refresh and inspire around the margins, but in the end the goods that only government can deliver are what everyone wants now. Well-managed and efficient, always room for improvement, public service is indispensable and precious. These are still only the green shoots of an ideology that profoundly divides right from left - but once it was a third way taboo. So as the PM ploughs through his in-tray he has an emerging progressive idea for the next decisions he must take. The third way was Bill Clinton's emblem - an election winner that left a tragically empty legacy: there is no "Clintonism". Blairism already deserves a place in the dictionary for his global vision: now he has to establish its meaning at home.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
The National Lottery plants its golden footprints up and down the land. And 12bn of good has been done so far: the Angel of the North spreads its iron wings, athletes hold gold medals aloft hailing the lottery that made them possible, the Eden project gleams within its glass domes, while hundreds of new community centres start thriving local activities. Decayed parks in towns everywhere are restored to Victorian municipal glory. A playgroup arises in an area with none. And, yes, asylum seekers get a little too. But the lottery always had enemies. On the left puritans complain it is a regressive tax on the poor (though they don't propose banning Ladrokes). The moral right are uneasy at state-sponsored sin, but mainly loathe do-gooders. The result is sour sniping at everything the lottery does, emphasising the errors - the dome and the Churchill papers. But the latest war over grants to asylum seekers is doing real damage, destroying pride in its great benefits. This is a story of folly and also of wickedness. Start with the folly: the Community Fund, one of the six boards distributing lottery largesse, gave money to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCACD), a Birmingham group counselling asylum seekers on their rights, fighting deportations and getting many decisions successfully reversed. This is unpopular but necessary work: people should be helped to use what rights they have. They also campaign against the asylum laws, but that is not against charity law. All well and good. However, had the Community Fund glanced at the group's website, they would have found some wild, abusive stuff unbefitting lottery recipients. One group compared Bush to Hitler. The NCACD accused Blunkett of "colluding with fascism". Unwise. When Blunkett learned of a relatively small story on page 5 in the Mail about this grant, he went nuclear. He could have picked up the telephone for a private word with Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary who oversees the lottery. Together they could have limited the damage quietly by calling the Community Fund and requesting them to ask the NCACD to clean up their language and their website. If the NCACD had two ounces of sense and hoped for future grants, it would have spontaneously issued a correction/apology and a polite press release describing the good work they do. But with the Mail on their doorstep, they were embattled. What happened instead is that David Blunkett and his special adviser saw their chance for yet another of their regular nasty-story-for-the-Sundays slot. They constructed an inflammatory press release denouncing the grant. Tessa Jowell managed to get her hands on it in time and soften its language a bit, promising to review the grant. But Blunkett fanned the flames into a firestorm led by the Daily Mail, which day after day attacked the Community Fund with incendiary and racist ferocity. The Daily Mail gave a statement to Radio 4's World at One this week claiming that it was "highlighting the activities of the Community Fund with the wholehearted support of the home secretary". David Blunkett hotly denies this. The Daily Mail's campaign against the Community Fund has on four days urged readers: "Please vent your anger" against Diana Brittan (wife of Sir Leon), head of the fund. Staff have been forced to open 4,000 abusive letters wearing gloves, since some contained excrement, reading "I'm going to kill you", "fucking bitch", "fucking arsehole" and more. The Midland office has had a bomb threat. Falkland's hero Simon Weston joined in with an anti-lottery diatribe at the Tory party conference, complaining veterans had been refused money. Why was he helping slaughter the golden goose, when his own charity, the Weston Spirit, has had 2m of lottery money with another three applications pending? Not surprisingly, the fund went into meltdown and took too long to respond. Only 5% of its money goes to asylum seekers, 11% to ethnic minorities, and 5% to the third world, but yes, their remit is to give to less cuddly causes neglected by traditional giving. Their instructions are to fill the gaps, not follow popular sentiment. Any fund giving to smaller community groups makes some mistakes. One such was to give money to a man rescuing criminal youth from the streets: alas he was recruiting them to his own criminal gang. Was it the fund's fault? No. The man was an adviser to the police - if even the police didn't know, how could they? Worse is to come. Next week it is likely the fund will be forced to announce that the NCACD grant will go ahead. Dearly though some might regret it, unless evidence emerges of law-breaking, the promised cash cannot be rescinded. Expect mushroom clouds. Camelot, itself is in trouble after the abysmal failure of their chief executive Diane Thompson's relaunch of new games, had the cheek last week to add petrol on the flames by claiming this asylum seekers' grant had cut lottery sales by 500,000 a week. (She said nothing about Camelot's own foundation's grants to asylum seekers). Camelot has yet to produce figures proving they are not disguising their own failures: Thompson's "you'd be lucky to win a tenner" Ratner remark, about the negligible chance of winning, didn't help. Now every lottery hater has proclaimed the lottery undemocratic, demanding the right of lottery players to tick a box on their ticket to say where the money should go. October 31 is the closing date for a public consultation on the lottery. Radical change is needed to repair its reputation, to make it trusted and loved. Jowell is seriously considering nationalisation: the fiasco of the last contract proved that no outsider can ever beat the incumbent. Where there is no competition, it would be wise to make it into a national institution, with no profits lost. The six distribution boards will be amalgamated into one, with a single national lottery plaque emblazoned on every project that gets money, so people can see where the money is spent. Areas that have had too little funding - too deprived to apply - may get local referenda on how to spend lump sums. Democratic local citizens panels, (already in place for the Heritage Fund) may distribute money more accountably, gaining expertise as they go. When under fire, they would be better trusted to explain their spending decisions. But big grants over 1m must still be taken centrally. It should not all flow to kittens and cancer at the behest of the tabloids. If the government gave in to pressure for tick boxes, it might temporarily stop tabloid insults about "the liberal, lentil-chomping lefties who hand out Lotto cash". But granting funds at public whim would be a wicked abdication of the elected politicians' duty to see that all money is as wisely and justly spent as possible - give or take the odd inevitable mistake.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
The National Lottery plants its golden footprints up and down the land. And 12bn of good has been done so far: the Angel of the North spreads its iron wings, athletes hold gold medals aloft hailing the lottery that made them possible, the Eden project gleams within its glass domes, while hundreds of new community centres start thriving local activities. Decayed parks in towns everywhere are restored to Victorian municipal glory. A playgroup arises in an area with none. And, yes, asylum seekers get a little too. But the lottery always had enemies. On the left puritans complain it is a regressive tax on the poor (though they don't propose banning Ladrokes). The moral right are uneasy at state-sponsored sin, but mainly loathe do-gooders. The result is sour sniping at everything the lottery does, emphasising the errors - the dome and the Churchill papers. But the latest war over grants to asylum seekers is doing real damage, destroying pride in its great benefits. This is a story of folly and also of wickedness. Start with the folly: the Community Fund, one of the six boards distributing lottery largesse, gave money to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCACD), a Birmingham group counselling asylum seekers on their rights, fighting deportations and getting many decisions successfully reversed. This is unpopular but necessary work: people should be helped to use what rights they have. They also campaign against the asylum laws, but that is not against charity law. All well and good. However, had the Community Fund glanced at the group's website, they would have found some wild, abusive stuff unbefitting lottery recipients. One group compared Bush to Hitler. The NCACD accused Blunkett of "colluding with fascism". Unwise. When Blunkett learned of a relatively small story on page 5 in the Mail about this grant, he went nuclear. He could have picked up the telephone for a private word with Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary who oversees the lottery. Together they could have limited the damage quietly by calling the Community Fund and requesting them to ask the NCACD to clean up their language and their website. If the NCACD had two ounces of sense and hoped for future grants, it would have spontaneously issued a correction/apology and a polite press release describing the good work they do. But with the Mail on their doorstep, they were embattled. What happened instead is that David Blunkett and his special adviser saw their chance for yet another of their regular nasty-story-for-the-Sundays slot. They constructed an inflammatory press release denouncing the grant. Tessa Jowell managed to get her hands on it in time and soften its language a bit, promising to review the grant. But Blunkett fanned the flames into a firestorm led by the Daily Mail, which day after day attacked the Community Fund with incendiary and racist ferocity. The Daily Mail gave a statement to Radio 4's World at One this week claiming that it was "highlighting the activities of the Community Fund with the wholehearted support of the home secretary". David Blunkett hotly denies this. The Daily Mail's campaign against the Community Fund has on four days urged readers: "Please vent your anger" against Diana Brittan (wife of Sir Leon), head of the fund. Staff have been forced to open 4,000 abusive letters wearing gloves, since some contained excrement, reading "I'm going to kill you", "fucking bitch", "fucking arsehole" and more. The Midland office has had a bomb threat. Falkland's hero Simon Weston joined in with an anti-lottery diatribe at the Tory party conference, complaining veterans had been refused money. Why was he helping slaughter the golden goose, when his own charity, the Weston Spirit, has had 2m of lottery money with another three applications pending? Not surprisingly, the fund went into meltdown and took too long to respond. Only 5% of its money goes to asylum seekers, 11% to ethnic minorities, and 5% to the third world, but yes, their remit is to give to less cuddly causes neglected by traditional giving. Their instructions are to fill the gaps, not follow popular sentiment. Any fund giving to smaller community groups makes some mistakes. One such was to give money to a man rescuing criminal youth from the streets: alas he was recruiting them to his own criminal gang. Was it the fund's fault? No. The man was an adviser to the police - if even the police didn't know, how could they? Worse is to come. Next week it is likely the fund will be forced to announce that the NCACD grant will go ahead. Dearly though some might regret it, unless evidence emerges of law-breaking, the promised cash cannot be rescinded. Expect mushroom clouds. Camelot, itself is in trouble after the abysmal failure of their chief executive Diane Thompson's relaunch of new games, had the cheek last week to add petrol on the flames by claiming this asylum seekers' grant had cut lottery sales by 500,000 a week. (She said nothing about Camelot's own foundation's grants to asylum seekers). Camelot has yet to produce figures proving they are not disguising their own failures: Thompson's "you'd be lucky to win a tenner" Ratner remark, about the negligible chance of winning, didn't help. Now every lottery hater has proclaimed the lottery undemocratic, demanding the right of lottery players to tick a box on their ticket to say where the money should go. October 31 is the closing date for a public consultation on the lottery. Radical change is needed to repair its reputation, to make it trusted and loved. Jowell is seriously considering nationalisation: the fiasco of the last contract proved that no outsider can ever beat the incumbent. Where there is no competition, it would be wise to make it into a national institution, with no profits lost. The six distribution boards will be amalgamated into one, with a single national lottery plaque emblazoned on every project that gets money, so people can see where the money is spent. Areas that have had too little funding - too deprived to apply - may get local referenda on how to spend lump sums. Democratic local citizens panels, (already in place for the Heritage Fund) may distribute money more accountably, gaining expertise as they go. When under fire, they would be better trusted to explain their spending decisions. But big grants over 1m must still be taken centrally. It should not all flow to kittens and cancer at the behest of the tabloids. If the government gave in to pressure for tick boxes, it might temporarily stop tabloid insults about "the liberal, lentil-chomping lefties who hand out Lotto cash". But granting funds at public whim would be a wicked abdication of the elected politicians' duty to see that all money is as wisely and justly spent as possible - give or take the odd inevitable mistake.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Occasionally a new piece of research demolishes a myth with one fell blow. It does not happen often (social research tends to run along familiar tracks), but once in a while an iconoclastic study changes ideas. No one reading Self-Esteem - The Costs and Causes of Low Self-Worth by Professor Nicholas Emler of the LSE, should feel quite at ease again using a modern piece of psychobabble that has infused the language of sociology, criminology and education without real scrutiny until now. The accepted view has been that self-esteem - or the lack of it - lies at the root of almost every disorder from delinquency and drug abuse to violence and child abuse. One standard text after another takes this as a given fact without any scientific evidence, repeated as gospel from right to left, from Melanie Phillips to Oprah Winfrey. More than 2,000 books currently in print offer self-help prescriptions for raising self-esteem. A vast array of expensive social programmes in Europe and the US designed to solve drug dependency or delinquency are based on attempts to raise self-esteem. Some have tried to raise the self-esteem of whole schools or even an entire citizenry, describing self-esteem as a "social vaccine" against anti-social behaviour. Low self-esteem is the zeitgeist social disease. It has many useful attributes: it elevates self-love and sanctifies self-satisfaction. It justifies the introspection of the therapy addict. It excuses bad behaviour, turning perpetrator into victim. For teachers, it makes dealing with bullying, arrogant and disruptive pupils almost impossible, if beneath the insufferable exterior there is supposed to be a whimpering, self-loathing child in need of affirmation and praise. Professor Emler turns all this on its head. Scrutinising all the available research on both sides of the Atlantic, he finds no evidence that low self-esteem causes anti-social behaviour. Quite the reverse. Those who think highly of themselves are the ones most prone to violence and most likely to take risks, believing themselves invulnerable. They are more likely to commit crimes, drive dangerously, risk their health with drugs and alcohol. Exceptionally low self-esteem is indeed damaging - but only to the victim, not to anyone else. Those with low self-esteem are more likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, to become victims of bullying, domestic violence, loneliness and social ostracism. There ought to be a collective sigh of relief among many professionals on reading this eye-opening work. It is one of those moments when the blindingly obvious suddenly emerges from a fog of unquestioned nonsense. Teachers, social workers and probation officers do not have to massage the already inflated egos of bullies with unwarranted praise. Asserting his own superiority over his classmates, over-confident of abilities he does not have, it will do no harm to try to bring him down a peg. Emler looks at the relation between self-esteem and academic success. Does competition in school cause damaging failure? Most surprisingly he concludes that academic success or failure has very little impact on pupils' self-esteem. High self-esteem pupils will explain away failure to suit their previous high opinions of themselves: they make excuses that they were unlucky, suffered some bias or that they didn't try. Odder still, those with low self-esteem will not be buoyed up by academic success either. Sadly, they will regard it as a fluke and continue with their previous low estimation of their abilities. He concludes that it is exceedingly difficult to shift people's pre-existing view of themselves, even with tangible success. Nor is self- esteem any predictor of how well or badly someone will do academically. Even if confidence boosting worked (which he doubts) it would have no effect on exam results. So where does self-esteem come from? Looking at studies of twins, Emler concludes that genetic predisposition has the single strongest effect. Less surprisingly, after that it is parental attitudes. If they love, reinforce, praise and respect a young child, the effect lasts for life. Physical and above all sexual abuse of children is devastatingly and permanently damaging to self-esteem. Beyond these early influences, everything else that might be done to increase/ decrease self-esteem has virtually no effect. (This is bad news for the therapy business.) An interesting example: it was assumed that to belong to an outcast ethnic minority would harm self-esteem, but Emler finds it has no effect. People draw self-esteem from the good opinions of their own group and reject abuse from outsiders as the fault of others, not their own. Men have slightly more self-esteem than women. Low self-esteem in young women does increase the risk of teenage pregnancy, while low self-esteem in boys increases the risk of unemployment later in life. Anxiety about appearance does undermine women's self-esteem. But Emler's more curious finding is that there is very little correlation between how people think they look and how they actually look: their perceptions about their appearance are shaped by their level of self-esteem. Altogether Emler finds people have profoundly unrealistic views of how others see them, both negative and positive. How we think we are perceived is shaped by self-esteem. His conclusion is that all the myriad programmes designed to cure anti-social behaviour by raising self-esteem are wasting their time. Better by far to concentrate on the particular drug or crime problem and not on an imagined self-esteem deficit: self-esteem enhancing programmes he describes as "snake-oil remedies". This research deserves to cause a stir. It was always a kindly liberal notion that inside the anti-social bully was a timorous, tender soul waiting to be released. Emler is not suggesting that the violent are not damaged or might not be cured, but he has conclusively dismissed the intellectually woolly concept that lack of "self-esteem" is the root of all evil.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
Occasionally a new piece of research demolishes a myth with one fell blow. It does not happen often (social research tends to run along familiar tracks), but once in a while an iconoclastic study changes ideas. No one reading Self-Esteem - The Costs and Causes of Low Self-Worth by Professor Nicholas Emler of the LSE, should feel quite at ease again using a modern piece of psychobabble that has infused the language of sociology, criminology and education without real scrutiny until now. The accepted view has been that self-esteem - or the lack of it - lies at the root of almost every disorder from delinquency and drug abuse to violence and child abuse. One standard text after another takes this as a given fact without any scientific evidence, repeated as gospel from right to left, from Melanie Phillips to Oprah Winfrey. More than 2,000 books currently in print offer self-help prescriptions for raising self-esteem. A vast array of expensive social programmes in Europe and the US designed to solve drug dependency or delinquency are based on attempts to raise self-esteem. Some have tried to raise the self-esteem of whole schools or even an entire citizenry, describing self-esteem as a "social vaccine" against anti-social behaviour. Low self-esteem is the zeitgeist social disease. It has many useful attributes: it elevates self-love and sanctifies self-satisfaction. It justifies the introspection of the therapy addict. It excuses bad behaviour, turning perpetrator into victim. For teachers, it makes dealing with bullying, arrogant and disruptive pupils almost impossible, if beneath the insufferable exterior there is supposed to be a whimpering, self-loathing child in need of affirmation and praise. Professor Emler turns all this on its head. Scrutinising all the available research on both sides of the Atlantic, he finds no evidence that low self-esteem causes anti-social behaviour. Quite the reverse. Those who think highly of themselves are the ones most prone to violence and most likely to take risks, believing themselves invulnerable. They are more likely to commit crimes, drive dangerously, risk their health with drugs and alcohol. Exceptionally low self-esteem is indeed damaging - but only to the victim, not to anyone else. Those with low self-esteem are more likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, to become victims of bullying, domestic violence, loneliness and social ostracism. There ought to be a collective sigh of relief among many professionals on reading this eye-opening work. It is one of those moments when the blindingly obvious suddenly emerges from a fog of unquestioned nonsense. Teachers, social workers and probation officers do not have to massage the already inflated egos of bullies with unwarranted praise. Asserting his own superiority over his classmates, over-confident of abilities he does not have, it will do no harm to try to bring him down a peg. Emler looks at the relation between self-esteem and academic success. Does competition in school cause damaging failure? Most surprisingly he concludes that academic success or failure has very little impact on pupils' self-esteem. High self-esteem pupils will explain away failure to suit their previous high opinions of themselves: they make excuses that they were unlucky, suffered some bias or that they didn't try. Odder still, those with low self-esteem will not be buoyed up by academic success either. Sadly, they will regard it as a fluke and continue with their previous low estimation of their abilities. He concludes that it is exceedingly difficult to shift people's pre-existing view of themselves, even with tangible success. Nor is self- esteem any predictor of how well or badly someone will do academically. Even if confidence boosting worked (which he doubts) it would have no effect on exam results. So where does self-esteem come from? Looking at studies of twins, Emler concludes that genetic predisposition has the single strongest effect. Less surprisingly, after that it is parental attitudes. If they love, reinforce, praise and respect a young child, the effect lasts for life. Physical and above all sexual abuse of children is devastatingly and permanently damaging to self-esteem. Beyond these early influences, everything else that might be done to increase/ decrease self-esteem has virtually no effect. (This is bad news for the therapy business.) An interesting example: it was assumed that to belong to an outcast ethnic minority would harm self-esteem, but Emler finds it has no effect. People draw self-esteem from the good opinions of their own group and reject abuse from outsiders as the fault of others, not their own. Men have slightly more self-esteem than women. Low self-esteem in young women does increase the risk of teenage pregnancy, while low self-esteem in boys increases the risk of unemployment later in life. Anxiety about appearance does undermine women's self-esteem. But Emler's more curious finding is that there is very little correlation between how people think they look and how they actually look: their perceptions about their appearance are shaped by their level of self-esteem. Altogether Emler finds people have profoundly unrealistic views of how others see them, both negative and positive. How we think we are perceived is shaped by self-esteem. His conclusion is that all the myriad programmes designed to cure anti-social behaviour by raising self-esteem are wasting their time. Better by far to concentrate on the particular drug or crime problem and not on an imagined self-esteem deficit: self-esteem enhancing programmes he describes as "snake-oil remedies". This research deserves to cause a stir. It was always a kindly liberal notion that inside the anti-social bully was a timorous, tender soul waiting to be released. Emler is not suggesting that the violent are not damaged or might not be cured, but he has conclusively dismissed the intellectually woolly concept that lack of "self-esteem" is the root of all evil.
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8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
What is fair pay? How jobs are rewarded may always be irrational - an unruly muddle of tradition and notional markets - but the unfairness of low pay in Britain defies any rational or moral justification. Income inequality is the worst in Europe, the minimum wage virtually the lowest. My book on low pay, Hard Work, is timed to pitch at the low pay commission: next month its new head, Adair Turner, will publish his first recommendation on the next minimum wage rise. The government has kept the minimum wage exceedingly low, at 4.20 an hour. It acts as little more than a backstop against the grossest exploitation. In real terms it is lower than the lowest rate set by any wages council before they were abolished by Mrs Thatcher. It is far less than John Smith's promise of half male median earnings, which would now pay 5.38 an hour. It is not even earnings-linked to guarantee it never falls back. Fairer pay is not part of the plan for achieving Labour's astonishing pledge to abolish child poverty, though without far more radical redistribution in pay as well as tax and benefits, it is unclear how it can be done. Since poverty is a relative measure, reducing inequality is a mathematical necessity. Plotting on a graph all EU countries' levels of inequality and social security rates shows how countries with similar economies make very different decisions about wealth distribution. There is no iron economic rule that determines how people should be rewarded or wealth shared. Fairer countries (Scandinavia, Holland) tend to do better than the unfairest - Britain. The graph shows that equality is not a matter of ineluctable economics but of long-term politics: decades of social democracy have delivered fairer and more successful economies. It requires voters to want it and political leaders to offer it. Labour does want fairer shares; as Tony Blair said, Labour would have failed if it didn't achieve it. But they also say pay doesn't matter and tax credit subsidies are the best way to redistribute. As long as low pay is topped up by the taxpayer, wages are unimportant: the lower the better, if it creates jobs. But pay matters a great deal. Ask FTSE 100 directors why their median pay is now 1.5m a year. They admit frankly that it is not the second yacht, but a matter of respect and status. What's true at the top is just as true at the bottom: pay signifies personal worth. It is of primary emotional and social importance. There is no justification for paying a care assistant, a nursery nurse or a hospital cleaner less than they can live on for work that society depends on. If you eat in a restaurant where the dishwashers cannot survive on their wages, you are paying too little for that meal: why should the state subsidise such meals by handing out credits to the dishwasher? The biggest single group of the poor are now in work and their only social problem is that they are not paid enough to live on. The argument against raising the minimum wage is fear of job loss. At some level jobs would be lost, but no sensible economist can predict at what level or in which sectors. All dire predictions on introducing the minimum wage were wrong. There is little risk of jobs going abroad: low-paid jobs are virtually all in service work and old folk can't be cared for from India. These are mainly essential jobs and have already been squeezed and downsized to their bare bones. If the government wants to raise the minimum to the maximum sustainable it could bring back wages councils, setting rates to fit not only different industries but different areas, with extra weighting for the south-east. They could fix a far higher "living wage" rate for all state employees and those jobs contracted out by the state. (This lifts the going rate without ordering every local hairdresser to pay the same.) The gap between men and women's wages actually grew last year, despite government pledges to end it: as women form 70% of the low paid, revaluing the work women do would make all the difference. Catering, caring or cleaning is only low paid because women traditionally do it. All this will cost money in taxes and in prices and no one suggests it can be done at once: it took Sweden decades of steady social democratic endeavour. But the huge task of abolishing child poverty can't be done by stealth. So far tax credits are the government's chosen mechanism. They are a brilliant political device, silently shunting significant state funds to low-paid families - 40-50 a week - without upsetting the CBI, while also making a large chunk of the social security budget disappear into the impenetrable maw of the Inland Revenue. Credits are so complicated that no one understands them, thus conveniently not alerting the rightwing press. Yet increasingly they warp the market, even if that is hard to measure. For example, if they were withdrawn, all low-paid workers would quit work at once and go on to social security, and employers would have to up their pay rates steeply to entice them back again. Tax credits make low pay possible and they subsidise bad employers. If the minimum wage rose and drove some marginal small companies out of business, their work would largely be taken up by bigger, better-run companies. Topping up low pay for many will always be needed. But as the primary means of abolishing poverty, it is already starting to make pay packets look distinctly bizarre. A typical single mother now draws 65% of her money in credit, only 35% in earned pay, however valuable her work. If credits are to rise enough to abolish all poverty, the distortion of both the labour market and individual pay packets will become extreme. Topping up pay has other serious defects, some of which the government tried to hide. Without notifying anyone, they sneaked out on a website on December 23 figures eagerly demanded for months - the take-up rate for the working family tax credits. These show that a third of entitled families were not claiming. Some 600,000 families were losing an average of 42 a week, resulting in a Treasury saving of 1.4 bn last year. (Since it can't be claimed in arrears, that cash should be used exclusively as a bonus for poor families: it could build and maintain many high-quality children's centres.) Experts reckon it extraordinary if any means-tested benefit ever reaches 80%. Families depending on child tax credits will find their incomes fall off a cliff when their youngest reaches 18 (most children still cost after 18). Families depending on credits will never build up any pension entitlement, which comes with better pay, not better benefits. Wives have been forced to stay home, as their low-paid husbands' credits make it impossible for them to earn. That is bad news, since one in three marriages fail and women who have never worked have trouble supporting themselves later. Above all, the blunt fact is that it is unfair to pay people less than they are worth, less than they can live on. What they are worth is not set by the market - the market is set by the social security system. But if none of these methods convince, then find others. Not even the right is comfortable with the idea that social progress is at an end and care assistants are destined to live on sub-survivable pay.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
What is fair pay? How jobs are rewarded may always be irrational - an unruly muddle of tradition and notional markets - but the unfairness of low pay in Britain defies any rational or moral justification. Income inequality is the worst in Europe, the minimum wage virtually the lowest. My book on low pay, Hard Work, is timed to pitch at the low pay commission: next month its new head, Adair Turner, will publish his first recommendation on the next minimum wage rise. The government has kept the minimum wage exceedingly low, at 4.20 an hour. It acts as little more than a backstop against the grossest exploitation. In real terms it is lower than the lowest rate set by any wages council before they were abolished by Mrs Thatcher. It is far less than John Smith's promise of half male median earnings, which would now pay 5.38 an hour. It is not even earnings-linked to guarantee it never falls back. Fairer pay is not part of the plan for achieving Labour's astonishing pledge to abolish child poverty, though without far more radical redistribution in pay as well as tax and benefits, it is unclear how it can be done. Since poverty is a relative measure, reducing inequality is a mathematical necessity. Plotting on a graph all EU countries' levels of inequality and social security rates shows how countries with similar economies make very different decisions about wealth distribution. There is no iron economic rule that determines how people should be rewarded or wealth shared. Fairer countries (Scandinavia, Holland) tend to do better than the unfairest - Britain. The graph shows that equality is not a matter of ineluctable economics but of long-term politics: decades of social democracy have delivered fairer and more successful economies. It requires voters to want it and political leaders to offer it. Labour does want fairer shares; as Tony Blair said, Labour would have failed if it didn't achieve it. But they also say pay doesn't matter and tax credit subsidies are the best way to redistribute. As long as low pay is topped up by the taxpayer, wages are unimportant: the lower the better, if it creates jobs. But pay matters a great deal. Ask FTSE 100 directors why their median pay is now 1.5m a year. They admit frankly that it is not the second yacht, but a matter of respect and status. What's true at the top is just as true at the bottom: pay signifies personal worth. It is of primary emotional and social importance. There is no justification for paying a care assistant, a nursery nurse or a hospital cleaner less than they can live on for work that society depends on. If you eat in a restaurant where the dishwashers cannot survive on their wages, you are paying too little for that meal: why should the state subsidise such meals by handing out credits to the dishwasher? The biggest single group of the poor are now in work and their only social problem is that they are not paid enough to live on. The argument against raising the minimum wage is fear of job loss. At some level jobs would be lost, but no sensible economist can predict at what level or in which sectors. All dire predictions on introducing the minimum wage were wrong. There is little risk of jobs going abroad: low-paid jobs are virtually all in service work and old folk can't be cared for from India. These are mainly essential jobs and have already been squeezed and downsized to their bare bones. If the government wants to raise the minimum to the maximum sustainable it could bring back wages councils, setting rates to fit not only different industries but different areas, with extra weighting for the south-east. They could fix a far higher "living wage" rate for all state employees and those jobs contracted out by the state. (This lifts the going rate without ordering every local hairdresser to pay the same.) The gap between men and women's wages actually grew last year, despite government pledges to end it: as women form 70% of the low paid, revaluing the work women do would make all the difference. Catering, caring or cleaning is only low paid because women traditionally do it. All this will cost money in taxes and in prices and no one suggests it can be done at once: it took Sweden decades of steady social democratic endeavour. But the huge task of abolishing child poverty can't be done by stealth. So far tax credits are the government's chosen mechanism. They are a brilliant political device, silently shunting significant state funds to low-paid families - 40-50 a week - without upsetting the CBI, while also making a large chunk of the social security budget disappear into the impenetrable maw of the Inland Revenue. Credits are so complicated that no one understands them, thus conveniently not alerting the rightwing press. Yet increasingly they warp the market, even if that is hard to measure. For example, if they were withdrawn, all low-paid workers would quit work at once and go on to social security, and employers would have to up their pay rates steeply to entice them back again. Tax credits make low pay possible and they subsidise bad employers. If the minimum wage rose and drove some marginal small companies out of business, their work would largely be taken up by bigger, better-run companies. Topping up low pay for many will always be needed. But as the primary means of abolishing poverty, it is already starting to make pay packets look distinctly bizarre. A typical single mother now draws 65% of her money in credit, only 35% in earned pay, however valuable her work. If credits are to rise enough to abolish all poverty, the distortion of both the labour market and individual pay packets will become extreme. Topping up pay has other serious defects, some of which the government tried to hide. Without notifying anyone, they sneaked out on a website on December 23 figures eagerly demanded for months - the take-up rate for the working family tax credits. These show that a third of entitled families were not claiming. Some 600,000 families were losing an average of 42 a week, resulting in a Treasury saving of 1.4 bn last year. (Since it can't be claimed in arrears, that cash should be used exclusively as a bonus for poor families: it could build and maintain many high-quality children's centres.) Experts reckon it extraordinary if any means-tested benefit ever reaches 80%. Families depending on child tax credits will find their incomes fall off a cliff when their youngest reaches 18 (most children still cost after 18). Families depending on credits will never build up any pension entitlement, which comes with better pay, not better benefits. Wives have been forced to stay home, as their low-paid husbands' credits make it impossible for them to earn. That is bad news, since one in three marriages fail and women who have never worked have trouble supporting themselves later. Above all, the blunt fact is that it is unfair to pay people less than they are worth, less than they can live on. What they are worth is not set by the market - the market is set by the social security system. But if none of these methods convince, then find others. Not even the right is comfortable with the idea that social progress is at an end and care assistants are destined to live on sub-survivable pay.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT), Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18 years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the long night of Tory opposition? Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the bellow of Crow. The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership or carry on declining. Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them. To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary: they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection to fight another day. But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves. This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a safety issue, sympathy may wane. Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her cooks, cleaners and carers settled for 5 an hour, less than half what firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant, breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and, frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some shook their heads. Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner. Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals. Their present 21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median, so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not everyone? The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates. Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be seen off. Times have changed. But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it gets difficult. Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively. Awkward truth.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
So is this war? The noise from new trade union leaders Bob Crow (RMT), Mick Rix (Aslef) and Derek Simpson (Amicus) sent frissons of delight down the spines of the rightwing press. At last! History will repeat itself and the Tories sweep to power on the one issue that remains unassailably Mrs Thatcher's triumph. The public may blame her for 18 years of public service ruination and rusting infrastructure, but the one thing they give her in the saloon bars and the taxi cabs - she did stop the unions running the country. So is this a flicker of dawn in the long night of Tory opposition? Almost certainly not. Tony Blair's reasonably emollient tones and his correspondingly good reception by the TUC yesterday suggest that the noisy new boys are not mainstream. Where were the wild cat calls in the Winter Gardens so eagerly predicted by the Tory press? Instead there was applause. As things stand, the unions are in a surprisingly strong position - unless they play their present hand very badly indeed. Right now, public opinion is with them. Most people think Thatcher went too far in crushing them: the snarl of Tebbit is detested more than the bellow of Crow. The Guardian ICM poll shows 59% think strikes in the public sector by rail, tube and council workers are justified. Tony Blair's praise for unions was well in tune with his focus groups, but he rightly warned them of losing that public support. His easy confidence in facing them comes from knowing what wiser old TUC heads also know: the public is fickle and they have suffered no real inconvenience yet. A one-day strike for the dinner ladies is heart-warmingly easy to support, but the country grinding to a halt soon sets public teeth grinding. The danger is not that Labour will be brought down again by the unions, but that if the unions answer the siren calls of Bob Crow et al, they will get mashed by Blair as soundly as they were squashed by Thatcher, because the thwack of firm government is what the voters would expect again if it came to serious disruption. So, as John Monks knew, it is partnership or carry on declining. Physically the unions are weak, membership concentrated in the old not the new service occupations - 19% membership in the private sector and even in the public sector only 65%. However desperately needed unions are among the low-paid and down-trodden, the new recognition laws have only succeeded in slowing long-term decline. (There should be compulsory ballots in every non-unionised workplace, where organising can be next to impossible for casualised shift workers unsure of their rights.) But it is not on muscle, but on public opinion that unions rely for their real power. Crow and partners need that political lesson, since public alienation seems to be almost a strategy with them. To succeed, unions need to capitalise skilfully on the general sympathy for public service staff who have fallen far behind and deserve much better. Yet at the same time they must be wary of polls that show 78% of voters fear the extra money for public services will be "used up" in pay instead of improvements. The council workers' victory was exemplary: they won, they got a long-term pay review and they kept public affection to fight another day. But next up, the firefighters are in danger of overreaching themselves. This may be 9/11 we-love-firefighters week, but if train drivers and tube drivers come out in support of firefighters, avoiding the secondary action laws by claiming that running trains without firefighters is a safety issue, sympathy may wane. Andy Gilchrist, the new Fire Brigades Union leader, is making a splash with a startling 40% demand - 40%! Many other trade union leaders roll their eyes and sigh. "Hope Andy's got an exit strategy," says one, who is himself regarded as a radical - 40%! Some of the women trade unionists who helped organise the low-paid council workers strike spit with fury. "Who do these willy-wavers think they are?" said one, as her cooks, cleaners and carers settled for 5 an hour, less than half what firefighters get now, let alone another 40% on top. "What makes them think a firefighter is worth so much more than a senior care assistant, breaking her back lifting old people all day, saving lives too and, frankly, working a darned sight harder. Firefighters are asleep half the bloody time they're on duty!" On the record, the brothers' omerta means the TUC general council supported the firefighters nem con, but some shook their heads. Well, has he got an exit strategy? There is still a long way to go before a possible strike at the end of October. There is plenty of room for compromise, so long as they don't paint themselves into a corner. Income Data Services, which monitors pay in all sectors, calculates that like all public servants, the FBU has indeed fallen far behind. To catch up with 1978, they need 21%. It is not impossible to imagine a phased deal that got them close. Both sides agree their skills have grown greatly, raising them up from manual workers to assistant professionals. Their present 21,531 is not a lot of money - though it is the median, so half the workforce earns even less. But 40%? If them, why not everyone? The employers want a quid pro quo: a review of working practices as well as pay. But unlike the council workers, who welcomed it, the FBU refuses any review, especially not of their working practices. Emotional pleas about the danger - three die a year - may wear a bit thin among trawlermen and building trades with far higher death rates. Firefighters' jobs are sufficiently desirable so that almost alone among public workers, there is no shortage. Once the public focuses on all this, the firefighters may look a bit less loveable than they do this week. Blair's political education dates from 1979, hearing those famously disastrous words of the leader of the London ambulancemen: "If it means lives must be lost, that is how it must be." If the Fire Brigades Union or anyone else threatened anything like it now, they'd be seen off. Times have changed. But both these strikes bring home the great public pay dilemma the government will have to face. The review of council workers' pay will stub its toe at once on "comparability". What is any worker worth? How do you value them? Easy to give points for training, for exams, for responsibility but allowing for these, they are all indispensable and it gets difficult. Until now women's work has been downgraded simply because women do it with no rhyme or reason, only tradition - from teaching, social work and nursing to caring, cleaning and catering. Women's jobs will have to be revalued upwards. Then where do firefighters, who are compared now to the upper quartile of male manual pay, fit? (An FBU leader reputedly had a racehorse called Upper Quartile.) All need more, but women's pay cannot rise relatively unless some men's pay falls back, relatively. Awkward truth.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Choice? What choice? The residents of Clapham Park Estate might be asking themselves that as they head off to the polls within a couple of weeks. People who live in what was judged Lambeth's worst housing estate will be voting on whether to transfer their homes from Lambeth council to a new community-led housing association. Since 1997, 142 estates have voted yes in housing-transfer votes, while only 25 have voted no. A wise decision, since this is a gun-to-the-head choice. Here's what confronts them: vote yes and in exchange for selling off some land you get your estate repaired and large parts of it rebuilt with new homes with larger rooms, a new park, new play areas, a new school and improvements all round - or else. Else what? Nothing, or almost nothing. If they vote no, eventually the estate will be repaired to the standards of the government's "decent homes" target - but that is a pretty basic improvement. In most of Clapham Park, a decent homes makeover would mean hardly more than a bit of damp-proofing and a lick of paint, and perhaps not for years. It would not include central heating, insulation, new kitchens or bathrooms, entry phones on front doors or lifts - all of which will be provided under the stock transfer plan if they vote yes. So where is the choice? A gleaming refurbished estate with lots of new housing and an extra 225 social homes, or carrying on much the same? It's a no-brainer: opinion poll samples taken so far suggest the residents will vote for the change. And yet now that can't be taken for granted. Over the last years, I have been observing meetings where the plans have been drawn up with tenants in the driving seat of the board that runs the estate. There have been extensive consultations and public meetings. But at the last moment, the Defend Council Housing group has moved to mount a campaign for a no vote. A war of leaflets and meetings has broken out. Insults are flying to and fro, roughly translated as "a bunch of Trots" versus "a bunch of pocket-liners bent on doing down the tenants for profit". This is typical of the pattern of the debate that has raged over these ballots. Defend Council Housing is wrong on this stock transfer. And they are very wrong to frighten tenants with - to put it politely - misleading stories about what the plan will mean. They have been telling tenants that they will lose their security of tenure (false: it will get written back in) and that they will pay higher rents (false: true in the past but Labour has put council and housing association rents on a par, by law). Worst of all is the charge that they will be permanently decanted but no one knows to where. This last is the most powerful fear. But tenants have been given a firm guarantee that they can all stay on exactly the same part of the rebuilt estate, which is strongly divided between the east and west sides. (A false rumour said all the social housing was to be squeezed into the east, while the lush west would be new, private homes). What makes these ideological battles hard is that, despite its fear-mongering tactics, many agree that Defend Council Housing is not altogether wrong. This government keeps boasting about giving choice to public-service users - but choice, it seems, does not extend to council tenants. Alan Milburn uses the council estate of his youth as an example of the need for choice, recalling how the council painted all the doors the same colour, but the tenants' right to choose their landlord is rather more important than door colour. Local authorities only transfer homes to housing associations because of Treasury rules and political dogma allowing housing associations but not councils to borrow money on future development. A stroke of the pen could let councils do likewise. However, now is no time to tamper with how the public sector borrowing requirement is calculated, in the middle of an election fought over a so-called "black hole" in government finances. Stock transfer opponents are right to object to selling off council-owned land for private development, when expensive land in the south-east is needed for more social and key-worker homes in London. Lambeth, which is short of school places, already regrets sales of old schools converted into loft apartments. So how should the tenants on Clapham Park vote? The danger is that some will be swayed by scare tactics and false rumours spread by the anti campaign. People are easily frightened and a tenancy can feel precarious: this is their home, their neighbours, their future. However, in weighing it up, Lambeth council tenants know they have had nothing to be grateful for in the past 30 years from a council landlord who has mismanaged and neglected them and is still deep in debt. When Camden tenants voted against stock transfer, they wanted to stay with a beacon council with an "excellent" rating as a landlord: but voting no left them stranded without new money. Housing experts say the government should give the best councils the same powers as housing associations. But Lambeth is no Camden. This vote matters more here: it is a vote of confidence in the residents themselves, who have been helping to run the estate for the past five years. Clapham Park is one of the 39 New Deal for Communities (NDCs) - a remarkable experiment in handing more power to tenants elected to chair and sit on the board that runs it. It is they who oversaw the masterplan. Given 56m to spend over 10 years, NDCs are one of Labour's most radical regeneration ideas, closely monitored, a regeneration testbed for all kinds of social enterprise, and their success matters. So when Defend Council Housing puts out leaflets claiming "Regeneration isn't about our needs, it's about other people making money out of our misery", it is a direct attack on Clapham Park residents elected by other residents. This is no place to play out politics. The management board of local tenants gives up a phenomenal amount of unpaid time and has done well, hitting most targets for improvement. New community support officers patrol the estate, scores of crack houses have been closed, prostitution is less aggressive, there are CCTV cameras in the worst zones, crime is down and the number of residents feeling unsafe after dark has dropped from 78% to 43%. After paying for extra teachers for schools and after-school clubs, exam results have improved - above target in English, despite the many non-English speakers. There may be too little choice in how to vote, but Clapham Park residents should block their ears to those who tell them that their own elected New Deal board has done anything but what's best in drawing up this plan. Defend Council Housing's campaign of fear could put it all at risk: it has already left many estates without a future after a no vote. It should argue this out with the national politicians, not jeopardise the best chances of local people.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
Choice? What choice? The residents of Clapham Park Estate might be asking themselves that as they head off to the polls within a couple of weeks. People who live in what was judged Lambeth's worst housing estate will be voting on whether to transfer their homes from Lambeth council to a new community-led housing association. Since 1997, 142 estates have voted yes in housing-transfer votes, while only 25 have voted no. A wise decision, since this is a gun-to-the-head choice. Here's what confronts them: vote yes and in exchange for selling off some land you get your estate repaired and large parts of it rebuilt with new homes with larger rooms, a new park, new play areas, a new school and improvements all round - or else. Else what? Nothing, or almost nothing. If they vote no, eventually the estate will be repaired to the standards of the government's "decent homes" target - but that is a pretty basic improvement. In most of Clapham Park, a decent homes makeover would mean hardly more than a bit of damp-proofing and a lick of paint, and perhaps not for years. It would not include central heating, insulation, new kitchens or bathrooms, entry phones on front doors or lifts - all of which will be provided under the stock transfer plan if they vote yes. So where is the choice? A gleaming refurbished estate with lots of new housing and an extra 225 social homes, or carrying on much the same? It's a no-brainer: opinion poll samples taken so far suggest the residents will vote for the change. And yet now that can't be taken for granted. Over the last years, I have been observing meetings where the plans have been drawn up with tenants in the driving seat of the board that runs the estate. There have been extensive consultations and public meetings. But at the last moment, the Defend Council Housing group has moved to mount a campaign for a no vote. A war of leaflets and meetings has broken out. Insults are flying to and fro, roughly translated as "a bunch of Trots" versus "a bunch of pocket-liners bent on doing down the tenants for profit". This is typical of the pattern of the debate that has raged over these ballots. Defend Council Housing is wrong on this stock transfer. And they are very wrong to frighten tenants with - to put it politely - misleading stories about what the plan will mean. They have been telling tenants that they will lose their security of tenure (false: it will get written back in) and that they will pay higher rents (false: true in the past but Labour has put council and housing association rents on a par, by law). Worst of all is the charge that they will be permanently decanted but no one knows to where. This last is the most powerful fear. But tenants have been given a firm guarantee that they can all stay on exactly the same part of the rebuilt estate, which is strongly divided between the east and west sides. (A false rumour said all the social housing was to be squeezed into the east, while the lush west would be new, private homes). What makes these ideological battles hard is that, despite its fear-mongering tactics, many agree that Defend Council Housing is not altogether wrong. This government keeps boasting about giving choice to public-service users - but choice, it seems, does not extend to council tenants. Alan Milburn uses the council estate of his youth as an example of the need for choice, recalling how the council painted all the doors the same colour, but the tenants' right to choose their landlord is rather more important than door colour. Local authorities only transfer homes to housing associations because of Treasury rules and political dogma allowing housing associations but not councils to borrow money on future development. A stroke of the pen could let councils do likewise. However, now is no time to tamper with how the public sector borrowing requirement is calculated, in the middle of an election fought over a so-called "black hole" in government finances. Stock transfer opponents are right to object to selling off council-owned land for private development, when expensive land in the south-east is needed for more social and key-worker homes in London. Lambeth, which is short of school places, already regrets sales of old schools converted into loft apartments. So how should the tenants on Clapham Park vote? The danger is that some will be swayed by scare tactics and false rumours spread by the anti campaign. People are easily frightened and a tenancy can feel precarious: this is their home, their neighbours, their future. However, in weighing it up, Lambeth council tenants know they have had nothing to be grateful for in the past 30 years from a council landlord who has mismanaged and neglected them and is still deep in debt. When Camden tenants voted against stock transfer, they wanted to stay with a beacon council with an "excellent" rating as a landlord: but voting no left them stranded without new money. Housing experts say the government should give the best councils the same powers as housing associations. But Lambeth is no Camden. This vote matters more here: it is a vote of confidence in the residents themselves, who have been helping to run the estate for the past five years. Clapham Park is one of the 39 New Deal for Communities (NDCs) - a remarkable experiment in handing more power to tenants elected to chair and sit on the board that runs it. It is they who oversaw the masterplan. Given 56m to spend over 10 years, NDCs are one of Labour's most radical regeneration ideas, closely monitored, a regeneration testbed for all kinds of social enterprise, and their success matters. So when Defend Council Housing puts out leaflets claiming "Regeneration isn't about our needs, it's about other people making money out of our misery", it is a direct attack on Clapham Park residents elected by other residents. This is no place to play out politics. The management board of local tenants gives up a phenomenal amount of unpaid time and has done well, hitting most targets for improvement. New community support officers patrol the estate, scores of crack houses have been closed, prostitution is less aggressive, there are CCTV cameras in the worst zones, crime is down and the number of residents feeling unsafe after dark has dropped from 78% to 43%. After paying for extra teachers for schools and after-school clubs, exam results have improved - above target in English, despite the many non-English speakers. There may be too little choice in how to vote, but Clapham Park residents should block their ears to those who tell them that their own elected New Deal board has done anything but what's best in drawing up this plan. Defend Council Housing's campaign of fear could put it all at risk: it has already left many estates without a future after a no vote. It should argue this out with the national politicians, not jeopardise the best chances of local people.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Who said these wise words in the House of Commons? "In this spirit of great caring, dredging up personal cases of misery to try to find the one case that has gone badly in the NHS and overlooking all the reforms and successes that we have had, they have resorted to the lowest form of political debate." Was that Tony Blair this week? No, it was Tory shadow health spokesman Dr Liam Fox, in his maiden speech on May 12 1992. He spoke in the wake of the Jennifer's Ear debacle during the 1992 election, when Labour had used a child's case in an emotive party political broadcast and - as these things do - it blew up in their face. Dr Fox was dead right. That story too descended into farce as Jennifer's semi-separated parents rowed in public and it turned out that her mother was a Tory council candidate while her Labour-inclined father offered up her case to the party campaign machine. Families, we all know, are messy confused affairs with all kinds of internal dynamics and surprises. Now the family of Rose Addis have (unwisely) offered themselves up for public inspection by going straight to the Evening Standard with their version of their grandmother's treatment at the Whittington Hospital. The hospital's chief executive rightly sprang to the defence of his staff with a robust letter refuting every point of the family's complaint. Then all hell broke loose in the Commons as Iain Duncan Smith made the beginner's mistake of not triple-checking the facts. (The Tories are still green about cases that turn into political landmines.) Blair was genuinely angry and Duncan Smith lashed out, sensing that he may have fallen into an elephant trap. Things went from bad to worse as the hospital - the angriest of all - spelled out that the old lady refused to be undressed by black nurses. They gave Duncan Smith a furious walloping for raising a case without calling them first, demanding an apology. But nothing ever looks crystal clear. The hospital's hint that the old lady refused to be touched by black hands may have raised doubts about whether a confused 94-year-old was dumped by angry, offended nurses. Allow real life into political debate and things turn foggy. An independent witness spoke to me yesterday, outraged at the allegations against the Whittington. Jean Christodoulo was in the next door cubicle to Rose Addis, and she saw and listened to her most of the day. "She was very confused and the doctors and nurses were in to see her all the time, gave her a cardiogram and were very good with her," Jean Christodoulo said. "She refused to be cared for by a black nurse. She was in a terrible state and they were trying to clean her up but she would not let them. Sometimes she did not know where she was and kept calling out that she had lost her keys, very distraught, but they were really patient and caring. I was incensed when I saw her grandson on television saying she was not racist. I heard her shouting 'I don't want you touching me!' to a black nurse. I know those nurses and they are very nice, but maybe she was just confused. They couldn't have been more caring to her or to me. It's all political." The hospital's medical director, Professor James Malone-Lee (a Labour activist, it turns out) said what every family in the country must have thought when he suggested that Mrs Addis's relatives "had not helped at all" by failing to visit her for two days. "I regret to say it is not unusual for it to take such a long time for the family of elderly patients to visit." But families are not simple: who knows what their relationship is? The family put themselves up for such speculation by making the public allegations about Mrs Addis's treatment when they were not there to see for themselves. They could have used the Whittington's very good complaints procedure, but preferred the Evening Standard, newly edited by an apparatchik from the Mail which specialises in these frontpage NHS shockers. With breathtaking cheek - and surely some political motive - the grandson is now protesting about Downing Street: "I think it is an absolute disgrace they have committed such an intrusion. They may have breached codes of practice." He was considering legal action. Now the saga is unravelling, the entire Tory press has spun the story on its head and thundered into attacks on Labour for breaching patient confidentiality, as if Labour brought the case of this sad old lady to public attention. Does that mean the opposition and their press can use any case and no one can defend either hospital or government? Labour only repeated what the hospital had already said in an open letter. The peculiar question is whether doctors are allowed to use key patient information in public to clear themselves from calumny. Department of Health guidelines and BMA advice suggest that where a family puts information in the public domain, doctors are allowed to answer allegations with their version of the facts. The government should rush to sign today's BMA call for all parties to pledge no breaches in confidentiality, and all facts to be checked first. Will the Tories sign too? Who won? Labour, on points. But did they really? Most people only have half an eye on the news, so all that remains of poor Rose's 15 minutes of fame may be an old lady badly treated. In Rose's wake, came a stream of "My A&E hell" stories, many probably true. A&E may be getting better - most refurbished with another 100m just announced, 600 more nurses and targets to admit-or-discharge all within four hours by 2004. But "better" will never be 100%. This most public face of the NHS will still alarm on inner-city Saturday nights when eight out of 10 patients arrive with alcohol-related injuries and 65,000 staff were assaulted last year. That's why Casualty makes good TV drama. How can the NHS escape death by a thousand anecdotes? The Kings Fund, an independent health thinktank, yesterday called for ministers to withdraw to arm's length, giving real independence to each hospital. If only. The government already has similar plans but no seasoned observer imagines that it will ever be possible - here or in any other democracy - to stop health and its dramas being used as potent political ammunition by every opposition. How the Tory government blustered during Jennifer's Ear, accusing Labour of "shroud-weaving" and "sick NHS stunts". The best hope is that sharp and angry rebuttal by NHS staff themselves each time will see off political predators bent on proving that the NHS is unsustainable.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
Who said these wise words in the House of Commons? "In this spirit of great caring, dredging up personal cases of misery to try to find the one case that has gone badly in the NHS and overlooking all the reforms and successes that we have had, they have resorted to the lowest form of political debate." Was that Tony Blair this week? No, it was Tory shadow health spokesman Dr Liam Fox, in his maiden speech on May 12 1992. He spoke in the wake of the Jennifer's Ear debacle during the 1992 election, when Labour had used a child's case in an emotive party political broadcast and - as these things do - it blew up in their face. Dr Fox was dead right. That story too descended into farce as Jennifer's semi-separated parents rowed in public and it turned out that her mother was a Tory council candidate while her Labour-inclined father offered up her case to the party campaign machine. Families, we all know, are messy confused affairs with all kinds of internal dynamics and surprises. Now the family of Rose Addis have (unwisely) offered themselves up for public inspection by going straight to the Evening Standard with their version of their grandmother's treatment at the Whittington Hospital. The hospital's chief executive rightly sprang to the defence of his staff with a robust letter refuting every point of the family's complaint. Then all hell broke loose in the Commons as Iain Duncan Smith made the beginner's mistake of not triple-checking the facts. (The Tories are still green about cases that turn into political landmines.) Blair was genuinely angry and Duncan Smith lashed out, sensing that he may have fallen into an elephant trap. Things went from bad to worse as the hospital - the angriest of all - spelled out that the old lady refused to be undressed by black nurses. They gave Duncan Smith a furious walloping for raising a case without calling them first, demanding an apology. But nothing ever looks crystal clear. The hospital's hint that the old lady refused to be touched by black hands may have raised doubts about whether a confused 94-year-old was dumped by angry, offended nurses. Allow real life into political debate and things turn foggy. An independent witness spoke to me yesterday, outraged at the allegations against the Whittington. Jean Christodoulo was in the next door cubicle to Rose Addis, and she saw and listened to her most of the day. "She was very confused and the doctors and nurses were in to see her all the time, gave her a cardiogram and were very good with her," Jean Christodoulo said. "She refused to be cared for by a black nurse. She was in a terrible state and they were trying to clean her up but she would not let them. Sometimes she did not know where she was and kept calling out that she had lost her keys, very distraught, but they were really patient and caring. I was incensed when I saw her grandson on television saying she was not racist. I heard her shouting 'I don't want you touching me!' to a black nurse. I know those nurses and they are very nice, but maybe she was just confused. They couldn't have been more caring to her or to me. It's all political." The hospital's medical director, Professor James Malone-Lee (a Labour activist, it turns out) said what every family in the country must have thought when he suggested that Mrs Addis's relatives "had not helped at all" by failing to visit her for two days. "I regret to say it is not unusual for it to take such a long time for the family of elderly patients to visit." But families are not simple: who knows what their relationship is? The family put themselves up for such speculation by making the public allegations about Mrs Addis's treatment when they were not there to see for themselves. They could have used the Whittington's very good complaints procedure, but preferred the Evening Standard, newly edited by an apparatchik from the Mail which specialises in these frontpage NHS shockers. With breathtaking cheek - and surely some political motive - the grandson is now protesting about Downing Street: "I think it is an absolute disgrace they have committed such an intrusion. They may have breached codes of practice." He was considering legal action. Now the saga is unravelling, the entire Tory press has spun the story on its head and thundered into attacks on Labour for breaching patient confidentiality, as if Labour brought the case of this sad old lady to public attention. Does that mean the opposition and their press can use any case and no one can defend either hospital or government? Labour only repeated what the hospital had already said in an open letter. The peculiar question is whether doctors are allowed to use key patient information in public to clear themselves from calumny. Department of Health guidelines and BMA advice suggest that where a family puts information in the public domain, doctors are allowed to answer allegations with their version of the facts. The government should rush to sign today's BMA call for all parties to pledge no breaches in confidentiality, and all facts to be checked first. Will the Tories sign too? Who won? Labour, on points. But did they really? Most people only have half an eye on the news, so all that remains of poor Rose's 15 minutes of fame may be an old lady badly treated. In Rose's wake, came a stream of "My A&E hell" stories, many probably true. A&E may be getting better - most refurbished with another 100m just announced, 600 more nurses and targets to admit-or-discharge all within four hours by 2004. But "better" will never be 100%. This most public face of the NHS will still alarm on inner-city Saturday nights when eight out of 10 patients arrive with alcohol-related injuries and 65,000 staff were assaulted last year. That's why Casualty makes good TV drama. How can the NHS escape death by a thousand anecdotes? The Kings Fund, an independent health thinktank, yesterday called for ministers to withdraw to arm's length, giving real independence to each hospital. If only. The government already has similar plans but no seasoned observer imagines that it will ever be possible - here or in any other democracy - to stop health and its dramas being used as potent political ammunition by every opposition. How the Tory government blustered during Jennifer's Ear, accusing Labour of "shroud-weaving" and "sick NHS stunts". The best hope is that sharp and angry rebuttal by NHS staff themselves each time will see off political predators bent on proving that the NHS is unsustainable.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
Another day, another front page NHS horror story. London's billboards were ablaze this week with an evening paper tale - "94-year-old abandoned in casualty". It was a good blood-boiler - a frail old lady who had fallen and concussed herself was left alone "caked in blood" and forgotten for three days in A and E for lack of a hospital bed. Except it wasn't true. There were beds, but she was kept under observation, moved to a room of her own and only sent to a ward when well enough. But despite the hospital's vigorous denials the story still appeared, repeated in the Daily Mail, deeply implanting in a million minds yet another nasty NHS snapshot. The NHS is in grave danger - not from internal failure but from external attack. A war of anecdotes has replaced most attempts at careful analysis. It is more fun to write "My hospital hell", or "My hospital heaven in a much better Spanish hospital", "My wonderful NHS birth experience", or "My neighbour's 10-hour wait for his son's cut finger". Journalists who do not usually write about health feel quite at liberty to expound their own sudden brushes with medicine, good and bad, as if this were "evidence" of the state of the NHS, taking leave of the objective analysis they would apply to other subjects. Since I write about health, I am bombarded with friends' and colleagues' NHS sagas - good and bad - as if these were triumphant "proof" of anything. A head of a TV news service told me the other day that he now "knew" the NHS could not survive: his wife had a bad NHS birth. Actually it was because the hospital at the time was undergoing a major maternity ward renovation, one of more than 200 around the country, costing 100m. To be sure the temporary decanting process had been abominably managed, but this was not the sign he took it to be that now we must reach for some radical privatising alternative. Health stories are dynamite. Inordinate gleeful space and TV time is given to any medical calamity - last week's corker happened to come from a private hospital where a young mother died. As the NHS treats a million people a day, there will never be a shortage of such tales, as indeed, there never is in "better" Europe where just such horror stories of killer surgeons or fatal injections fill their tabloid pages too. In TV news rooms I see how pushy health correspondents, competing to get their faces on screen, can always elbow their way into the running order with some souped-up NHS crisis. Only 100% perfect medicine will do now, with zero mistakes and zero below-average treatment (a statistical impossibility). Without statistics, any bad anecdote lets the press ring the death knell for a non-viable, non-survivable health service. No such excited attention greeted the first annual report of the NHS modernisation board, the body which oversees the government's 10-year plan, on which sit leaders of the royal colleges of doctors and nurses, trade unions, managers and the independent Kings Fund. Barely reported, (not at all in most papers), here is the first annual assessment of what is actually happening. This is no New Labour spin machine, for on this board sit those who shout loudest when things get bad: they have no vested interest in glossing the facts, especially as many are in the middle of tricky NHS contract negotiations. Their report charts progress so far, not startling, but progress: 597 new critical care beds, 714 new general beds, 500 more secure mental beds, 10,000 more nurses, four new medical schools to double doctors in training, 10 new major hospitals, free nursing care for people in nursing homes, 150 new rapid access chest pain clinics, 797 GPs surgeries modernised, 42 new high street walk-in health centres, 5.75m patients using the new NHS Direct telephone advice service, and more. But some of the "successes" only serve to remind us how far there is still to go: 60% of GP surgeries now see patients within 48 hours, (hardly a triumph). The number of people waiting more than 15 months for their operation fell by a third but was still 8,100 (to be eliminated by 2005). Meanwhile, seven out of 10 were treated within three months. It is not much of a boast that no hospital now has "red" alert status for dirt, while more are still "yellow" than top class "green" clean. But the money is at last flowing in - 21 new MRI scanners, 52 CT scanners and so on. For all that, the killer anecdote will always win. Meanwhile consider the absence of some old stories. Leading NHS figures, like Lord Winston, are no longer blowing the whistle, as they rightly did on Labour's disastrous first two low-spending years. So far, for the second year running there has been no winter beds crisis. The NHS dog is no longer barking, even if it is too early to start wagging its tail. However good the NHS may become, the front pages of the 75% Conservative press will still proclaim it is getting worse. Tory hopes are pinned on persuading voters this failed "Stalinist" institution can only be saved by a dose of privatisation. As a tactic it works: Labour did the same with its own outrageous "24 hours to save the NHS" slogan at the 1997 election. It is lethal for public trust in the NHS, but all politicians kick it about recklessly for their own self-interest. The recent Telegraph poll showed how voters are swayed: two thirds think the NHS is in bad shape. Yet asked about their personal experience, 86% are happy with their GP and 77% happy with their hospital treatment. What can the NHS do when people believe the Daily Mail more than the evidence of their own lives? The answer has to come from within the NHS itself. Those doctors and nurses who speak out in bad times must get used to the idea of publicly defending it in good times against its predators. Tory ideas are flowing fast: Iain Duncan Smith posits getting people to pay to visit GPs. Professor Tim Congdon, Tory economic guru, this week publishes a pamphlet calling for state spending to shrink from 40% to 25% of GDP, cutting public services to a rump with minimal vouchers for health and education to be cashed in private facilities. "Over time extra expenditure would have to be financed by parents, patients and citizens, as they saw fit." It is not just the usual Tory extremists who now play around with the idea that the NHS is beyond repair, a 1940s outfit unfit for the 21st century and the like. The prime minister and Alan Milburn deserve their own share of the blame. It is time to stop floating a clever new NHS wheeze every week. It is time they started to stand up for the basic principles of the NHS, proclaiming its growing strength and encouraging its staff. Nuts and bolts reforms being implemented by the modernisation board are bearing fruit. The more Labour talks up radical ideas using the word "private", the more they undermine trust and confirm the Tory story that an ideological revolution is required: their own facts and figures suggest otherwise.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
Another day, another front page NHS horror story. London's billboards were ablaze this week with an evening paper tale - "94-year-old abandoned in casualty". It was a good blood-boiler - a frail old lady who had fallen and concussed herself was left alone "caked in blood" and forgotten for three days in A and E for lack of a hospital bed. Except it wasn't true. There were beds, but she was kept under observation, moved to a room of her own and only sent to a ward when well enough. But despite the hospital's vigorous denials the story still appeared, repeated in the Daily Mail, deeply implanting in a million minds yet another nasty NHS snapshot. The NHS is in grave danger - not from internal failure but from external attack. A war of anecdotes has replaced most attempts at careful analysis. It is more fun to write "My hospital hell", or "My hospital heaven in a much better Spanish hospital", "My wonderful NHS birth experience", or "My neighbour's 10-hour wait for his son's cut finger". Journalists who do not usually write about health feel quite at liberty to expound their own sudden brushes with medicine, good and bad, as if this were "evidence" of the state of the NHS, taking leave of the objective analysis they would apply to other subjects. Since I write about health, I am bombarded with friends' and colleagues' NHS sagas - good and bad - as if these were triumphant "proof" of anything. A head of a TV news service told me the other day that he now "knew" the NHS could not survive: his wife had a bad NHS birth. Actually it was because the hospital at the time was undergoing a major maternity ward renovation, one of more than 200 around the country, costing 100m. To be sure the temporary decanting process had been abominably managed, but this was not the sign he took it to be that now we must reach for some radical privatising alternative. Health stories are dynamite. Inordinate gleeful space and TV time is given to any medical calamity - last week's corker happened to come from a private hospital where a young mother died. As the NHS treats a million people a day, there will never be a shortage of such tales, as indeed, there never is in "better" Europe where just such horror stories of killer surgeons or fatal injections fill their tabloid pages too. In TV news rooms I see how pushy health correspondents, competing to get their faces on screen, can always elbow their way into the running order with some souped-up NHS crisis. Only 100% perfect medicine will do now, with zero mistakes and zero below-average treatment (a statistical impossibility). Without statistics, any bad anecdote lets the press ring the death knell for a non-viable, non-survivable health service. No such excited attention greeted the first annual report of the NHS modernisation board, the body which oversees the government's 10-year plan, on which sit leaders of the royal colleges of doctors and nurses, trade unions, managers and the independent Kings Fund. Barely reported, (not at all in most papers), here is the first annual assessment of what is actually happening. This is no New Labour spin machine, for on this board sit those who shout loudest when things get bad: they have no vested interest in glossing the facts, especially as many are in the middle of tricky NHS contract negotiations. Their report charts progress so far, not startling, but progress: 597 new critical care beds, 714 new general beds, 500 more secure mental beds, 10,000 more nurses, four new medical schools to double doctors in training, 10 new major hospitals, free nursing care for people in nursing homes, 150 new rapid access chest pain clinics, 797 GPs surgeries modernised, 42 new high street walk-in health centres, 5.75m patients using the new NHS Direct telephone advice service, and more. But some of the "successes" only serve to remind us how far there is still to go: 60% of GP surgeries now see patients within 48 hours, (hardly a triumph). The number of people waiting more than 15 months for their operation fell by a third but was still 8,100 (to be eliminated by 2005). Meanwhile, seven out of 10 were treated within three months. It is not much of a boast that no hospital now has "red" alert status for dirt, while more are still "yellow" than top class "green" clean. But the money is at last flowing in - 21 new MRI scanners, 52 CT scanners and so on. For all that, the killer anecdote will always win. Meanwhile consider the absence of some old stories. Leading NHS figures, like Lord Winston, are no longer blowing the whistle, as they rightly did on Labour's disastrous first two low-spending years. So far, for the second year running there has been no winter beds crisis. The NHS dog is no longer barking, even if it is too early to start wagging its tail. However good the NHS may become, the front pages of the 75% Conservative press will still proclaim it is getting worse. Tory hopes are pinned on persuading voters this failed "Stalinist" institution can only be saved by a dose of privatisation. As a tactic it works: Labour did the same with its own outrageous "24 hours to save the NHS" slogan at the 1997 election. It is lethal for public trust in the NHS, but all politicians kick it about recklessly for their own self-interest. The recent Telegraph poll showed how voters are swayed: two thirds think the NHS is in bad shape. Yet asked about their personal experience, 86% are happy with their GP and 77% happy with their hospital treatment. What can the NHS do when people believe the Daily Mail more than the evidence of their own lives? The answer has to come from within the NHS itself. Those doctors and nurses who speak out in bad times must get used to the idea of publicly defending it in good times against its predators. Tory ideas are flowing fast: Iain Duncan Smith posits getting people to pay to visit GPs. Professor Tim Congdon, Tory economic guru, this week publishes a pamphlet calling for state spending to shrink from 40% to 25% of GDP, cutting public services to a rump with minimal vouchers for health and education to be cashed in private facilities. "Over time extra expenditure would have to be financed by parents, patients and citizens, as they saw fit." It is not just the usual Tory extremists who now play around with the idea that the NHS is beyond repair, a 1940s outfit unfit for the 21st century and the like. The prime minister and Alan Milburn deserve their own share of the blame. It is time to stop floating a clever new NHS wheeze every week. It is time they started to stand up for the basic principles of the NHS, proclaiming its growing strength and encouraging its staff. Nuts and bolts reforms being implemented by the modernisation board are bearing fruit. The more Labour talks up radical ideas using the word "private", the more they undermine trust and confirm the Tory story that an ideological revolution is required: their own facts and figures suggest otherwise.
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8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
After the season of excess come the resolutions - thinner/fitter/nicer. There may also be a nagging sense that it would be good to do something for the community. But what? Most people have a hazy idea of what volunteering might be and may shudder at the thought. Be a Brown Owl? Work in a charity shop sifting old clothes? Wheel a trolley of library books and Lucozade round a hospital? Clean out a canal? What if there is no escape from the blind old man waiting for your visit, a burden of guilt too far? The immediate manifestations of volunteering may not be 100% enticing to everyone and it is all too easy to alienate tentative would-be volunteers. Finding the right slot for each individual requires experience and sensitivity - and then it may last for life. Done badly, it may put people off for ever. As it is, half the population already does something: another 25% - 11m people - say they would "if only they were asked" but no one has. The government has waxed lyrical about the importance of volunteering, but their record so far is mixed. Millennium Volunteers, for 16 to 25-year-olds has gone well, using mostly experienced organisations such as the Prince's Trust and others. But elsewhere they have failed to use the experience of people who know how to entice volunteers and use them. Politicians always want to reinvent the wheel, eager to badge their own gleaming new organisations, often wasting money and good will. Volunteering was always fraught. Is it to produce a cheap workforce for things the state can't afford? Or is it to foster community? Should the outcome be the effectiveness of what volunteers do, or the satisfaction and community spirit engendered? In the end it has to be both, yet if matched badly the two functions can conflict. Community Service Volunteers (CSV), which places more than 150,000 volunteers a year for its 1m grant, looks with anxiety at some government spending. The government has just founded a new organisation, Experience Corps, to attract older volunteers for a walloping great 19m. It funded the new TimeBank for 27m. Many others in the same field, such as Reach, are asking the same question: why use complete beginners to start Experience Corps from scratch, employing expensive outside PR firms, the Saatchis and a host of those consultants who now increasingly descend upon large government grants? Allowing for all the usual charity rivalries, there is a storm brewing over what government can and can't do well in the voluntary field. Government does have a crucial role to play but not down at community level. Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV wants them to concentrate on opening up the institutions they run - prisons, hospitals, schools and social services - by setting targets for the number of volunteers each must use. She points to programmes in America where hard-pressed social services have a team of volunteers calling on the family of a child at risk. But here professional opposition to using volunteers is hardening. Half the hospitals use some, the other half use none at all, yet every ward has people who need company, feeding, reading to or taking outside. GPs who use volunteers for extra home visits have cut prescribing by 30%. Prisons are filled with illiterates needing tutors. Amateur eyes and ears, extra pairs of hands, befrienders, mentors, tutors and helpers would hugely improve most state services - but the professionals need to be forced to make it happen. This is not just to improve the service but to improve the local bond and the sense that these services belong to the community and not just to professionals. From next September, every 11 to 16-year-old will have to do community service as part of the national curriculum. Many schools will struggle to organise it, with hard-pressed teachers expected to devise and create suitable schemes. It will need seasoned senior volunteers to help schools set up plans, liaise with local government or hospitals. CSV says it and others can do it, using models from the best schools without each school learning from scratch. But the connection between the government and the people who have the experience on the ground often seems to be weak. The relationship between government and the voluntary sector is undergoing several reviews at once. With large sums of government money now pouring into community schemes, the voluntary sector complains it does not get a fair share and bidding for contracts can be a nightmare. Yet at the same time voluntary organisations fear becoming surrogate government agencies: many large housing associations are now hardly recognisable from housing departments. The problem is how charities can keep their freshness, originality and independence while taking on large slabs of heavily regulated state work. Figures for volunteers only emerge every three years, so we do not know yet whether government exhortations have helped slow the decline. Most people are drawn into volunteering by a friend or colleague inviting them to join in, not by M & C Saatchi. However, perusing the internet the huge array of opportunities is encouraging. It can include one-off short efforts and brief episodes: it does not have to be a long commitment. It might involve just keeping in telephone contact with a lonely person. Of the many sites, a good one to start at is do-it.org.uk where you can fill in your postcode and access an array of activities. In my patch I found this mixed bunch: painting frescos in a local day centre, being a business mentor, playing with children in Brixton prison visitors' centre, campaigning for fair trade, working in a Citizens Advice Bureau, mentoring young offenders or refugees, helping in a night shelter, mending electric buggies or knitting tiny clothes for premature babies. Local volunteering bureaux can offer more personalised ideas. Try csv.org.uk, volwork.org.uk, experiencecorps.co.uk, and timebank.org.uk.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
After the season of excess come the resolutions - thinner/fitter/nicer. There may also be a nagging sense that it would be good to do something for the community. But what? Most people have a hazy idea of what volunteering might be and may shudder at the thought. Be a Brown Owl? Work in a charity shop sifting old clothes? Wheel a trolley of library books and Lucozade round a hospital? Clean out a canal? What if there is no escape from the blind old man waiting for your visit, a burden of guilt too far? The immediate manifestations of volunteering may not be 100% enticing to everyone and it is all too easy to alienate tentative would-be volunteers. Finding the right slot for each individual requires experience and sensitivity - and then it may last for life. Done badly, it may put people off for ever. As it is, half the population already does something: another 25% - 11m people - say they would "if only they were asked" but no one has. The government has waxed lyrical about the importance of volunteering, but their record so far is mixed. Millennium Volunteers, for 16 to 25-year-olds has gone well, using mostly experienced organisations such as the Prince's Trust and others. But elsewhere they have failed to use the experience of people who know how to entice volunteers and use them. Politicians always want to reinvent the wheel, eager to badge their own gleaming new organisations, often wasting money and good will. Volunteering was always fraught. Is it to produce a cheap workforce for things the state can't afford? Or is it to foster community? Should the outcome be the effectiveness of what volunteers do, or the satisfaction and community spirit engendered? In the end it has to be both, yet if matched badly the two functions can conflict. Community Service Volunteers (CSV), which places more than 150,000 volunteers a year for its 1m grant, looks with anxiety at some government spending. The government has just founded a new organisation, Experience Corps, to attract older volunteers for a walloping great 19m. It funded the new TimeBank for 27m. Many others in the same field, such as Reach, are asking the same question: why use complete beginners to start Experience Corps from scratch, employing expensive outside PR firms, the Saatchis and a host of those consultants who now increasingly descend upon large government grants? Allowing for all the usual charity rivalries, there is a storm brewing over what government can and can't do well in the voluntary field. Government does have a crucial role to play but not down at community level. Elizabeth Hoodless of CSV wants them to concentrate on opening up the institutions they run - prisons, hospitals, schools and social services - by setting targets for the number of volunteers each must use. She points to programmes in America where hard-pressed social services have a team of volunteers calling on the family of a child at risk. But here professional opposition to using volunteers is hardening. Half the hospitals use some, the other half use none at all, yet every ward has people who need company, feeding, reading to or taking outside. GPs who use volunteers for extra home visits have cut prescribing by 30%. Prisons are filled with illiterates needing tutors. Amateur eyes and ears, extra pairs of hands, befrienders, mentors, tutors and helpers would hugely improve most state services - but the professionals need to be forced to make it happen. This is not just to improve the service but to improve the local bond and the sense that these services belong to the community and not just to professionals. From next September, every 11 to 16-year-old will have to do community service as part of the national curriculum. Many schools will struggle to organise it, with hard-pressed teachers expected to devise and create suitable schemes. It will need seasoned senior volunteers to help schools set up plans, liaise with local government or hospitals. CSV says it and others can do it, using models from the best schools without each school learning from scratch. But the connection between the government and the people who have the experience on the ground often seems to be weak. The relationship between government and the voluntary sector is undergoing several reviews at once. With large sums of government money now pouring into community schemes, the voluntary sector complains it does not get a fair share and bidding for contracts can be a nightmare. Yet at the same time voluntary organisations fear becoming surrogate government agencies: many large housing associations are now hardly recognisable from housing departments. The problem is how charities can keep their freshness, originality and independence while taking on large slabs of heavily regulated state work. Figures for volunteers only emerge every three years, so we do not know yet whether government exhortations have helped slow the decline. Most people are drawn into volunteering by a friend or colleague inviting them to join in, not by M & C Saatchi. However, perusing the internet the huge array of opportunities is encouraging. It can include one-off short efforts and brief episodes: it does not have to be a long commitment. It might involve just keeping in telephone contact with a lonely person. Of the many sites, a good one to start at is do-it.org.uk where you can fill in your postcode and access an array of activities. In my patch I found this mixed bunch: painting frescos in a local day centre, being a business mentor, playing with children in Brixton prison visitors' centre, campaigning for fair trade, working in a Citizens Advice Bureau, mentoring young offenders or refugees, helping in a night shelter, mending electric buggies or knitting tiny clothes for premature babies. Local volunteering bureaux can offer more personalised ideas. Try csv.org.uk, volwork.org.uk, experiencecorps.co.uk, and timebank.org.uk.
|
8pollytoynbee
| 1Society
|
At his new monthly press conferences, Tony Blair turns out a fine tour de force. He lays himself open to all questions, from footling local crime to great global issues. He looks unafraid, his manner warm and convincing. With elegant deftness he turns aside questions he does not want to answer. He plays off the hopeless vanity of the big cheeses among the lobby who vaunt their own questions instead of following up one after another to hammer home a previous point and dig deeper. He is master of this medium, knowing that one man exposed to a pack of hounds in public will always have the PR advantage. It is the fidgety press, not he, who winds up proceedings, bored after an hour or so, while he professes himself willing to stay and chat indefinitely. "Doesn't he do it well!" the journos say to one another between gritted teeth as they file out, feeling somehow cheated. This week's press conference was billed as the one where the butterfly would wriggle on the pin. The cabinet is against war, the party does not want it and only 53% of the public would support it even if there is full UN approval on a second resolution. Yet the Blair butterfly flapped its wings and escaped again. The effect doesn't last long. By the time the flotilla of hacks have reached the Downing Street gates, comparing notes as they go, they find there is nothing much there, another Chinese meal of a conference, hungry for more before they reach Whitehall. Then they realise the grounds for war have just shifted yet again. Last time it was because Saddam Hussein is a danger to his neighbours, has started four wars and must be stopped from launching a nuclear attack. But that line has worn thin: people see how containment works fairly well, with US bombing raids every week and no-fly enforcement. Dangerous materials may have slipped past sanctions - yet Iraq just does not look more threatening than North Korea. The real weapons of mass destruction are the hearts and minds of boys pouring out of madrassahs in our good friend Pakistan. So now the Blair argument has shifted. This week the clear and present danger is not Saddam starting another war but the danger of his weapons sold to the madrassah boys. Blair is rightly frightened about terror to come, but the missing link in his argument is this: wouldn't an attack on Iraq make such terror more - not less - likely? Dangerous materials are already loose on the global market and war will inflame a terrorist rage which can only be assuaged eventually with peace and prosperity in the region. There is no doubting the prime minister's sincerity: after all, his policy costs him more political pain than gain. Alas, that does not make him right and his moral rhetoric begins to sound naive in the real world where post-war Iraqi oil contracts are being bartered among UN security council members as the price and maybe the cause of war. His own attempt at peace in Palestine is crushed under the contemptuous White House boot. His passion on world poverty is ignored on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe if he were in the White House, he might be a great world leader. But he isn't. He has only a weak British hand to play and the only question to ask is has he maximised British influence for global good, or could he have done better with it? As the prime advocate of a joint European defence policy, he threw away the chance to bring Europe together and reconnect its citizens with a sense of purpose in the union. His global visions once seemed admirable - but now sadly misplaced in the hands of George Bush. If only the scope of his foreign dreams were matched in ambition by his visions at home. Perhaps that can change, for yesterday Tony Blair hosted a rather different event in Downing Street. It marked 10 years since the launch of Renewal, a magazine that sprung from the ruins of the 1992 election disaster. It was the thinking furnace to fire up ideas for New Labour modernisers. Tony Blair heads the list of its editorial advisory board and there collected was a room packed with many of New Labour's big brains - the advisers, the party apparat, heads of the thinktanks, cabinet brains, policy wonks, the brightest and best, (and many of those whey-faced young men who seem never to have left the artificial light of political seminar rooms). It was billed as a seminal event and so in a way it was, less for any actual ideas produced - (though there were plenty) - than for the fact that the prime minister himself recognised a need for them. Ten years ago New Labour began to shape its manifesto so that it came to power with a well-planned programme which has been carried out. Devolution, abolition of the hereditaries, a minimum wage, the New Deal, a million jobs, virtually full employment, tax credits, much more social security for children, child benefit, cash for poor pensioners, and a bigger increase than the NHS and schools ever saw before. But that was done or foreshadowed in the first term. Tony Blair promised a great leap forward in the second term, yet there has been dangerously little sign of new thinking. Delivery may be some time coming and even then expectations will run ahead, demanding more. Slowly nudging up statistics is not enough to sustain a government's momentum. So what now? A senior figure yesterday confessed, "We're crap at politics," and that is an important admission. It was said in a slightly faux self-deprecatory way, implying they were far too busy delivering to worry about spin. But politics does matter. It is the vision thing, a beacon that explains what they are doing and why. It is what makes people believe in politics and politicians. It is where trust begins and respect for politics is engendered. Tony Blair's great political fault is his refusal to deliver a clarity of ideals. He avoids taking sides, giving nothing to his allies without taking with the other hand. He is always equivocal, so every time a public service is praised, praise for the private must follow. The very word "modernise" which brought Renewal to birth is now a word damaged by daily abuse, a threat as often as a promise. Labour has evolved no new political vocabulary since then, a symptom of the lack of new political ideas for a political world changed out of recognition since 1993. This politics deficit is a curious phenomenon, for at heart Labour does not really lack ideals: it lacks the boldness to speak them out loud. The wish for social justice is there, but the vocabulary that might inspire others sticks in their throat. This meeting signified that the prime minister sees the problem. After a few years in power, all leaders have a dangerous tendency to spend too much time on foreign policy - so much more intellectually challenging. Tony Blair enunciates his big ideas globally and perhaps too grandiosely. What he lacks is some big new ideas at home, for the clever plans devised for 1997 cannot sustain Labour through the next election. Time for renewal indeed.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Polly Toynbee on the topic of Society.
|
At his new monthly press conferences, Tony Blair turns out a fine tour de force. He lays himself open to all questions, from footling local crime to great global issues. He looks unafraid, his manner warm and convincing. With elegant deftness he turns aside questions he does not want to answer. He plays off the hopeless vanity of the big cheeses among the lobby who vaunt their own questions instead of following up one after another to hammer home a previous point and dig deeper. He is master of this medium, knowing that one man exposed to a pack of hounds in public will always have the PR advantage. It is the fidgety press, not he, who winds up proceedings, bored after an hour or so, while he professes himself willing to stay and chat indefinitely. "Doesn't he do it well!" the journos say to one another between gritted teeth as they file out, feeling somehow cheated. This week's press conference was billed as the one where the butterfly would wriggle on the pin. The cabinet is against war, the party does not want it and only 53% of the public would support it even if there is full UN approval on a second resolution. Yet the Blair butterfly flapped its wings and escaped again. The effect doesn't last long. By the time the flotilla of hacks have reached the Downing Street gates, comparing notes as they go, they find there is nothing much there, another Chinese meal of a conference, hungry for more before they reach Whitehall. Then they realise the grounds for war have just shifted yet again. Last time it was because Saddam Hussein is a danger to his neighbours, has started four wars and must be stopped from launching a nuclear attack. But that line has worn thin: people see how containment works fairly well, with US bombing raids every week and no-fly enforcement. Dangerous materials may have slipped past sanctions - yet Iraq just does not look more threatening than North Korea. The real weapons of mass destruction are the hearts and minds of boys pouring out of madrassahs in our good friend Pakistan. So now the Blair argument has shifted. This week the clear and present danger is not Saddam starting another war but the danger of his weapons sold to the madrassah boys. Blair is rightly frightened about terror to come, but the missing link in his argument is this: wouldn't an attack on Iraq make such terror more - not less - likely? Dangerous materials are already loose on the global market and war will inflame a terrorist rage which can only be assuaged eventually with peace and prosperity in the region. There is no doubting the prime minister's sincerity: after all, his policy costs him more political pain than gain. Alas, that does not make him right and his moral rhetoric begins to sound naive in the real world where post-war Iraqi oil contracts are being bartered among UN security council members as the price and maybe the cause of war. His own attempt at peace in Palestine is crushed under the contemptuous White House boot. His passion on world poverty is ignored on the other side of the Atlantic. Maybe if he were in the White House, he might be a great world leader. But he isn't. He has only a weak British hand to play and the only question to ask is has he maximised British influence for global good, or could he have done better with it? As the prime advocate of a joint European defence policy, he threw away the chance to bring Europe together and reconnect its citizens with a sense of purpose in the union. His global visions once seemed admirable - but now sadly misplaced in the hands of George Bush. If only the scope of his foreign dreams were matched in ambition by his visions at home. Perhaps that can change, for yesterday Tony Blair hosted a rather different event in Downing Street. It marked 10 years since the launch of Renewal, a magazine that sprung from the ruins of the 1992 election disaster. It was the thinking furnace to fire up ideas for New Labour modernisers. Tony Blair heads the list of its editorial advisory board and there collected was a room packed with many of New Labour's big brains - the advisers, the party apparat, heads of the thinktanks, cabinet brains, policy wonks, the brightest and best, (and many of those whey-faced young men who seem never to have left the artificial light of political seminar rooms). It was billed as a seminal event and so in a way it was, less for any actual ideas produced - (though there were plenty) - than for the fact that the prime minister himself recognised a need for them. Ten years ago New Labour began to shape its manifesto so that it came to power with a well-planned programme which has been carried out. Devolution, abolition of the hereditaries, a minimum wage, the New Deal, a million jobs, virtually full employment, tax credits, much more social security for children, child benefit, cash for poor pensioners, and a bigger increase than the NHS and schools ever saw before. But that was done or foreshadowed in the first term. Tony Blair promised a great leap forward in the second term, yet there has been dangerously little sign of new thinking. Delivery may be some time coming and even then expectations will run ahead, demanding more. Slowly nudging up statistics is not enough to sustain a government's momentum. So what now? A senior figure yesterday confessed, "We're crap at politics," and that is an important admission. It was said in a slightly faux self-deprecatory way, implying they were far too busy delivering to worry about spin. But politics does matter. It is the vision thing, a beacon that explains what they are doing and why. It is what makes people believe in politics and politicians. It is where trust begins and respect for politics is engendered. Tony Blair's great political fault is his refusal to deliver a clarity of ideals. He avoids taking sides, giving nothing to his allies without taking with the other hand. He is always equivocal, so every time a public service is praised, praise for the private must follow. The very word "modernise" which brought Renewal to birth is now a word damaged by daily abuse, a threat as often as a promise. Labour has evolved no new political vocabulary since then, a symptom of the lack of new political ideas for a political world changed out of recognition since 1993. This politics deficit is a curious phenomenon, for at heart Labour does not really lack ideals: it lacks the boldness to speak them out loud. The wish for social justice is there, but the vocabulary that might inspire others sticks in their throat. This meeting signified that the prime minister sees the problem. After a few years in power, all leaders have a dangerous tendency to spend too much time on foreign policy - so much more intellectually challenging. Tony Blair enunciates his big ideas globally and perhaps too grandiosely. What he lacks is some big new ideas at home, for the clever plans devised for 1997 cannot sustain Labour through the next election. Time for renewal indeed.
|
6nickcohen
| 1Society
|
In an address given to an aptly awful audience of venture capitalists a few months ago, Tony Blair adopted the modish confessional style and told the world that his struggle to manage the public sector had left 'scars on my back'. The National Health Service was not a home for the many under-resourced and over-worked people who run the most efficient medical service in the developed world, but a swamp of vested interests. Nurses, doctors and cleaners were the élite forces of conservatism. The Prime Minister was their proletarian victim. Only the unreliable protection of an enormous Parliamentary majority and a Cabinet which will let him do anything he wants, prevented a martyrdom to rival Saint Di's. After his performance, no one had the right to be surprised when he announced that henceforth the NHS would buy operations from private hospitals. A 'concordat' had been reached with corporate medicine. 'I have always made clear that it is not a question of ideology,' he said in July when asked if further treaties were likely. Admittedly, this particular policy without ideology was the wheeze of New Labour's most influential think tank - the Conservative Party, which once was considered to be an ideologically motivated organisation. But all Third Wayers of good will and sound judgment could be relied upon to forget intellectual origins in this instance and agree that it is nothing more than plain common sense to cut waiting lists by snapping up private services. Who wouldn't prefer to be treated on demand by suddenly deferential consultants in a room of one's own, luxuriously appointed with pot plants the size of triffids, soft carpets and cable television? How many Observer readers have forgotten their loud defences of the NHS when worrying pains afflict them or their loved ones and gone private? What matters is what works. Only a weirdo and probable paedophile would sacrifice the health of a child on the alter of an exhausted ideology. The private sector delivers. It can deliver your child at the Portland Hospital, where Sarah Ferguson, Patsy Kensit, and Posh Spice were relieved of various sprogs. Those with other requirements can be sent to the Harley Street, Princess Grace or Wellington hospitals in central London. All four were brought by a company called HCA on 19 May. The US health conglomerate, which used to be called Columbia/HCA, but was forced to dance the old Windscale-Sellafield name shuffle for reasons we'll get to in a moment, added the Devonshire, Lister and London Bridge hospitals to its portfolio in June. The company intends to nab 'new facilities in markets outside the London area' as soon as possible. Commercial rivals at the London Heart Hospital are so worried by the Americans' predatory intent they are trying to excite a media campaign to persuade the Department of Trade and Industry to stop HCA creating a private monopoly in London. Sir Richard Needham, a former Conservative Health Minister who now runs the Heart, complained to me at length that HCA's associates, the PPP insurance company, had insisted their patients - sorry, customers - should be diverted from his beds to the rooms of HCA hospitals. Needham's colleagues say the loss of income may force him to sell to the Americans. You may not care about Needham's problems - I won't pretend to have been sobbing myself - when HCA seems the better product. The company's PRs boast it is 'one of London's leading healthcare providers... committed to excellence and quality through the provision of specialised healthcare services. We have established an international reputation for offering the highest quality of service in private healthcare'. They forgot to add that HCA's international reputation is somewhat tarnished. On 19 May it agreed to pay $745 million (500m) to the US Justice Department for the greatest fraud in American medical history, without admitting liability, after two executives had been jailed. When other alleged scams are resolved the final fine will be about a billion dollars. By purchasing private beds for public patients, New Labour is imitating American health care. The US government uses the Medicare and Medicaid national insurance schemes to pay 'independent' hospitals to treat working-class and elderly Americans. (The poor are left to suffer and die without health cover.) Charitable institutions with a rudimentary grasp of medical ethics are being taken over by medical conglomerates which seek to maximise profits. The US authorities cannot have officials on the spot to check that treatment is necessary and bills are accurate - if they did, they might as well go for the full Soviet terror of a 'socialistic' national health service administered by the state. The result of a freeish market is pervasive fraud. June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General of the US Department of Health, estimated that private hospitals were overpaid by $23 billion (15bn) a year. Fourteen cents in every dollar spent on health were stolen from the government by accident or design. Tales of scams fill the US press. There were the psychiatric hospitals which refused to release cash-earning patients even when they had recovered their wits; the psychologists who billed for 24 hours of therapy a day; and the health-company owners who claimed their son's first BMW was a medical expense. The FBI investigation into HCA showed corruption went beyond the odd rotten apple. 'Columbia's fraudulent cost-reporting practices have infected the cost reports of virtually every health care facility,' the US government said in its affidavit. As in Britain, HCA had engaged in the vigorous buying of beds and built a network of 340 hospitals. It was then able to add new euphemisms to the dictionary of fraud. Its executives tried 'upcoding': the exaggeration of the seriousness of an illness to receive higher fees; 'gaming': the double billing of the state; and 'physician partnerships': the practice of offering doctors shares, subsidised offices and directorships in return to steering patients to HCA hospitals. Mark Gardner, who worked in three Columbia hospitals, testified: 'I committed felonies every day. Let me tell you this a ruthless greedy company. Employees are the largest operating expense. Cut that to the bone. Cut nursing to the bone.' The instructions were obeyed to the letter. One nurse told how she was left to watch 80 heart monitors by herself. John W. Schilling, another whistleblower, said the company was confident it could avoid detection. Advertising and marketing costs were passed off as medical necessities and when the danger of a government auditor getting too close to the truth grew, he was told to buy her off with a job offer. Their testimony sounds strange to British ears. Yet Action for Proper Regulation of Private Hospitals (whose website at www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk I urge you to read before paying for treatment) suggests that many American vices are here in embryo. Private hospitals are dangerous places. They don't have the emergency teams of the NHS and their lovely single rooms are not the safest places to be when you need to attract attention urgently. For all the pampering on offer at HCA's Portland Hospital, the death rate of pregnant women is five times above the national average, as we reported last week. Their parasitic nature is well known - they rely on the NHS to train their staff and to take their patients when an operation goes wrong or an insurance company refuses to pay for complicated treatment - but their imitation of US practices deserves a wider audience. The British Medical Journal claimed in 1993 that at least one-third of all private 'hysterectomies... are unnecessary', while the growth in the number of 'therapeutically useless' removals of tonsils was an 'epidemic'. The NHS, by contrast, has no interest in overcharging or performing pointless operations, quite the reverse. The largest employer in Europe is remarkably free of fiddles in all areas except one: consultants skipping NHS commitments to work in the private sector. There is a perverse incentive: unscrupulous consultants benefit if they persuade patients to pay to see them privately. Invariably, the consultants with the longest waiting lists are those with the largest private practices. Instead of buying out consultants and giving them the generous salaries they deserve - for these are skilled men and women - to work exclusively for the NHS, the Government is making the perverse incentive more attractive still by pumping public funds to the likes of HCA. It claims that it will ensure that health authorities get value for money. If you were to point out that the US Government which has decades of experience of auditing private hospitals still cannot prevent fraud which would dazzle a mafioso, you would be dismissed as an ideological dinosaur. HCA has the advertising slogan 'You've Never Seen Health Care Like This Before'. Indeed you have not. But soon you may.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Nick Cohen on the topic of Society.
|
In an address given to an aptly awful audience of venture capitalists a few months ago, Tony Blair adopted the modish confessional style and told the world that his struggle to manage the public sector had left 'scars on my back'. The National Health Service was not a home for the many under-resourced and over-worked people who run the most efficient medical service in the developed world, but a swamp of vested interests. Nurses, doctors and cleaners were the élite forces of conservatism. The Prime Minister was their proletarian victim. Only the unreliable protection of an enormous Parliamentary majority and a Cabinet which will let him do anything he wants, prevented a martyrdom to rival Saint Di's. After his performance, no one had the right to be surprised when he announced that henceforth the NHS would buy operations from private hospitals. A 'concordat' had been reached with corporate medicine. 'I have always made clear that it is not a question of ideology,' he said in July when asked if further treaties were likely. Admittedly, this particular policy without ideology was the wheeze of New Labour's most influential think tank - the Conservative Party, which once was considered to be an ideologically motivated organisation. But all Third Wayers of good will and sound judgment could be relied upon to forget intellectual origins in this instance and agree that it is nothing more than plain common sense to cut waiting lists by snapping up private services. Who wouldn't prefer to be treated on demand by suddenly deferential consultants in a room of one's own, luxuriously appointed with pot plants the size of triffids, soft carpets and cable television? How many Observer readers have forgotten their loud defences of the NHS when worrying pains afflict them or their loved ones and gone private? What matters is what works. Only a weirdo and probable paedophile would sacrifice the health of a child on the alter of an exhausted ideology. The private sector delivers. It can deliver your child at the Portland Hospital, where Sarah Ferguson, Patsy Kensit, and Posh Spice were relieved of various sprogs. Those with other requirements can be sent to the Harley Street, Princess Grace or Wellington hospitals in central London. All four were brought by a company called HCA on 19 May. The US health conglomerate, which used to be called Columbia/HCA, but was forced to dance the old Windscale-Sellafield name shuffle for reasons we'll get to in a moment, added the Devonshire, Lister and London Bridge hospitals to its portfolio in June. The company intends to nab 'new facilities in markets outside the London area' as soon as possible. Commercial rivals at the London Heart Hospital are so worried by the Americans' predatory intent they are trying to excite a media campaign to persuade the Department of Trade and Industry to stop HCA creating a private monopoly in London. Sir Richard Needham, a former Conservative Health Minister who now runs the Heart, complained to me at length that HCA's associates, the PPP insurance company, had insisted their patients - sorry, customers - should be diverted from his beds to the rooms of HCA hospitals. Needham's colleagues say the loss of income may force him to sell to the Americans. You may not care about Needham's problems - I won't pretend to have been sobbing myself - when HCA seems the better product. The company's PRs boast it is 'one of London's leading healthcare providers... committed to excellence and quality through the provision of specialised healthcare services. We have established an international reputation for offering the highest quality of service in private healthcare'. They forgot to add that HCA's international reputation is somewhat tarnished. On 19 May it agreed to pay $745 million (500m) to the US Justice Department for the greatest fraud in American medical history, without admitting liability, after two executives had been jailed. When other alleged scams are resolved the final fine will be about a billion dollars. By purchasing private beds for public patients, New Labour is imitating American health care. The US government uses the Medicare and Medicaid national insurance schemes to pay 'independent' hospitals to treat working-class and elderly Americans. (The poor are left to suffer and die without health cover.) Charitable institutions with a rudimentary grasp of medical ethics are being taken over by medical conglomerates which seek to maximise profits. The US authorities cannot have officials on the spot to check that treatment is necessary and bills are accurate - if they did, they might as well go for the full Soviet terror of a 'socialistic' national health service administered by the state. The result of a freeish market is pervasive fraud. June Gibbs Brown, Inspector General of the US Department of Health, estimated that private hospitals were overpaid by $23 billion (15bn) a year. Fourteen cents in every dollar spent on health were stolen from the government by accident or design. Tales of scams fill the US press. There were the psychiatric hospitals which refused to release cash-earning patients even when they had recovered their wits; the psychologists who billed for 24 hours of therapy a day; and the health-company owners who claimed their son's first BMW was a medical expense. The FBI investigation into HCA showed corruption went beyond the odd rotten apple. 'Columbia's fraudulent cost-reporting practices have infected the cost reports of virtually every health care facility,' the US government said in its affidavit. As in Britain, HCA had engaged in the vigorous buying of beds and built a network of 340 hospitals. It was then able to add new euphemisms to the dictionary of fraud. Its executives tried 'upcoding': the exaggeration of the seriousness of an illness to receive higher fees; 'gaming': the double billing of the state; and 'physician partnerships': the practice of offering doctors shares, subsidised offices and directorships in return to steering patients to HCA hospitals. Mark Gardner, who worked in three Columbia hospitals, testified: 'I committed felonies every day. Let me tell you this a ruthless greedy company. Employees are the largest operating expense. Cut that to the bone. Cut nursing to the bone.' The instructions were obeyed to the letter. One nurse told how she was left to watch 80 heart monitors by herself. John W. Schilling, another whistleblower, said the company was confident it could avoid detection. Advertising and marketing costs were passed off as medical necessities and when the danger of a government auditor getting too close to the truth grew, he was told to buy her off with a job offer. Their testimony sounds strange to British ears. Yet Action for Proper Regulation of Private Hospitals (whose website at www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk I urge you to read before paying for treatment) suggests that many American vices are here in embryo. Private hospitals are dangerous places. They don't have the emergency teams of the NHS and their lovely single rooms are not the safest places to be when you need to attract attention urgently. For all the pampering on offer at HCA's Portland Hospital, the death rate of pregnant women is five times above the national average, as we reported last week. Their parasitic nature is well known - they rely on the NHS to train their staff and to take their patients when an operation goes wrong or an insurance company refuses to pay for complicated treatment - but their imitation of US practices deserves a wider audience. The British Medical Journal claimed in 1993 that at least one-third of all private 'hysterectomies... are unnecessary', while the growth in the number of 'therapeutically useless' removals of tonsils was an 'epidemic'. The NHS, by contrast, has no interest in overcharging or performing pointless operations, quite the reverse. The largest employer in Europe is remarkably free of fiddles in all areas except one: consultants skipping NHS commitments to work in the private sector. There is a perverse incentive: unscrupulous consultants benefit if they persuade patients to pay to see them privately. Invariably, the consultants with the longest waiting lists are those with the largest private practices. Instead of buying out consultants and giving them the generous salaries they deserve - for these are skilled men and women - to work exclusively for the NHS, the Government is making the perverse incentive more attractive still by pumping public funds to the likes of HCA. It claims that it will ensure that health authorities get value for money. If you were to point out that the US Government which has decades of experience of auditing private hospitals still cannot prevent fraud which would dazzle a mafioso, you would be dismissed as an ideological dinosaur. HCA has the advertising slogan 'You've Never Seen Health Care Like This Before'. Indeed you have not. But soon you may.
|
6nickcohen
| 1Society
|
I know you should not judge by appearances, but 'Mrs B' doesn't look like a child killer. To use old-fashioned language, she is motherly - a plump, rosy-cheeked woman of Kent, whom nature seemed to have created to raise children. Kent social services soon put a stop to that. In 1999, Mrs B gave birth to a daughter. The child suffered fits that would have baffled previous generations of doctors, but which modern doctors could label with an impressively scientific name. Two concluded that Mrs B was poisoning the girl because she was an attention-seeker suffering from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. First, they claimed she had fed her tranquillisers. There was no trace of tranquilliser in the child's blood, hair or urine. Then they claimed she had injected her with water from a flower bowl or lavatory. One of Britain's foremost toxicologists said the idea that either could have caused fits was nonsense. The family paediatrician said he found the allegations absurd. The evidence was so feeble the police didn't investigate. No matter. In 2003, the Family Division of the High Court, sitting in closed session, upheld the decision to take the girl from her mother and send her to live with relatives 200 miles away. Curiously, since the authorities had declared that Mrs B was an insane and depraved woman, the courts allowed her to keep her other two daughters. I don't know how to explain this - maybe it's a miracle - but they survive in rude health. The Family Division might have been designed to allow miscarriages of justice. Judges need only find the case against parents proven 'on the balance of probabilities' rather than 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable questioning of their decisions by outsiders is next to impossible because it is a contempt of court to reveal what has gone on. The formal reason for secrecy is that it prevents the media identifying children - and, undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which they need protecting. When there is an injustice, however, it is in the interests of parents and child for the mother to be able to exercise a free woman's right to make a fuss by going to the papers, local TV station, her councillors and MP. In normal circumstances, the law would have stymied Mrs B, but she had two strokes of luck. The first was that her solicitor was Sarah Harman. This case has come close to ruining Harman. The best part of the past 18 months has been the admiring tributes. At the Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal last week, clients, judges and fellow solicitors spoke of a lawyer of the highest integrity who 'looks to right injustice wherever she finds it'. People who know her rely on her. After Michael Stone murdered Josie Russell's mother and sister, her father Shaun asked Harman to be Josie's trustee and protect her interests. If you need to smash your way through a brick wall, she is a good lawyer to have holding your coat. Mrs B was also fortunate that by 2003 politicians were belatedly realising that like many another secret world the Family Division was liable to be swept by pseudo-scientific manias. The spark for their concern was the quashing by the Court of Appeal of the convictions of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and others allegedly driven mad by Munchausen's. The evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow which had sent them down for child killing was revealed to be tosh. It was not just his cockeyed testimony. The Court of Appeal wisely noticed that doctors were trying to identify illnesses that 'may be unexplained today [but] perfectly well understood tomorrow'. When medieval cartographers did not know what lay beyond the mountains they filled the blank spaces on their maps with 'There be dragons'. Much the same had happened in English law. When no one could explain injuries or illnesses, Meadow and his associates filled the blank spaces with pictures of monstrous women. Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, announced a review that was potentially more explosive than the Court of Appeal's verdicts. Whatever else Angela Cannings and Sally Clark had suffered, their friends and families could at least protest loudly and in public. Hodge was to look at 5,000 Family Division cases with disputed medical evidence where the courts had taken away children in secret. Well, thought Sarah Harman, if there's at last going to be a review I want my client's voice heard. She sent details of Mrs B's case to the local MP and to her sister Harriet Harman, the solicitor-general, who passed them to Hodge. Nothing they saw identified Mrs B's daughter. Mrs B also spoke to the Daily Mail and the BBC. Nothing was printed or broadcast which identified the girl. Closed systems hate daylight. Kent County Council went ape and claimed that Sarah Harman was in contempt of court for talking to politicians and the press. It was far from clear that she was. No other common law democracy imposes such restrictions on child care cases. Even in Scotland, what Sarah Harman had done would not have raised an eyebrow. Kent County Council itself discussed Mrs B with Roy Meadow, even though he was not a witness in the case. If Sarah Harman were guilty of contempt of court, so were its officers, presumably. Mr Justice Munby heard the argument. On one point all sides agreed: Sarah Harman was slow to disclose what she had done to the court. She had a good excuse. Her doctors had just told her she was suffering from cancer, and she had to endure two bouts of emergency surgery while she was fighting to defend her reputation. You might have forgiven her for being a touch confused. Munby didn't forgive and threw the book at her. She was in contempt of court and had misled the court, he declared. No one had the right to discuss a Family Division case with anyone - not with the Children's Minister or the solicitor-general or their MP. People talk about judicial activism, but this was judicial totalitarianism. Britain is a parliamentary democracy, but Munby was saying that citizens who brought their grievances to their elected representatives were in contempt of court. Harman had to pay £20,000 in legal costs. The punishments didn't stop there. Last week the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard Kent County Council's complaint against Sarah Harman and banned her from practising law for three months. It is an ugly but typical picture of the legal establishment thumping critics when its faults are exposed. The backlash won't work and isn't working. Parliament reacted to Munby's treatment of Sarah Harman by changing the rules and giving citizens the right to discuss injustices. More reform is coming, albeit slowly and timorously. Even Mr Justice Munby told Parliament that he did not think 'the existing rules are necessary'. The old regime will die, but it is getting its pound of flesh before it goes. Sarah Harman has had her good name blackened and spent so many thousands of pounds defending herself that she has given up counting. I'm not saying all the 5,000 parents who had their children snatched were innocent. But the pathetic and frankly incredible review of their treatment found that in only one case - that's right, just one - did the Family Division get it wrong. Despite the scandal, despite the General Medical Council striking Meadow's name from the medical register, 'Mrs B' and 4,998 others are still being punished as child abusers. BBC1's adaptation of Bleak House continues at 4.10 this afternoon.
|
article_from_author_topic
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of {{
[
"Catherine Bennett",
"George Monbiot",
"Hugo Young",
"Jonathan Freedland",
"Martin Kettle",
"Mary Riddell",
"Nick Cohen",
"Peter Preston",
"Polly Toynbee",
"Roy Hattersley",
"Simon Hoggart",
"Will Hutton",
"Zoe Williams"
] [author]
}} on the topic of {{
[
"Politics",
"Society",
"UK",
"World",
"Books"
] [topic]
}}. |||
{{article}}
|
Generate an article based on the writing style of Nick Cohen on the topic of Society.
|
I know you should not judge by appearances, but 'Mrs B' doesn't look like a child killer. To use old-fashioned language, she is motherly - a plump, rosy-cheeked woman of Kent, whom nature seemed to have created to raise children. Kent social services soon put a stop to that. In 1999, Mrs B gave birth to a daughter. The child suffered fits that would have baffled previous generations of doctors, but which modern doctors could label with an impressively scientific name. Two concluded that Mrs B was poisoning the girl because she was an attention-seeker suffering from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. First, they claimed she had fed her tranquillisers. There was no trace of tranquilliser in the child's blood, hair or urine. Then they claimed she had injected her with water from a flower bowl or lavatory. One of Britain's foremost toxicologists said the idea that either could have caused fits was nonsense. The family paediatrician said he found the allegations absurd. The evidence was so feeble the police didn't investigate. No matter. In 2003, the Family Division of the High Court, sitting in closed session, upheld the decision to take the girl from her mother and send her to live with relatives 200 miles away. Curiously, since the authorities had declared that Mrs B was an insane and depraved woman, the courts allowed her to keep her other two daughters. I don't know how to explain this - maybe it's a miracle - but they survive in rude health. The Family Division might have been designed to allow miscarriages of justice. Judges need only find the case against parents proven 'on the balance of probabilities' rather than 'beyond reasonable doubt'. Reasonable questioning of their decisions by outsiders is next to impossible because it is a contempt of court to reveal what has gone on. The formal reason for secrecy is that it prevents the media identifying children - and, undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which they need protecting. When there is an injustice, however, it is in the interests of parents and child for the mother to be able to exercise a free woman's right to make a fuss by going to the papers, local TV station, her councillors and MP. In normal circumstances, the law would have stymied Mrs B, but she had two strokes of luck. The first was that her solicitor was Sarah Harman. This case has come close to ruining Harman. The best part of the past 18 months has been the admiring tributes. At the Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal last week, clients, judges and fellow solicitors spoke of a lawyer of the highest integrity who 'looks to right injustice wherever she finds it'. People who know her rely on her. After Michael Stone murdered Josie Russell's mother and sister, her father Shaun asked Harman to be Josie's trustee and protect her interests. If you need to smash your way through a brick wall, she is a good lawyer to have holding your coat. Mrs B was also fortunate that by 2003 politicians were belatedly realising that like many another secret world the Family Division was liable to be swept by pseudo-scientific manias. The spark for their concern was the quashing by the Court of Appeal of the convictions of Sally Clark, Angela Cannings and others allegedly driven mad by Munchausen's. The evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow which had sent them down for child killing was revealed to be tosh. It was not just his cockeyed testimony. The Court of Appeal wisely noticed that doctors were trying to identify illnesses that 'may be unexplained today [but] perfectly well understood tomorrow'. When medieval cartographers did not know what lay beyond the mountains they filled the blank spaces on their maps with 'There be dragons'. Much the same had happened in English law. When no one could explain injuries or illnesses, Meadow and his associates filled the blank spaces with pictures of monstrous women. Margaret Hodge, the Children's Minister, announced a review that was potentially more explosive than the Court of Appeal's verdicts. Whatever else Angela Cannings and Sally Clark had suffered, their friends and families could at least protest loudly and in public. Hodge was to look at 5,000 Family Division cases with disputed medical evidence where the courts had taken away children in secret. Well, thought Sarah Harman, if there's at last going to be a review I want my client's voice heard. She sent details of Mrs B's case to the local MP and to her sister Harriet Harman, the solicitor-general, who passed them to Hodge. Nothing they saw identified Mrs B's daughter. Mrs B also spoke to the Daily Mail and the BBC. Nothing was printed or broadcast which identified the girl. Closed systems hate daylight. Kent County Council went ape and claimed that Sarah Harman was in contempt of court for talking to politicians and the press. It was far from clear that she was. No other common law democracy imposes such restrictions on child care cases. Even in Scotland, what Sarah Harman had done would not have raised an eyebrow. Kent County Council itself discussed Mrs B with Roy Meadow, even though he was not a witness in the case. If Sarah Harman were guilty of contempt of court, so were its officers, presumably. Mr Justice Munby heard the argument. On one point all sides agreed: Sarah Harman was slow to disclose what she had done to the court. She had a good excuse. Her doctors had just told her she was suffering from cancer, and she had to endure two bouts of emergency surgery while she was fighting to defend her reputation. You might have forgiven her for being a touch confused. Munby didn't forgive and threw the book at her. She was in contempt of court and had misled the court, he declared. No one had the right to discuss a Family Division case with anyone - not with the Children's Minister or the solicitor-general or their MP. People talk about judicial activism, but this was judicial totalitarianism. Britain is a parliamentary democracy, but Munby was saying that citizens who brought their grievances to their elected representatives were in contempt of court. Harman had to pay £20,000 in legal costs. The punishments didn't stop there. Last week the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal heard Kent County Council's complaint against Sarah Harman and banned her from practising law for three months. It is an ugly but typical picture of the legal establishment thumping critics when its faults are exposed. The backlash won't work and isn't working. Parliament reacted to Munby's treatment of Sarah Harman by changing the rules and giving citizens the right to discuss injustices. More reform is coming, albeit slowly and timorously. Even Mr Justice Munby told Parliament that he did not think 'the existing rules are necessary'. The old regime will die, but it is getting its pound of flesh before it goes. Sarah Harman has had her good name blackened and spent so many thousands of pounds defending herself that she has given up counting. I'm not saying all the 5,000 parents who had their children snatched were innocent. But the pathetic and frankly incredible review of their treatment found that in only one case - that's right, just one - did the Family Division get it wrong. Despite the scandal, despite the General Medical Council striking Meadow's name from the medical register, 'Mrs B' and 4,998 others are still being punished as child abusers. BBC1's adaptation of Bleak House continues at 4.10 this afternoon.
|
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