Unfortunately Feeling Compelled To Be A 'Nimby'

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'nimby' comes from 'not in my back yard' referring to people complaining about developments in their area.  Such an attitude has caused immense problems for the UK and is one reason why we have a shortage of prisons, drug rehabilitation centres, social housing, wind farms and even graveyards.  UK residents despise change.  They do not like 'others' coming into their area.  This was noticeable in the new town, Milton Keynes, where I used to live.  The town is laid out on a grid pattern and one-by-one over the past four decades these grids are filled in with new housing.  The trouble is much of the housing is very middle class, fine for people who can afford it, but it has meant that shops like Tescos have to bus in lower-paid staff from Luton, 27 Km away as none of them can find affordable accommodation locally.  The sensible solution seemed to be to build social housing in one of the grids close to the large shopping centre in the South-East of the town.  This was too much for the residents of neighbouring grids who went and vandalised equipment on the building site in an attempt to stop social housing coming anywhere near their middle class enclaves.  It is fascinating how such residents portray the potential newcomers as feckless, drug addicts, alcoholics, noisy and dirty.  They do not connect them with the people who serve them their luxury delicatessen items in the supermarket or clean up when one of their offspring makes a mess.  The main concern for the residents was that the value of their houses is sliding as a result of these social housing areas.  There is no sense that if the supermarkets close for lack of staff then the price will fall anyway.  In Milton Keynes the districts are divided by dual-carriageway roads on which most of, cars travel at 70 mph, which is as good a ghetto forming barrier as any.

Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself.  Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite.  My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street.  I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street.  Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s.  It has been empty for over three weeks now.  It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company.  The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open.  We had assumed that the windows would be replaced.  However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up.  Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.

Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets.  These were distributed all over the street.  Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings.  Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses.  What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea.  Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.

After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line.  Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns.  The perpetrators had fled.  Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden).  My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes.  Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses?  These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing.  I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country.  However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties.  The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged.  My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.

These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby.  I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change.  I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students.  However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors.  The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done.  I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime.  Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down.  People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence.  Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in.  I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals.  However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.

How Inflexible The System Is When You Get Temporary Work

As I have often noted on this blog, I have now been out of work for nine months. I have had a little work, adding up to a total of 7 weeks and 3 days, which I suppose means that I have only been unemployed for six months and twenty-seven days. However, that ephemeral work hardly felt like a proper job and certainly my career is no less derailed than when I was made redundant last June. I have been signing on at the Job Centre Plus and fulfilling all their requirements very carefully. After six months, the contribution-based Jobseeker's Allowance ran out, but I could not get the Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, because I happened to live in a house with a woman who ran her own business that meant she worke more than 24 hours per week. It did not matter that in a good year she earnt £12,000 (€14,280; US$18,120) per year and due to the recession was making a loss, so she was not in much position to contribute to the household income. The fact that she worked more than 24 hours meant I got no unemployment benefit or mortgage interest benefit; I did get National Insurance credits, but of course never see them, they just go to another part of the civil service. Hence the rush to dispose of the house before it was repossessed. This is one reason why there is a difference between the number of people who are unemployed and the number of people receiving benefit for being unemployed. David Cameron notes very proudly when the latter figure goes down as if it was a benefit to the entire country rather than just the Treasury. In fact, all it marks is that another set of people have fallen foul of the tricksy regulations around such benefits. They do nothing to encourage people to try even harder to find work, they simply cut off even the meagre benefits they are receiving.

The requirements of signing on, even if you are not actually receiving benefits, mean that you have to be 'actively looking for work', this entails carrying out three activities (e.g. going to the Job Centre, reading a newspaper, calling an employment agency) each week. I was also compelled to apply for two jobs each week and after six months to apply for any job that I was deemed to be suitable for. This latter condition was quite laughable, because even in my own industry I got such negative (even hostile at times) feedback from some interviews that it seemed that even trying to get back into work I had done before, I was no longer seen as 'suitable'.

I was also encouraged to find temporary and part-time work. I am not averse to that, as proven by my two periods of temporary work. I am signed up with three employment agencies, but they seem unable to find anything for me. In a depression as we are currently experiencing, unemployment figures are kept lower by people who previously had full-time jobs taking part-time and temporary work. This is why female unemployment tends to rise slower and fall quicker, because a lot of such jobs, for example, in caring and retail, tend to appoint women rather than men. In the UK we consider someone going even on to say 18 hours per week, to no longer be unemployed, even though previously they had always worked 37.5 hours per week.
 
So, as in the 1980s, with a weak economy, temporary work is back in flavour. Do the government and local authorities then make it easy for someone to go in and out of temporary work so as to encourage people to take it up? Of course not. If the work is anything over a week you have to sign off from the Job Centre. Even if you just do 6 days' part-time work you have to start all over again with the application form and having the interviews and stating what you will do to find work. The cost of doing this for people who have found one or two weeks' work must be phenomenal. I turned up after my week's work and had to write and say everything that had precisely been on my file less than a fortnight earlier. Of course, having a new claim means there is a delay in getting benefits. If you have worked for a week or a fortnight, you are unlikely to be paid until the end of that month, in my case and many others, not until the end of the following month, so taking on work, in the short term, leaves you short of funds whilst the benefits are processed once again. This is hardly an incentive to take on temporary work, especially when your housing benefit is dependent on you receiving Jobseeker's Allowance.

There is a further complication which does nothing to reduce unemployment in the longer term.  After six months of signing on for Jobseeker's Allowance you begin to become eligible for training courses.  These can vary between a short course on a particular package to the Department of Work & Pensions allowing you to attend a college a certain number of days per week to entirely retrain without them stopping your benefits.  The trouble is, even if you take a week's temporary work, your 'clock' is reset to zero.  So after my one week's work in November I returned to sign on as if I had not been unemployed for the preceding five months.  Once I finish my current work I will again start as if I had not been unemployed for half of last year and part of this year.  I have been in work for only 7 weeks out of 30 but when I sign on again the 23 weeks of unemployment are disregarded and I have to start again being unemployed for six months before I can go on training.

It seems apparent after applying for seventy positions and attending 22 interviews that my sector is in trouble.  Many sectors are, but I might widen my chances by retraining.  However, nine fragmented months of unemployment does not count, it has to be six months unbroken.  I have been encouraged to take temporary work and certainly welcome the little bits of money it has brought in.  However, in terms of getting me into a permanent job or even one that lasts six months rather than just six weeks, I have done myself, and thus the state, a disfavour.  Again, very short-sighted policies make it harder not easier to get off benefits for the long term.

Dealing with the Department of Work & Pensions, time after time, saying the same thing again and again just because you have got bits of work. Dealing with the local authorities is far harder. In the UK local councils pay out the benefits to help with your council tax payments (effectively giving you a discount on that) and housing benefit (which is currently being constrained far more by central government). Now every council has different rules and procedures for applying for such benefit. The town I am currently in, sends print outs covering four sheets of A4 paper every time there is even a minimal change to your circumstances.

When our student lodger left one week earlier than planned we had four pages of calculations to tell us we would receive £3.95 (€4.70; US$5.96) more in council tax benefit than previously advised. When I first signed on they sent me a council tax refund which I felt was short-sighted of them, and it has proven to be the case. Taking my first week's temporary work before Christmas led them to send me a form to complete again, this covered 16 pages, though fortunately most of it was irrelevant.

The woman in my house was again sent an even longer form which requested all details of her business. It contained patronising advice about how she should run her business and wanted all the details of her private and business accounts and three months' worth of income, though of course, they had had this data just a few weeks before. She was angry at this request, because as she pointed out, it was me, not her who was claiming the benefit.

Now, I have had six weeks' work and my Jobseeker's Allowance stopped when I started the work. Within days of me doing that, I receive a demand from the council for the outstanding council tax, which is £280 (€333; US$422), which is just £27 more than the refund they gave me last summer. Of course, again I was not paid until the end of February, but the demand was to be paid on 6th February. How is it that the council assumes that the moment you start work, you suddenly have money? I wish it was the case, but in fact, again I had to wait until 28th February to get any pay for the work I did in January and will have to wait to the very end of this month for the work I did in February.

When you have been out of work as long as me, you do not have a slush fund to suddenly pay off new demands. In addition after this later, six weeks of employment, we have to start all over again, as if the council never knew anything about me. There is a good chance that they will have to refund some of the money I paid out at the start of February (having had to borrow more to cover it until I got paid). Is this efficient? No. I have a file full of paper about this, with money going back and forth between me and the council on the basis of some very complex formula which must be using up council funds to administer, if this is how much work, just my single case generates.

Temporary work is by definition a temporary solution, it is not a permanent job. Even so-called permanent jobs these days are only 1 or 2-year contracts, not really enough time to become established. We are in a context in which in a desire to see the unemployment figures fall even a little, civil servants will encourage you to take short-term temporary work. However, given that mass unemployment is going to be a characteristic of the next few years, probably the rest of this decade, we need to move to a benefit system that actually encourages you not only to take temporary work, but to be honest about it when you do. Making you jump through tiresome administrative hoops due to a few weeks' or even just days' work is wasteful and encourages people simply to conceal their temporary work. The attitude of my local council, which I accept is probably not universal, but is likely to be occurring in quite a few towns, is ridiculous, with no appreciation of how people are paid in the 21st century or how just because you have a job does not mean suddenly you have lots of money. In fact, for the initial days and weeks, you are liable to be worse off, having to pay for transport costs, clean clothes, food for lunches, etc.

My suggestion is that claims should simply be suspended for 4 weeks (perhaps 8 weeks would be better) when you get temporary work. Your 'clock' for eligibility for free training should be frozen, not reset.  If you go back unemployed within that time you should not be compelled to make a new claim, simply pick up where you left off. Councils should levy no charges on people until they have been at work for at least a month if not six weeks. In this way you will encourage people to take temporary work knowing they are not suddenly going to get demands for money the day they start it.

A little realism will make life a great deal easier for people, and in fact, save the central and local governments money by reducing all this duplicated paperwork they insist you do.When I got the one week's work, even before I had done the job I had a demand from the council that I provide two consecutive pay slips (which was never going to happen for a job lasting a week). I pointed out that I had not actually received any pay for the job yet and would not do so until the end of the following month. They did not seem to understand that these days most people are paid a month in arrears. They seem to think all temporary work is cash in hand. However, then, why do they think you would get two pay slips? In most jobs you get one per month. Ultimately I was compelled to send a certificate of earnings to be completed by my employer. The council demanded that this was completed before the month I had worked in was up, even though I did not actually receive any pay for a further four weeks. When I pointed this out, I was told I had to apply for a delay on the demand, generating yet more paper. Why cannot the council simply come into the 21st century and see how people work and are paid these days?

Since the 1980s, many employers in the public, as well as the private, sector have liked having part-time and temporary workers because they have fewer rights. This gap has been narrowed a great deal, but a relative of mine was laid off after 12 months in her job with the employer explicitly saying that it was so that she did not qualify for the rights that come after a year in employment, such as being able to take an employer to a tribunal (this is being extended to 2 years at the moment). There is an assumption by employers and the current government, that if you give people rights at work, somehow they will instantly use them and burden the company 'unnecessarily'. This shows the enduring arrogance of too many employers and their supporters in government. There is apparently no recognition that the constant 'churn' of workers on this basis actually costs companies money, not least in regular training of new staff and the inefficiency of people who have no experience in the company. However, flexibility is king and these benefits are dismissed.

Cameras Off? Excuse to Drive Like an Idiot?

Back in August it was announced that the Road Safety Grant, like so much other central government funding was going to be ceased.  The grant was around £80-£100 million per year and was given to local authorities to install and maintain their speed cameras.  Ironically, it was a self-funded grant as the number of people breaking the speed limit in the UK remains so high that fines which were handed over from local authorities to central government were the same as the grant.  Interestingly, national government is still happy to take the fines, but will no longer fund the speed cameras.  Of course, local authorities, being charged with making cuts somewhere from 25%-40%, saw no sense in continuing with the speed cameras, which cost £40,000 each, because they get no money from them.

Speed cameras have always been controversial and online you can read how they were apparently part of Gordon Brown's 'Stasi state' (the Stasi being the secret police of East Germany), though ironically the first mobile speed cameras were introduced in 1982 under the Thatcher government.  The technology had existed since 1905.  Cameras are not only used to catch speeders but also people driving private cars down bus lanes or jumping red lights or approaching level crossings, and, around the City of London for security.  They attracted greatest attention, however, from 1999 when Safety Camera Partnerships were introduced to promote the use of the cameras with 15% of the revenue from fines being used to improve road safety.  Whilst the scheme ended in 2007, this use of the fine revenue to boost road safety in general and not simply to install or maintain cameras continued.  The fines from speed cameras averaged around £1.3 million (€1.59 million; US$202 million) per year which suggests a lot of people violating traffic laws.  They were increasingly portrayed as simply revenue raisers for local authorities and this led in the early 2000s to attacks on the cameras.  Right-wing councils in the late 2000s began to be swayed by the populist arguments against them and in 2009 Swindon, which has an appalling road network (I tried to navigate it back in August), was the first to switch off its cameras, followed by Oxfordshire county council in July 2010 and many more since.

I have never seen speed cameras as having anything to do with revenue.  I am glad that they were self-funding, but I am also disappointed that that was the case, because it suggests that so many people are driving dangerously.  Very selfish people, and you can still find them very actively promoting their arguments across the internet, said speed cameras were actually a hazard, forcing people to slow down suddenly (despite the fact that most road maps and sat navs indicate very clearly, certainly since 2006 where the cameras are and there are always warning signs and markings on the road to show them) and to keep checking their speedometers (they must be bad drivers, I can tell how fast I am doing within 2-3 mph without looking at the speedometer, from experience I know).  They often blame injury to pedestrians on the pedestrians rather than their speed.  I have been struck by just how fast people do speed at especially in residential areas.  Just within a few streets of my house (where cars should not exceed 30mph) I have seen a car which has crashed through a brick wall and into the front of a house; cars which have almost levelled lamp-posts and others which have literally gone into houses.  Even with speed cameras in action people are driving too fast especially on rural roads and in residential areas.  Portsmouth felt the problem was so serious as to introduce 20mph limit throughout most of the city.

What happened when the media covered the government's announcement of cut-backs and the statements from some local authorities that they were switching off their speed cameras?  Well, I guess you could have been driving in any part of the UK to know the answer.  Instantly drivers seemed to assume that no camera was working, even though in many areas, of course, there had not even been an announcement that they would be switched off.  Of course, even if a camera is not there to catch you, you are still breaking the law.  If you exceed 33mph in a 30mph area you can be stopped, arrested, prosecuted and fined, it just takes longer than if the camera was there.  This is what the speeders disliked, that they would be caught by the camera, whereas they think they have far greater chances if it is left up to the police to catch them.  Now, these reckless drivers feel they are free.  It was reported in August that immediately some areas where there were police patrols, speeding offences had risen 90% once people believed the cameras were off.  Worse than this, it is almost as if, freed from the worry about being caught on camera anywhere, many more drivers feel it is fine to speed and, in fact, that they need to demonstrate that freedom. 

I often drive across a large housing estate filled with pets, young children and mothers with push chairs.  A mother and child in a pushchair were killed when a car decided to overtake one that was slowing and just went straight into them.  The whole estate has a 30 mph limit with a 40 mph limit on the roads around the diameter.  The day after the announcements about the speed cameras (which are numerous along the route I take), I was driving across the estate OBEYING THE LAW, driving at 30mph and what do I get?  I have cars and vans behind me, revving their engines, hooting me, gesticulating and then accelerating past me at 50 mph and faster, just because they feel they can.  I am made to feel I am in the wrong, just for obeying the law and, in fact, fulfilling the duty of every driver, which is to drive in a way I feel is safe given the prevailing conditions, which may in many circumstances, for example, foggy or icy weather or during heaving rain or when schools are turning out the children, actually be slower than the stated speed limit.  I am ridiculed and insulted for trying to keep myself and other people in the vicinity alive.

The Coalition government is going to pay a high price for its policy.  The price ultimately will be financial for all the street furniture damaged and, above all, for the medical costs of all the additional children and adults who are going to be maimed and killed by reckless driving.  In this ridiculous situation, in which the rights to be able to behave dangerously and to drive as fast as you like are somehow taken to be greater rights than the right to safety, I encourage anyone on a housing estate or in a village or anywhere else which particularly needs cars to drive safely, to take steps.  It is ironic that you can be fined for making a fake hand-held and mounted speed cameras (even though there are companies specialising in fake cameras) and even making mannequins to look like police officers.  I suggest we need to find ways, such as ensuring that those cars you find abandoned, are abandoned where they act as traffic bollards or they happens to be a lot of building materials delivered in piles which happen to narrow the road and slow up traffic or mannequins of small children appear along the roadsides or 'men at work' signs, one of which I found abandoned near my house as well as some police traffic cones, find their away to places where they may make a speeding motorist think twice.  If this government is going to pander to the killers, and that is what these speeders are, then those of us in favour of life and the right to live it in safety, should act. 

May I suggest, if there enough of you and you have enough time, you follow the example of the people of Chideock in Dorset.  This is a lovely village in a very steep-sided narrow valley (appalling for radio and mobile phone reception) through which the A35, the main road connecting Bournemouth, Poole, Dorchester, Bridgport, Axminster and Exeter, runs.  There is a pedestrian crossing which in May this year, Tony Fuller kept pressing and crossing the road.  He did this with neighbours, totally legally, to bring the whole road to a standstill in protest at the noisy lorries which charge through this village every day, seemingly all hours of the day. 

We need to assert that it is safety and not the right to be a killer that should win the day, despite the government's foolish step to pander to the ignorant of the UK by taking away the one tool which had actually helped make our roads that bit safer at a time when knowledge of road laws, let alone road custom and practice are at all time low.

P.P.  08/04/2011
In a situation like this I hate to be able to say 'I told you so'.  However, it was with interest that I noted that Oxfordshire county council has decided to switch its speed cameras back on after a sharp rise in casualties since they were turned off in August 2010.  There are 72 fixed cameras and 89 mobile ones in the county.  In the period August 2010 to January 2011, 18 people were killed compared to 12 in the same period the previous year, i.e. August 2009 - January 2010.  To my mind, 12 was still too high, but there has been a 50% increase since the ending of speed cameras.  The rise in non-fatal injuries has been even greater, from 19 in the six month period of 2009/10 to 179 in 2010/11 period, more than an 800% increase.  Interestingly, what drivers who overtake me seem unaware of, there was no general switching off of speed cameras, they are still on in many areas.  The number of fines imposed for speeding has fallen from a peak of 2 million in 2005 to about 1 million today (that is 1 million individual fines, the sum of money raised is far higher), not due to better driving but because first time offenders can opt to go on a training course instead.  Portsmouth has only turned off its speed cameras this month.  This is a real shame as it is a city with a 20 mph speed limit in residential areas which I felt was a model for other towns.  Bristol is another large urban centre which has only just switched off its speed cameras.  An AA spokesman quoted in 'The Guardian' noted, the public announcement of the turning off of speed cameras had a grave effect on their deterrent impact.  However, as I have noted here, I think that deterrent effect evaporated the moment the ending of the funding was announced and many drivers charge through towns assuming that no camera is on and I am glad to hear that many of them are being caught, however, it seems far too few.  The real tragedy is those who have been injured or killed as a result of the turning off of cameras.  If the level has risen that much just in the single county of Oxfordshire with a population of only 635,000 people (compared to 200,000 people living in Portsmouth and 420,000 people in Bristol; not their surrounding counties), then the national rise in casualties must be alarming.  I imagine, however, that until one of these drivers is injured themselves or has a close family member injured they will not even think once about their speed and ironically perceive themselves as the oppressed freed by this wonderful coalition government [sarcasm].

Extreme Weather; Extreme Behaviour

As many commentators have noted during the recent snowy and icy weather, the trouble in the UK is not that we experience extremes of weather, and in fact what we have seen is considered normal in many neighbouring states (remember London is as far North as Moscow), but that we do not experience them often enough.  For comparisons we have to look back to 1981, 1963, 1947 and beyond rather than, say, 2006 or even 2001 which other countries could draw comparisons with.  This applies to all 'extremes' of weather in the UK.  The hot summer of 1995 could only be compared to 1976, 19 years earlier.  The bulk of the weather in Britain is tepid and this allows us all to forget how to cope when it gets a little colder, hotter, wetter or drier than has been the case in the past decade.  Combined with this is the tightness of public funding especially at a local level as councils have been facing constraints really non-stop since the mid-1970s when 'cuts' first became a common phrase for British local authorities.  So, given that you are likely to only have harsh weather in winter one year in twenty or thirty, it is clear that it is a gamble they are willing to take to save a little money in not buying salt or grit and keeping it in storage and the necessary lorries maintained. 

The other factor is the privatisation of so many public services in the UK. Why would a train company risk being sued by stranded customers or penalised for a string of late arrivals by trying to run a comprehensive train service.  In a hot summer, it is far easier for water companies to declare restrictions on the use of water and to reduce the water pressure than for them to spend money to repairing the high level of leakages in the British system which means around 25% of British water is lost compared to 14% of French and 10% of Dutch.  Greed and penny pinching make it far harder for the UK to be adaptable when something slightly different occurs.  Of course, we have just finished one six-year war and are still in the middle of one that has now be raging for coming up to its ninth year (almost as long as the First and Second World Wars combined) so costing millions of pounds in resources and a constant haemorrage of British people through death and injury.

Anyway, given the context that the weather and the response of the local authorities, who I acknowledge do the best they can with the resources they have, creates, how do the British people respond to it?  Well, this goes to 'extremes' as well.  People talk of the 'Blitz spirit' or the 'Dunkirk mentality', once again having to rely on nostalgia for a war that ended 64 years ago (in fact going back 69-70 years to those specific events) rather than finding anything of merit from the British public in those intervening years.  It is fascinating how with a single snowfall British people suddenly start talking to each other.  I know the weather is a common topic of conversation but it seems that it needs to really begin disrupting people's lives before they break through to talking to their neighbours let alone strangers.  Even among colleagues I have seen a change.  Those stranded at home yesterday did not sit in front of their radiators whining they were out checking on elderly people, fetching food and helping people dig out their cars.  In some ways the British cannot be stirred from their apathy unless it is by a 'crisis'.  It has to be a tangible crisis, as the failure to alarm us all about terrorists in the early 2000s showed, something which is intangible will not stir us, it has to be immediately visible and physical and so snow and floods in particular flick the switch in the average Briton's head.  Ironically, it seems, in my experience, and I accept that is very limited, to even push aside the usual whining about immigrants, dole 'scroungers' and so on and emphasise for many people the commonality of humanity. 

A new focus of complaint, however, are those who warm us about global warming.  There is a saying 'one swallow does not make a summer' and the same can be said in this case 'one snowfall does not mean there is no global warming'.  The climate does shift steadily, we know the 11th century was warm enough for people to farm on Greenland and the 17th century cold enough for people to have bonfires on the River Thames but within those periods there were hot or cold, dry or wet seasons.  As a spokesman for the Met(reological) Office noted on BBC1 yesterday, even if in 20 years when the global temperature is 2-3oC warmer we will still get snowy winters.

This beneficial, communal spirit which gets turned on by 'extreme' weather does have a counteracting behaviour too, sometimes among the very same people.  Britons are, on the whole, very selfish and often find it difficult to comprehend that anyone else may have equal and/or different needs that have any validity let alone greater validity than their own perceived needs.  This is most apparent when British people drive.  The bulk of British drivers want no-one else to be on the road and if there are other drivers, for them to get out of the way.  They see themselves as driving in a bubble, looking only a short distance ahead rather than what they are in fact, a cog in a complex machine of traffic.  This situation has worsened and drivers now often do not feel obliged to signal, they complain at attempts to make them stick to a speed limit, and in my experience, these days occasionally feel it is appropriate to drive on pavements if it can get them where they 'need' to be, that little bit quicker.  They take no responsibility for their actions, always blaming the others, especially if those others are cyclists or pedestrians. 

Rather than tempering this behaviour the snow has apparently exacerbated it.  Partly, I think, it is accentuated by the fact that 4x4 drivers, who assume they should be granted a superior position on the road at normal times, actually have it in such slippery conditions so apparently legitimising their arrogant attitudes and the fact that they are driving so far removed from the road.  Ironically, talking to a man this week who lives in rural Devon, he said that now the 4x4 drivers have conditions which suit their vehicles many drivers are too afraid and lack the expertise to use them properly and so end up blocking village high streets.  Despite the conditions many drivers are going too fast and are impatient with people trying to get over icy patches or going up and down hills cautiously.  In my office we discussed how one car was tipped on its side on a road.  Even stunt men find this a challenge, it is not the result simply of ice and snow unless the vehicle has slid sideways off a particular camber, it is achieved by driving too fast.  Too many people in the UK speed in normal conditions and apparently have no appreciation of the stopping distances needed even on dry roads let alone on icy ones.  Speeding among too many people, including, it seems newspapers like the 'Daily Mail' (complaining this week about the £15 increase in speeding fines to pay compensation to victims of other crimes, seemingly forgetting that speeding is a crime and that people who speed are criminals), is not seen as a criminal offence, rather it is perceived as a right, one that even outweighs commons sense.

The occasions on which such behaviour becomes insane is in the attacks on workers driving snow ploughs and gritting lorries.  Interviews last night with such drivers showed that they had had objects thrown at their vehicles on some occasions smashing the windscreens.  Apparently this stems from frustration that the roads have not been sufficiently cleared or not soon enough or that side roads are neglected or routes in rural areas cannot be kept open constantly.  Attacks on the gritting vehicles is like shooting yourself in the foot because you are tired from walking.  Yet, to too many people it apparently seems rational behaviour.  However, perhaps it is unsurprising in a country where ambulance and fire fighting crews are attacked when carrying out their duties.  If you have a problem with the services protest to the people who actually control it, vote for someone who will adopt a different policy, do not attack the people trying to deliver a life saving service, doing an ordinary job like the rest of us, under tough and dangerous circumstances anyway.  Think about it, someone who drives a gritting lorry has to get up early on the coldest days of the year and drive constantly in the most hazardous conditions.  Less severe, but equally moronic is the people who rush to overtake gritting lorries and snow ploughs.  Think about it.  If the road did not need a plough or gritting, the lorry would not be there and before a lorry has passed over a particular section the road is likely to be even more dangerous than usual, and you want to hurry on to that untreated road surface?

The other unhelpful thing is the attitude of employers who are given privileged opportunities to whine about how much the weather is damaging the economy.  It is the same whenever there is a bank holiday, they are allowed to come on to radio and television and produce some huge figure about how badly industry is missing out by people being off for a day or two (in the case of bank holidays, of course, the UK has five fewer than the next nearest number in the EU and many of our competitors have many more than us.  I imagine only the fact that the additional 2012 bank holiday is linked to the Queen's diamond jubilee that has meant no complaints from business leaders about it).  Apparently the snow is losing business £600 million per day.  Of course fuel utility companies and even many supermarkets (given the British tendency to stockpile food at any hint of a crisis) are actually benefiting from the cold weather.  The new twist is the complaint from employers that too many schools have closed too quickly and so compelling parents to take time off to look after their children. 

What the employers forget (or choose not to notice) is that often teachers cannot afford to live anywhere near the schools they work at because house prices have risen far faster than teachers' salaries over the past forty years and schools are fearful of being sued if any child has an accident even in good weather so are terrified they will get a slew of litigation if children slip over in the snow.  Added to this, much investment in school buildings and heating facilities has been neglected over the past thirty years, there are regular reports on the poor conditions many schools actually are in, so it is unsurprising when their aged boilers pack up or single-glazed classrooms are too cold to study in.  None of these considerations is allowed to get in the way of employers yet again telling us we are lazy and negligent and so are costing the country money (though of course not reducing their salaries or bonuses a jot).  Hassle from employers makes many people feel they must get on the road to reach their work, often adding the hazards and accidents.

Extreme weather shows how shabby the UK's infrastructure has become from decades of cuts and when this is combined with an unassailable belief that satisfaction of all individual wishes is the only legitimate concern, it creates 'crisis' that neighbouring states must look upon with bemusement/amusement. I wonder what happens in places like western Normandy and Brittany which, like the UK, benefit from the Atlantic warm currents that stop the climate being as cold, most winters, as, say, northern France, the Benelux countries and Germany.  In these regions of France they must have mild winters but the occasional harsh ones too, yet I never hear Cherbourg or Rennes or Brest grinding to a halt when this occurs.  I suspect it means keeping things in store that you might only use once per decade, but at least you know they are there.  I guess to it stems from an attitude which is not all 'me, me, me' when harsh conditions bite.  I may be wrong and would be interested to hear from people who have had experiences in these regions.  I have certainly travelled around Belgium in the winter when the temperature is often -10oC or worse without difficulty and without the madness that seems to affect too many Britons whenever snow comes.  The weather might be extreme for the UK but let us hope that negative extreme behaviour can be moderated and the positive behaviour become normalised rather than needing extreme weather to trigger it.

P.P. 12/01/2010: One contributory factor to schools closing that I had missed, but is now being reported widely, are the league table ratings around percentage of attendance.  This means that if a school opens and say, even a third or a quarter, in fact anything more than about a tenth, of its pupils cannot get in then it slides quickly in terms of its standing for attendance.  I should have remembered the messages that I have seen coming home from the school that the 8-year old who lives in my house attend.  The headteachers writes of figures like 92.4% attendance and a drive to get this figure higher.  It is unsurprising then, that heads shut the school and so have that day null-and-void for the statistics rather than risk dropping even a 1-2% and so looking worse than last year when we had a mild winter.

Another point of behaviour that I forgot to mention is drivers using their fog lights when visibility is good.  Many drivers, even now where there is a lot of thawing going on, certainly in the counties I have been driving through, seem to assume these lights are simply 'bad weather' lights.  They forget that on frosty days often the air is far clearer than even on rainy days and so there is no need for fog lights.  You can be fined if you have them on when visibility is more than 50-100 metres.  On the back fog lights can be up to 30 times more powerful than normal rear lights.  I know when you are driving up and down valleys on foggy days you go in and out of fog and may be excused for leaving them on in clear patches, but some people switch them on just when it is cold and frosty, every one car in ten I passed this morning had them on and there was not a scrap of fog on the 190Km I covered.  I do wonder, if, as with drivers who keep full beam on at all times, whether these drivers actually know how to operate the functions on their cars or get stuck with a certain setting.

The Block Warden Arrives

None of this is original research, it is something which I read in 'The Guardian' newspaper, but seems to mesh with the developments I have been reading about from different sources ever since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 and particularly since 2001. As we all know, the terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists against the USA in September 2001, unlike previous such attacks, allowed the government of George W. Bush to adopt a policy they termed the 'War on Terror'. Elements of this included supposed justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq by US-led alliances and the introduction of authoritarian domestic legislation in the USA and many of its allied states which have severely reduced the civil liberties of citizens of those countries as well as foreigners. Consequently in the 2000s we have seen a ramping up in the use of torture and detainment without charge or trial particularly by the USA and the UK, notably in collaboration with Pakistan. I have written before about how house arrest and 28 days' detention without charge, which in the past would have been totally unacceptable in the UK have become to be seen as the norm, and in fact, by some, as mild measures. Fortunately, the change in government in the USA and the work of the independent judiciary reviewing such steps in the UK has begun rolling back such policies, at least a little.

What is interesting is another element that has come to light in the UK about steps to target those people who are seen as being 'at risk' of becoming extremists, notably males with origins in South Asia. These are seen as the easy representation of Islamist terrorism and such attitudes have helped fuel racist groups and attitudes in the UK. Back in October 2006 and again in November 2008, university lecturers were encouraged to monitor Muslim students and report to the security services if they saw behaviour that was felt to indicate these students were becoming extremist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/16/highereducation.topstories3 and
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/5087-lecturers-asked-to-spy-on-foreign-students-again Unsurprisingly, given that universities pride themselves on their autonomy and welcoming people from across the world, notably from countries where they face oppression, they were not happy to be told to adopt this spying role: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7774949.stm

Parallel to these high profile developments in universities it seems less apparent has been the development of such monitoring at community level. The 'Prevent Violent Extremism' programme, termed 'Prevent' launched in 2006, has received £140 million (€152 million; US$228 million) has aimed at targeting these 'at risk' Muslims, and using language borrowed from the Communist Chinese dictatorship, 'deprogrammed'. As with the university lecturers, the government has set out to recruit community group leaders and workers to being their surveillance force. Those who have expressed a reluctance to do the government's spying have been terrified that they will lose their jobs or face threats from the police and security services themselves. It is becoming apparent that some college teachers are collaborating with the authorities in reporting 'suspects'. However, others are being pressured such as a mental health project in the Midlands and various youth projects across the country. The project is run by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism and its head, Charles Farr and local leaders of the scheme, are former intelligence officers. The youngest suspect was aged 9 and he was sent for deprogramming.

'Deprogramming' is a term, which in English, is usually associated with helping people who have been rescued from cults to allow them to have a more normal perspective on society and people around them. It is a common way of translating what used to be termed 're-education' in China under Chairman Mao, punishing those, usually with imprisonment and hard labour, who were seen to hold views different from the state or came from a social class that was deemed to be a threat to the state. 'Re-education camps', which still exist in China, most of us would see as being identical to concentration camps (as opposed to extermination camps) of the Nazi German design. 'Deprogramming' is probably a correct term to use, but if this is being imposed on a 9-year old, one has to see it as being very severe. In the UK children do not even have criminal responsibility until the age of 10, one of the lowest ages in the world. So, can a 9-year old even be an 'extremist'? I was speaking to a 7-year old recently who was talking about chopping up girls and eating them, should he simply see a child psychologist or is he a genuine threat to the security of the country? If a child espouses fundamental Christian views and wants people struck down for stealing or coveting their neighbour's wife is he a potential terrorist? If he espouses the Five Pillars of Islam it seems he is much more likely to be seen as one.

Of course, a lot of this, trying to predict future crime, sounds very like something out of a science fiction novel or movie, in particular 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1948) in which dissidents are tortured and terrified into accepting without question, the totalitarian regime they are living under. The science fiction nature of this scary policy continues when you read quotations from Ed Husain, head of the Quilliam Foundation (which has received £700,000 from the Prevent fund), believes it is morally right to stop people committing terrorist offences before they occur. This is naturally the role of security services. However, there is a difference between stopping some conspirators who are sitting around assembling bomb making equipment and stopping someone, a child even, who perhaps might some many years into the future think about carrying out terrorist activity. No-one has used the term 'thought police' (from thinkpol in 'Nineteen Eight-Four') in the popular media for many years, but it is effectively what we are now moving towards. Other science fiction that we seem to be basing policing policies on includes 'Minority Report' (novel 1956; movie 2002) in which people with psychic powers are used by the police to predict crimes before they happen and in 'A Philosophical Investigation' (1992) by Philip Kerr in which scientists try to predict which men are going to commit violent crime by studying the lay out of their brains.

The key issue is that the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' has gone. The principle of 'innocent until plans/commits a crime' has gone. In its place is 'innocent until someone believes that sometime in the future you may commit a crime'. There seems to be no monitoring of the quality of the assumptions about these 'potential' extremists, not even some pseudo-scientific explanation that people with a particular physiology or in specific circumstances are far more certain to commit a crime in the future. It is just a case of someone reporting someone else. As someone who has worked in different parts of the civil service, I know people are being reported on a daily basis. Every mail sack arriving at every job centre or tax office, every working day, has letters reporting people in it. The bulk of these are simply the disgruntled taking it out on the people they do not like the look of, or simply just a random person so they can make themselves appear more important.

Most of the public forgets that the authorities generally have a good idea on what people to target based on a mix of their own experience and own prejudices, generally they do not need help from the public. What involving the public is about, is developing an air of paranoia which helps foster compliance among them, so they do not complain when they have to undress, have their luggage opened in their absence or are searched repeatedly at an airport or when public transport is closed or the road blocks are put up. Paranoia in the UK tends to fade quicker than it does in the USA. I think because the British have faced far more real threats in their recent history than the Americans ever have. We have develop an awareness of genuine and falsified threat and have a natural scepticism which seems less common among Americans, but perhaps, more common among, say, the French, Germans, Spanish and Italians.

Simply thinking about a crime let alone having some vague resentment towards the government, should not be a crime, otherwise they will have to ban all crime novels and series and prevent anyone complaining about the service they receive from the government. Of course, that might be on the cards. What Prevent has helped do, is divide the very communities that policies following the Bradford and Oldham riots of 2001 were supposed to be assisting. It is pressurising more and more public servants in an insidious way to spy for the state.

The Prevent approach also blinkers people. The assumption that young Asian males from particular districts (Prevent currently only works with 82 councils; rising to 94 next year) are the only threat leads lots of 'blind spots' neglecting other threats and terrorism from different groups like the far right and Irish terror groups. That is if you believe, as the government seems to, that extremism leading to terrorism is so pervasive in our society. In the UK, partly due to public apathy, extremist views have never been popular. Even in states like Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia, Islamist extremists are a small minority.

Of course, security services like to be well funded, so if to get more cash they have to adopt an approach of trying to be pre-emptive and in someone's view stop scores of young people coming terrorists, they are going to go with it, even if they have little faith in the approach. The UK government has got so wrapped up in the Bush myths that it cannot see straight. If terrorism is so widespread why did the UK never face a war over Ireland with the large Irish (869,000 of the UK population were born in Ireland; 6 million have Irish ancestry compared to 1.6 million Muslims) population here? Why was there not extreme left-wing terrorism in the UK in the 1970s when there was in Italy and West Germany? Why was there no neo-Nazi terrorism in the late 1970s? I suppose they would argue that somehow South Asian and/or Muslim young people have different 'mental wiring' to Irish or other white people, but that is not based on any scientific fact at all or the fact that many Muslim states, though facing incidents as the UK has faced, have also not had massive terrorist activity in the way the Prevent method envisages it coming.

I titled this section 'The Block Warden Arrives'. This refers to the role in Germany during the Nazi period (1933-45) though similar positions were used in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-74) and in Argentina (1976-83). A block warden is a representative of the dominant party/state regime who in Germany oversaw around 40-60 houses and not only spreads propaganda in favour of the regime but monitors that his/her neighbours are complying with the regime's wishes, not simply passively but in an active way. Anyone, in the individual's judgement, who is not complying or without insufficient vigour or that the block warden simply dislikes, is arrested by the secret police and imprisoned/tortured/killed. The example from Argentina which brought the term 'the disappeared' to the world, is probably the model most likely to be adopted in the UK. Most simply people would disappear usually for long-term imprisonment or execution without their families ever knowing what happened to them.

What we are seeing in the UK at present with people reporting Asian neighbours plus the government trying to compel community workers to spy for them is a back door introduction of the block warden approach. Once in a while they may catch someone who is a real threat, but recent evidence shows that even the security services with their high tech equipment have arrested innocent people. Such powers are quickly abused especially by small-minded people who see their personal quirks as issues of national security, so people will be put under suspicion, not because they have any genuine terrorist sympathies but because some neighbour simply dislikes them or they parked in 'their' slot or their children were noisy or something. Such an approach actually wastes the time of the police and security services and creates so much 'traffic' of denunciation and counter-denunciation that it provides good cover for genuine criminals and even terrorists, though of course, their numbers are in fact tiny.

It is clear that more and more British people, often those very individuals who have been working hard to keep their communities in a fit state, are being compelled to work for what is increasingly a state machine aiming to police people's thinking. These people are often reluctant but history has always shown us there are always the 'little Hitlers' who relish such roles and you can imagine the bullyboys of the English Defence League queuing up to become these monitors in their neighbourhoods. I have noted before how local authorities have been abusing anti-terrorist laws to carry out their own agendas often in punishing people for violating (or for being suspected, however wrongly, of trying to violate) local regulations. The Prevent approach is simply giving them yet more abilities for them and even simple members of the public with which to beat the people they do not like in their neighbourhood.

Conservative Policies - Thatcherite Bigotry & Pain Return

I know I have complained that the Conservative Party who have this conference this week have been lacking in policies, but this is because I feel that no party which see themselves as the heirs presumptive to control of the British state should be able to simply slip into place without offering something to the electorate. This is a charge that David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives has face for many months now. To some degree the continued assumption that he will win the next election has meant Cameron has felt little need to outline any policies. Partly this is because on the key issue facing the UK at present, the recession, the Conservative line since about 1974 is that no government can do anything about economic downturns and it will do more damage than good if it tries. Though few people seem to have picked up on it, the Conservative emphasis on cut-backs is really no different from the deflationary policy of the 1930s adotped by the UK when faced with the Great Depression and contrasts sharply with the post-Keynesian, stimulus approach of Obama and Brown.

Given that Gordon Brown seemed to rally flagging Labour supporters last week at the Labour Party conference, Cameron seems to feel under some pressure to come out with policies. However, as I suggested recently these are in the flavour of what the Johnson administration has been attempting in London: the mix of frightening Thatcherite-authoritarian policies and simply headline grabbing policies that mean very little in substance. Given that I do not read 'The Sun' newspaper (I do not want to give any more cash to Rupert Murdoch and no longer travel on London Underground where I would pick up a range of right-wing newspapers to monitor for free), I was glad Polly Toynbee repeated the list of 10 pledges that Cameron outlined in 'The Sun' last Friday. Now the covers are coming off we can see why Cameron has been quite quiet on his policies, which if the bulk of the population pay attention to, will make them worse off. These pledges are Bushite with a British flavour. Fortunately he has not made a pact with the fundamentalist Christians (to some extent Blair exhausted that avenue in his years in office), though he does seem to be seeking 'moral' behaviour through economic policies, but certainly he is clearly addressing the super-wealthy that George W. Bush portrayed as his core constituency.

The broadcast media have picked up on the policies aimed at those people on benefits. Of course, this group has been hammered constantly since the 1980s. Yet, all parties seem to think that there are millions of lazy people dodging work and simply claiming from the state. The view that these people notably on incapacity benefit (about 2.6 million people) but also single parents, are not trying hard enough to find work. Given that unemployment is at 2.4 million people, many of whom were in work until recently, does Cameron really believe that UK companies have the capacity to take on, say, 1 million more workers. For the past twenty years anyone signing on for benefit has had to go through rigorous checks and periodic reviews. People who have had tax credits overpaid are often compelled to pay them back. The Labour governments have kept on tightening the regulation and monitoring of people on benefits in the way Cameron says he wants to; of course to his partisans, Labour is still not strict enough. Cameron seems to assume, like many right-wingers, that the whole civil service and local government is filled with people who simply bung money and housing at the people right-wingers dislike, feckless single mothers and immigrants. Of course, most local councillors and many civil servants are conservative (many are Conservative) and are very hostile to just the groups that the Conservatives want to target.

What so many people forget is that the bulk of people on benefits want to work. We live in a highly consumerist society and you are not seen to exist if you are not consuming. Consumption can only really come when you have a regular, good income. Consequently most people want to work. Work also provides a social network and if Cameron actually spoke to some single mothers and some people on incapacity benefit they would find that isolation and loss of dignity are additional painful factors for people in those conditions, work can help resolve such situations. There are lazy people in the UK but from other countries and Britain's history I would reckon these number around 60,000 people of working age in the UK at present. The bulk of the others on benefits would rather not be.

Of course, like so many governments, the Conservatives simply focus on the supply side of the labour market without looking at all at intervening in the demand side, i.e. the employers. I worked in a job centre in the mid-1990s when unemployment was much lower than now and saw how the disability officers struggled to place even a handful of disabled people in employment. Employers turned up their noses at such people and still do despite all the legislation. I had an employer in recent years moaning on about how terrible it was when people 'concealed' their disabilities. I have an 'unseen disability' diabetes and used never to mention it to anyone in any job. Even working for a liberal employer which worked with a lot of disabled people as consumers I found my managers made no efforts to address disabilities in our workplace and I was criticised for literally hours (I had to share a car with my boss one day) about how my disability had impinged on a meeting when my blood sugar went low because the meeting dragged on so long. Eventually I spoke out and found there were other concealed people with conditions among the workforce who had been suffering. This was at a supposedly liberal employer with quite an involvement with disabled people so imagine what it is like trying to get work with the average hard-nosed company especially in this period of economic difficulties.

The same applies to single parents. Of course, the default assumption is that these are all teenaged mothers. In the 2001 census it showed that of the 11.7 million children in the UK 22.7% lived in lone parent familes, around 10% lived in step families and 45,000 children were in care or other communal establishments; of the lone parent families 91% are headed by a mother. This means 65% of children in the UK live with their two natural parents and in fact 75% live in two-parent families. The latest figures I can find for teenaged mothers is that they had 41,700 in 1998, this compares to 2.65 million children in lone parent families three years later. It is clear that teenaged mothers do not make up the majority of single parents. Of course, by definition and teenaged mother soon ages into a non-teenaged mother. However, my point stands that a lot of single parents are older women left alone due to separation, divorce and death. As seen from the step family figures, probably half will not remain in this state forever. In addition, new family models such as two single mothers living together is becoming more common. Will that be counted as a step family in the future or two lone parents?

As the recent case with the two female police officers banned from taking care of each other's children shows, the laws at present seem to weigh against lone parents working to provide a more developed family structure for their children, and, vitally for Cameron's policies, attempting to create structures that allow the women to work. Child care is costly for even middle class parents let alone working class ones. Family structures are fragmented because people have been compelled and are facing even more pressure at present, to move to find work in other areas. Yet, the alternative of informal child care arrangements between friends is being ruled out. I can see that this may be a back handed policy to try to encourage contraception, but that will happen only long term and does not deal with the current issues of raising children. Mothers last week were told that their children will be less healthy and less intelligent if they work full-time but Cameron wants them all to go out to work. Presumably this is because it is felt the lower classes are getting too uppity and keeping them overweight and ill-educated will stop them challenging their superiors! Of course, this contradiction between supporting families in the shapes they come in today and yet getting more women into work has been one that plagued Blair as much as it will Cameron.

No government in the past thirty years has really attempted to address it, instead they put pressure on the parents to solve it for themselves. What they fail to realise too, is that it is not simply about lone parents, but two-parent families too. If you see a school or a childminder's at collection time, you will see that fathers as well as mothers come and collect. This is because with two working parents you are not better off than with a working lone parent. You could have four parents per child and if they all worked, as Cameron wants them too, then they would still need someone to sort out the child care. Having two parents does not make the child care issue go away as some assume. Since the late 1960s it has been basically impossible for a two-parent family to survive financially without both parents working. Yet, the lazy assumption of politicians is somehow is that Daddy goes to work and Mummy raises the children and this falls down when there is only Mummy. However, for forty years it has been falling down even when both parents are around, but Cameron's mind, like that of many politicians, is stuck in 1957.

This is much the same thinking behind Cameron's plan to 'reward marriage'. There are already tax breaks for married couples anyway. Marriage in itself is neither good or bad, it is simply a legal state. What is 'good' or 'bad', even moral/immoral is the behaviour of the people in that relationship and how they treat each other. Men taking responsibility is declining and more could be gained in education on what it really means to be a man, not in the macho sense which is all that seems to be emphasised these days, but in a sense of being a human capable of being in partnership with others. We certainly need education in what it means to be a father as many men seem to have no clue. In addition, with the Thatcherite consensus feminism seems to have become a dirty word and with the rush to return to Jane Austen behaviour combined weirdly with the widespread sexualisation of society, women are being clobbered from both sides and men feel themselves freed from any responsibility either because they are like some late 18th century gentleman or they are something resembling a Los Angeles pimp handling his 'ho's (whores). This is no basis for any marriage. A marriage in name only is no marriage and does not deserve reward. Will Cameron reward civil partnerships? It could be argued that they reduce promiscuity among gay men and decrease bullying in lesbian relationships, so surely they should be rewarded? Of course, you can have a 'bad' civil partnership as much as you can have a bad marriage, but somehow to Cameron stability comes with marriage, and, no doubt because of his 1957 perception of the world, that leads to economic stability and that, he believes, reduces expensive dependence on the benefit system.

The key problem with so much about benefit 'reform' it simply believes that if you hammer lone parents and the disabled with so many financial penalties they will be compelled to get the work that they are believed to be shirking. You need to compel employers to be fairer in their recruitment and stop being prejudiced against disabled people and working mothers. We also need a lot more free, state-provided childcare. This is the only way you will get most lone parents into work. By pressing child carers to become pre-school teachers and by legislating against informal child care arrangements you are exacerbating the problem. Of course, in the Thatcherite-Blarite-Cameronite mindset, none of this is the concern of the state and people must sort out their own lives. People can be as moral as you like, marry before they have children, not divorce and have the father stay around, but they cannot buck the pattern established by employers and the cost of living in the UK.

I will now turn to the other elements of Cameron's pledges. I think the same morality angle is behind the policy to increase magistrates' sentencing powers from 6 months to 1 year as magistrates' courts are seen as the point at which the low level crime which exercises voters the most is dealt with. The point about people using knives to kill should expect a prison sentence seems fine too. I would add to that, that people who use cars to kill should also expect a prison sentence, but naturally that would upset too many of Cameron's speeding, 4x4 drivers for him to accept it. The key issue is where all these prisoners will go. Labour has failed to build more prisons, no-one wants them in their district and yet the public want more prisons. They do not want crematoria or wind farms either but we need them all. Cameron will find it even tougher to force through the building of more prisons because he will be more sensitive to the opinion of rural voters in the areas where such prisons will be built. I anticipate that magistrates, as a result, will be compelled effectively to use house arrest and more electronic tagging, either that or we will have to have the prison hulks of the past or form criminal ghettos in certain cities ('Escape from Moss Side' anyone?).

One is to reduce the number of MPs by 10%, which Toynbee sees as gerrymandering as the reductions will not come in large, low populated rural constituencies where the Conservatives are strong but in areas that back Labour. This seems to be a step to avoid the repeat of the 1997 landslide. I am sure that by the mid-2010s Labour will bitterly regret that Blair abandoned any steps towards proportional representation. Ironically the landslide of 1997 might prove to have been one of the most damaging things to happen to Labour's long-term future. Of course, Conservatives have adopted such tactics before notably the regime of Dame Shirley Porter on Westminster Council in the late 1980s. Given that she fled to Israel and was compelled to pay a £12 million 'surcharge', i.e. fine for her part in that scandal (reduced from the original £27 million originally imposed), I believe she should have had the 'dame' title stripped from her. She claimed she had only £300,000 in assets, but was clearly a multi-millionaire. Kit Malthouse, one of Boris Johnson's deputy mayors who has taken political control of the Metropolitan Police, only joined Westminster Council in 1998. However, it is not difficult to argue that such attitudes that rewarded a leading Conservative who had adopted a policy now clearly seen by the House of Lords as having been gerrymandering, persist in the Conservative Party. Someone should track down where Westminster Conservative councillors from that era have gone now, I would bet some are advising Cameron whether directly or indirectly.

It is not surprising given that contempt of the electorate that Cameron wants to replace the Human Rights Act. Of course, this is seen by the right-wing as a law which only favours criminals and terrorists but in fact protects the average Conservative voter as it does everyone else. This is the false assumption of so much Conservative policy that if you are doing things correctly or morally then you have nothing to fear, so there is no need for legislation to protect you. As the murder by police of Ian Tomlinson a passerby of the G20 protest and of Jean Charles de Menezes shows, you can be anyone and yet be caught up by and killed by the state machine, however law abiding you might be. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is over 65 years old and yet the UK Human Rights Act is only 11 years old. The reason why Bush had prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay rather than on US soil is because the establishment of the republic that became the USA had a Bill of Rights which the regime's policy was violating. Anti-terrorist legislation has been used in the UK to put people against which no evidence has been brought, under house arrest. Scrapping the Human Rights Act will simply make such approaches easier and strip away a lot of defence we have against and increasingly authoritarian UK state.

Economically Cameron's pledges are aimed at benefiting his 'core constituency' of the very wealthy. The Thatcher years locked all parties but particularly the Conservatives into always being seen to cut taxation or rather find it from no direct sources which usually dent consumption further. Cameron will cut corporation tax from 28p to 25p in the £ which will clearly benefit companies who are back awarding their leading lights millions of pounds in bonuses. What such a cut needs to be accompanied by is a compulsion on the percentage of profits that need to be reinvested in the company and a restriction on how much profit can be sent overseas, but of course the Conservatives would never limit their greedy friends in that way. He wants to raise the inheritance tax threshold on money and property left from £325,000 to £1 million. Even at £325,000 only 6% of the population pays inheritance tax. Apparently the rise will, however, cut tax receipts by £1 billion in favour of the very richest people in the UK.

Despite this £1 billion windfall, Cameron wants to reduce the budget deficit currently at £175 billion. Of course, believing in a Keynesian approach I see nothing wrong with that, but it seems to be anathema to all political parties who now seek to reduce it. I would certainly argue that without that deficit unemployment would already be over 3 million and the burden on the UK of that greater slowdown in the economy, i.e. lower tax returns and consumption would mean we would be in a worse state. A limit on bankers' bonuses and a windfall tax on utilities could do a lot too, but seems to have been ruled out by those who have the real power in the UK. Cameron will have to introduce cuts across public spending and in this we leap right back into the 1980s. Thatcher cut the civil service staff by one third in the 1980s and it has never returned to those levels. Part of the problems for schools, social workers and hospitals stems from the cuts imposed in the 1980s especially in terms of hospital cleaners, and we are reaping the results even twenty years later. Cameron says he will not cut back the National Health Service, but as it seems apparent he will not cut back on defence (the Trident nuclear weapons programme currently costs £76 billion with which you could punch a huge hole in the deficit) and in fact promises the so-called Military Covenant (which sounds terribly Cromwellian) and arguing soldiers should be properly equipped to do their jobs. I accept the latter point about proper equipment and this is one point that Labour should be very embarrassed upon. However, the UK should not still be involved in Afghanistan 8 years on and Iraq 6 years on in wars that were started on false bases and mainly for US profit. Cameron will not reduce military involvement in these countries and by saying he will equip them better is indicating the defence budget will rise, suggesting that he will need to make cuts elsewhere to pay for this as well as reduce the deficit. If the Armed Forces expand they will absorb more of the unemployed, but of course, single mothers and the disabled are precisely the type of people they do not want to employ. This show that there is so little linkage between one policy and another, so much policy from all parties is handled in a vacuum.

Cuts will come somewhere and if not ameliorated by tax rises which have been ruled out nor in health and defence will have to come in other areas. It is unlikely he will squeeze the Revenue & Customs or the Borders Agency in which so much faith to 'protect full up Britain' is being place. As has been shown recently social welfare, the poor cousin of health care needs more funding. Yet, Cameron will freeze council tax for 2 years. This is returning to the Thatcher approach of the poll tax, in believing that local people would favour low tax charging Conservative councils over high-spending Labour ones. It always forgot that in any town the majority of the electorate actually benefits from high council spending. In addition, this will have to be balanced against high profile cases such as the killing of Baby P and the shortage of social workers. Council spending has been pared down and pared down to a situation in which many cannot afford the upkeep of leisure facilities and have had to reduce refuse collection to an unhealthy frequency. Yet the mantra that somewhere there is massive 'waste' is still chanted. Cameron will apparently find this waste and cut it as if the Labour governments never even thought of this. Ironically cutting back on social welfare and local authority activity cuts into the kind of employment disabled people and single mothers are very likely to go into, certainly if they want something better for their futures (rather than the futures of the wealthy) than working in a call centre.

This brings me back to my point recently about 'adult' movies and call centres being the only places locally with work that does not need you to have followed a lengthy path of specific qualifications. Women performing naked in front of webcams is rocketing, generating £1.1 billion in 2008 (up from £730 million in 2006) with companies saying they have 40-150 UK women signing up each month; the largest has 27,000 women on its books. So is this the kind of moral Britain that Cameron is driving for, especially in targeting single mothers?

So, overall, when pressed for policies, Cameron has really simply returned to Thatcherism with all its benefits for a small elite in British society and new sticks to beat the marginalised, those seen as the 'undeserving' so much harder. Despite his lip service to morality, in fact, by simply squeezing the supply side of the labour market he will make it harder, with more children left 'home alone' and more women pushed into dubious work. Cutbacks will lead to the deaths of more children and elderly people. Those unfortunate not to get work let alone work paying a wage you can live on, will again be demonised and as in the 1980s will breed a generation of young people resentful of the society which seems to mark them from birth as useless. There is a basic lack of understanding of how the UK economy and society works because too many politicians care only about wooing the super-rich (not even the middle class) and have assumptions about society that were outdated fifty years ago. I know it is hackneyed now, but in 2009 it seems as relevant as it did at the time: “I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.”

P.P. In fact remembering those words from 1983 sent me to dig out the whole quotation from Neil Kinnock and it seems eerily appropriate even 26 years later:

"I warn you. I warn you that you will have pain – when healing and relief depend upon payment. I warn you that you will have ignorance – when talents are untended and wits are wasted, when learning is a privilege and not a right. I warn you that you will have poverty – when pensions slip and benefits are whittled away by a government that won’t pay in an economy that can't pay. I warn you that you will be cold – when fuel charges are used as a tax system that the rich don't notice and the poor can't afford.

I warn you that you must not expect work – when many cannot spend, more will not be able to earn. When they don't earn, they don't spend. When they don't spend, work dies. I warn you not to go into the streets alone after dark or into the streets in large crowds of protest in the light. I warn you that you will be quiet – when the curfew of fear and the gibbet of unemployment make you obedient. I warn you that you will have defence of a sort – with a risk and at a price that passes all understanding. I warn you that you will be home-bound – when fares and transport bills kill leisure and lock you up. I warn you that you will borrow less – when credit, loans, mortgages and easy payments are refused to people on your melting income."

Some of this will be my epitaph.

Be Patriotic: Be Paranoid

Driving through Hampshire this week I heard the Hampshire police announcing the re-launch of an anti-terrorist hotline for members of the public to telephone in and report suspicious behaviour that they feel might be connected with terrorism. Given that the last terrorist attack in Britain (so excluding Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not Great Britain) was in July 2005, this seems to be an incredibly tardy response from the county which has the major port and rapidly developing airport of Southampton, the port and naval base of Portsmouth, numerous Army regiments housed across the country and the major Army base at Aldershot.


In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.


So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?


Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.


It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.


To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?


Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'


P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.

P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area.  I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton.  They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students.  Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out.  The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education.  The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.