I know that this blog is full up with the problems that I encounter in my life and the things that annoy, scare and anger me, so I thought that I would throw in something more positive and current. As I have said before if I had started this blog ten years ago (well, I only got internet access from home in 2001, so it would have been tough), a lot of it would be about cycling. You would have found a blog with hand-drawn maps and scanned in photographs of my various trips in parts of England and northern France. I have never been a strong cyclist, I could never make the 15mph sustained over 50 miles which was necessary to join the local club in Milton Keynes, but I enjoyed seeing places and it gave me a great sense of achievement when I had few things in my life to give me that. In London it got me out from the very urban East End and in Milton Keynes as in Oxford before, I got to see many beautiful parts of the English countryside and visit stately homes and eat in nice pubs. Much the same in France where I cycled through areas which are beautiful now but had been key regions in the battles of the Middle Ages and 20th century and I ate very well in a whole host of restaurants and had the 'little adventures' as I called them that you cannot avoid when cycling. The little adventures are things that are not insurmountable but create a decent anecdote like almost being hit by a deer jumping from a bush, stopping to help rescue a man who had fallen into a canal or almost being wrapped up in a security van heist on a wooded road in Normandy.
Now of course all that is behind me as I have aged and live in a town which is almost impossible to get out of on a bicycle due to the busy roads and motorways which ring it. I have only been on my bicycle once since 2005. So you have a very different blog. One enduring thing from my cycling days is my interest in the Tour de France. Most countries of western Europe have a national bicycle race and there are many other 'classic' shorter races too. Other parts of the world, notably the USA, Australia and Malaysia have races that attract the World's best road racers. Central Asia and South America are increasingly home for leading cyclists who ride alongside people from the longer establish cycling nations like France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg with leading names from Australia and the USA having appeared in recent decades. The most famous of all these races is the Tour de France which has been running since 1903 and for a minority interest sport (well in the UK it is) receives surprisingly large coverage in the news, though in the UK you still have to hunt out actual coverage of the race on obscure channels (currently ITV4) and at odd hours. This year is not bad as it is shown at 7pm but in the past it has been on after midnight. There was a golden era when you got 30 minutes each night on Channel 4 in the 1990s but that was really the last it was seen on the main terrestrial channels. Coverage in the newspapers is far better. I first saw the Tour de France at school, in 1982/3. A French teacher had recorded a stage going up to the Puy de Dome. He was a keen cyclist but where he had got this from I had no idea. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the stage which I remember was a lone breakaway from a cyclist who had been injured. However, it was not until the mid-1990s that I was able to watch the race regularly.
What is so special about the Tour de France? Well, unlike a football match which lasts only 90 minutes, the Tour goes on for 3 weeks. It is a stage race so there is a winner each day. It is like getting 19 or 20 winners (they have a couple of rest days) in a competition. The winner overall is the man (there is women's cycling too, but it gets far less coverage, though you are likely to see it as part of the Olympics, it got good coverage in Sydney and Athens) who gets around the course in the least time. Sometimes even after three weeks of cycling and covering 3-4000 kilometres a man can win by a matter of seconds. So, you have three weeks of tension and the standing of different competitors can alter day-to-day. Having 180 cyclists going along French town or country roads is hazardous so there can be crashes and the weather can be very varied from baking hot to very windy and storms. In previous years there has even been snow in July when they reached the height of the Alps and Pyrenees. The terrain is another factor. France has it all from flat countryside to some of the highest mountains in Europe and different stages are to the advantage of different racers. On flat or urban stages you find the 'sprinters' often from countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, though also Australia who charge in the mass of the 'peloton' (as the main group of cyclists on the road is called) to snatch a victory. On other days in the mountains it is men from Spain, Italy and Colombia who manage to sustain and win often thousands of metres above sea level. On any day there is a chance that one man or a small group will break away and win personal glory. There are also time trials in which either individuals or as a team they race against the clock rather than each other and the winner is the one who turns in the best time. So, within a single competition you get a whole variety of different road racing.
There are also different 'jerseys' for men who are leading in the different competitions. Normally they wear their bright team colours but put on a different coloured jersey if leading in one of the competitions of the Tour. The man leading the overall time competition wears the yellow jersey and this is the prime one that people focus on. However, as the cyclists proceed different sections give different points. There are sprint points and the man who crosses ahead of the rest picks up points (with others going to second and third place) and this contributes to the green jersey. There is also the red polka dot jersey for the so-called 'King of the Mountains' every hill or mountain that the cyclists cross has points for the men going first over the summit. Each summit is categorised and so high mountain tops give more points than low hills. The green and the red polka dot jerseys, thus give credit to the two types of specialists in teams. There is also the white jersey for the rider under 21 who has the best time and recognition is also given to the 'most aggressive' rider always trying to get to the front or breakaway, though there is no jersey for this.
There are teams, which like those in motor-racing are sponsored by commercial companies selling everything from telephones to insurance to clothing, in the past ONCE the Spanish lottery for the blind sponsored a team. Each team has nine members usually of different nationalities. They also have different expertise and teams aim to have at least one sprinter, one mountain climber and one man good in the time trials. There are also the 'domestiques' who are less renowned cyclists who help support the stars of each team. They pick up food and drink supplies and bring them to other cyclists of their team. If one of the stars drops back because of a puncture or an accident, they ride with them to help them get back into the peloton. For mountain climbers they can be pacemakers; for sprinters they are the 'lead out' men who create the slip stream through the bunch for the sprinter to follow safely. If their star's bicycle breaks often they will give up their own bicycle so that they can ride on. The whole race is followed by an armada of team cars, doctor's cars, food, spare part and referees' cars. Motorcycles carrying information and filming the race mix in with the cyclists too while an aircraft and a helicopter fly overhead to relay the pictures. Along the roadside often creating a hazard themselves are thousands and thousands of spectators many local but many who travel from across the world to see the cyclist hurtle past.
Every day you can tune in and see how your favourite racer is doing and as they close in on the finish line it is as exciting as watching a horse race and in my view far more exciting than Formula 1 as all the leaders can be shoulder to shoulder and the winner win by centimetres on the line. Last week a man who had been out for over 200Km was caught within 2 seconds of crossing the finishing line. You can imagine the drama of watching that. Even the commentators (and the British ones are far more reserved than the French ones) got very excited. I find the race most exciting when there is no single dominant cyclist. In the early 1990s and early 2000s it got rather tedious as Spaniard Miguel Indurain won every year 1991-1995 and the American Lance Armstrong won every year 1999-2005. The other thing which has plagued the race is drug taking by the cyclists. Last year the man leading the race, Alexandr Vinokurov was kicked out for taking drugs and then Michael Rasmussen who later took over as leader was kicked out for lying about where he had been when he was supposed to be being tested even though they found no traces during the race. This year Manuel Beltran who was a standard cyclist has been removed because he had a drug called EPO in his bloodstream which helps the blood carry oxygen. Hopefully this is the last of the doping scandals because it is so disappointing when people are cheating and cycling seems to have been even worse at it than athletics despite the stringent controls that have been in place for many decades now.
This year, the UK has a particular interest. We are not renowned as a cycling nation. Chris Boardman was the leading light in the early 2000s but was stronger in the velodrome than on the road and was very unlucky with crashes. David Millar has always been hovering near the top but again has been unlucky, he just missed out on taking the yellow jersey this year. His very public school boy aloof manner is very off-putting for viewers too. The new star is Mark Cavendish, from the Isle of Man, who is only 23 and has won two stages of the Tour so far this year. He is an incredibly fast sprinter and though is currently 45 minutes behind the fastest time overall, he is very impressive and hopefully will encourage more British people to take an interest in the sport.
If you have never watched the Tour de France I do recommend seeing at least one programme. There is a lot going on to interest you, tactics and strategy to mull over. You see very strong and skilled athletes at their best and all against the backdrop of beautiful French countryside and towns. I always love it when they cycle through a town I have ridden through. As with the best sport there is human action and drama and sustained over a much longer period than for something like football or even tennis with the ability for things to change in an instant as you see in motor-racing, but it is humans making the difference.
Monday, 14 July 2008
Sunday, 13 July 2008
What If We Still Lived On Pangaea?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other
Earths: Alternate Outcomes of Geological Developments & Prehistoric Times’
by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available
for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339081071&sr=8-1
UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339081015&sr=8-1
Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Earths-Developments-Prehistoric-ebook/dp/B0089EIJBQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043695&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Cars as Weapons
Earlier this year I produced a posting asking 'When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?' because I noted that in contrast to using a gun or a knife, which kill far fewer people in the UK, you were likely to get only 4 years imprisonment at most, often less for killing someone with a car (and only a £2,200 fine if you run them over and kill them with a bicycle - see the death of Rhiannon Bennett killed by cyclist Jason Howard, but that is a far less common occurrence). Last week I came across an article in a magazine in Hampshire by a man called Professor Colin Pritchard who has a long line of titles. His article was actually about how the media distorts our perceptions of British society. It alerted me to something I had not realised that the US media apparently portrays UK society as facing 'social collapse' though our in 2007 we had 64 males murdered aged 15-24 compared to 4,191 in the USA (which has a population about four times larger), the rate is 17 per million in the age group, in the UK compared to 209 per million in the age group in the USA. Apparently such reports are continuing to make older people fearful. Last year 98 people over the age of 65 were murdered, one third of them by members of their family, given that being over 65 is a much bigger category in fact the rate is only 7 per million per year compared to the US rate of 27 per million per year.
Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).
As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.
Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.
Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.
P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.
In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.
Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm
Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).
As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.
Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.
Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.
P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.
In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.
Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm
Britain - The Land That Time Forgot 2: Buses
Last year I did a posting about how obsessed the British were with the past and how we seemed to only be able to derive pride from things that were very dated like pre-decimal currency and I did another similar posting about imperial measurement. Well, all of this stuff seems to be going on but I was alerted this week to a new and more vigorous example of this obsession. When the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson, a real buffoon who has a made a career in the media of appearing like a real-life version of the 'Tim Nice-but-Dim' character of the comedian Harry Enfield, was elected to be the Mayor of London, he said he would reintroduce the Routemaster bus to London by 2012 and remove the so-called 'bendy bus' by 2015. The Routemaster double-decker bus was produced 1954-1968 and used in London from 1956 onwards up until present day, though they were phased out actively from 2005 onwards. This means that the Routemaster is not a pre-Second World War bus as many people assume. In fact its predecessors were Leyland Titan, in service 1938-9 and the AEC Regent III RT produced from 1942 onwards and used in London primarily 1947-54, though the last RT ran until 1979. They are often mistaken for the Routemaster.
None of these old buses, including the Routemaster was designed for an era in which we are concerned about disabled access. Its aisles are very narrow as is the staircase to the upper deck and it is high off the ground so is difficult for children and the elderly to access let alone anyone in a wheelchair. The Routemaster is open at the back, it cannot be closed against the weather and it allows people to jump on and off while the bus is moving causing on average 10 serious accidents per year and also making fare evasion easier. Every day 1000 wheelchair users travel on buses in London. This is compared to 6 million users in total, but it suggests on average there are 1-2 wheelchair users on every London bus route every day. Obviously this does not take into account the many more pushchair users or the numeous elderly people using the three-wheeled push along supports or people with other mobility difficulties or even luggage to get on board who welcome the low-level floors and ease of access of modern buses. This is why there are only 18 routemasters running compared to 5,197 modern double-deckers and 389 'bendy', i.e. two compartment buses in London, A bendy bus can hold 149 people compared to 90 on a modern double-decker and only 69 on a Routemaster.
People complain that there are fewer seats than on a Routemaster, but have they actually tried to sit in the seats. I am 6'0" tall (1.86m) which is about average height for a man in the UK now. I cannot sit on most Routemaster seats because my knees are jammed so hard into the seat in front, so I have to turn them to one side so I take up two slots or I have to stand anyway. Routemasters are more expensive to run than modern buses. People complain that they are safer on a Routemaster because of the conductor. Well, I know modern buses do not have conductors, but there is no reason why you cannot put one on or have a 'guard' if it makes people safer. I have travelled often on the Docklands Light Railway which is totally automated. There is no driver and all the tickets are bought from machines, and yet often, especially at night, they have a guard to make people feel safer. The structure of a bus does not determine who you put on it. If you wanted to, there is no reason why you could not have four armed guards on every bus. We do not have conductors on underground trains and yet people pack on to those.
You can see how successful modern design buses are if you note that bus passenger numbers are rising faster than at any time since 1946, they carry more people now than at any time since 1968 (when the Routemaster was dominant) and they cover more distance than at any time since 1957. Why is that? It is because they are clean and safe and easy to get on and off.
What is hilarious is that there are more complaints about the abolition of Routemasters online than there are people complaining about inflation. As I have noted before the British will always sacrifice comfort and efficiency for some perverse sense of nostalgia, that it is somehow better to be jammed on to a draughty bus that fills up quickly because it looks 'right' than to be on a modern efficient, safer service that their granny can get on without difficulty. Its removal is not portrayed as a step forward but, and I quote, 'an act of cultural vandalism'. No-one says every Routemaster must be destroyed but there is a difference between things you see in a museum and what you need to get to work or the shops in the morning. It is the same with the old red telephone boxes. They may have looked good but you had to be a weight-lifter to get the door open, not a child or an elderly or even just an average middle-aged person.
Johnson is clever, he knows how masochistic the vocal British public is, in its desire to live in some fantastical golden past that costs more and works less efficiently. His policies pander to that. It is ironic that most of the people who want the Routemaster back do not travel daily by bus in London. It is no different to saying that we should replace modern airliners with the aircraft you might see at a historic airshow or that the British Army should return to scarlet jackets and muskets because we won more battles with that equipment. Nostalgia has its place but not in informing the best approach for tackling the challenges of day-to-day life in 2008 Britain.
None of these old buses, including the Routemaster was designed for an era in which we are concerned about disabled access. Its aisles are very narrow as is the staircase to the upper deck and it is high off the ground so is difficult for children and the elderly to access let alone anyone in a wheelchair. The Routemaster is open at the back, it cannot be closed against the weather and it allows people to jump on and off while the bus is moving causing on average 10 serious accidents per year and also making fare evasion easier. Every day 1000 wheelchair users travel on buses in London. This is compared to 6 million users in total, but it suggests on average there are 1-2 wheelchair users on every London bus route every day. Obviously this does not take into account the many more pushchair users or the numeous elderly people using the three-wheeled push along supports or people with other mobility difficulties or even luggage to get on board who welcome the low-level floors and ease of access of modern buses. This is why there are only 18 routemasters running compared to 5,197 modern double-deckers and 389 'bendy', i.e. two compartment buses in London, A bendy bus can hold 149 people compared to 90 on a modern double-decker and only 69 on a Routemaster.
People complain that there are fewer seats than on a Routemaster, but have they actually tried to sit in the seats. I am 6'0" tall (1.86m) which is about average height for a man in the UK now. I cannot sit on most Routemaster seats because my knees are jammed so hard into the seat in front, so I have to turn them to one side so I take up two slots or I have to stand anyway. Routemasters are more expensive to run than modern buses. People complain that they are safer on a Routemaster because of the conductor. Well, I know modern buses do not have conductors, but there is no reason why you cannot put one on or have a 'guard' if it makes people safer. I have travelled often on the Docklands Light Railway which is totally automated. There is no driver and all the tickets are bought from machines, and yet often, especially at night, they have a guard to make people feel safer. The structure of a bus does not determine who you put on it. If you wanted to, there is no reason why you could not have four armed guards on every bus. We do not have conductors on underground trains and yet people pack on to those.
You can see how successful modern design buses are if you note that bus passenger numbers are rising faster than at any time since 1946, they carry more people now than at any time since 1968 (when the Routemaster was dominant) and they cover more distance than at any time since 1957. Why is that? It is because they are clean and safe and easy to get on and off.
What is hilarious is that there are more complaints about the abolition of Routemasters online than there are people complaining about inflation. As I have noted before the British will always sacrifice comfort and efficiency for some perverse sense of nostalgia, that it is somehow better to be jammed on to a draughty bus that fills up quickly because it looks 'right' than to be on a modern efficient, safer service that their granny can get on without difficulty. Its removal is not portrayed as a step forward but, and I quote, 'an act of cultural vandalism'. No-one says every Routemaster must be destroyed but there is a difference between things you see in a museum and what you need to get to work or the shops in the morning. It is the same with the old red telephone boxes. They may have looked good but you had to be a weight-lifter to get the door open, not a child or an elderly or even just an average middle-aged person.
Johnson is clever, he knows how masochistic the vocal British public is, in its desire to live in some fantastical golden past that costs more and works less efficiently. His policies pander to that. It is ironic that most of the people who want the Routemaster back do not travel daily by bus in London. It is no different to saying that we should replace modern airliners with the aircraft you might see at a historic airshow or that the British Army should return to scarlet jackets and muskets because we won more battles with that equipment. Nostalgia has its place but not in informing the best approach for tackling the challenges of day-to-day life in 2008 Britain.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Never Become A Father
Yesterday I read an open letter in the 'Family' section of 'The Guardian' from a mother of three children to them and also to their father who committed suicide ten years ago. Reading it reinforced my view that single-parent families are the only model that can adequately prepare children for life in the UK in the 21st century. Though all the children who are now 21, 17 and 16 have had the usual run-ins with some self-harm and contact with drugs, they are all now prospering and pursuing a range of interests and careers, they have not become homeless junkies. I imagine the same would have been much the same if their father had stayed alive. He would have been in no better position to stop them doing bad things to themselves than the mother has been. In fact especially for the two boys, the 21 and 16 year olds, antagonism with their father may have driven them to behave more hostilely and destructively than their brief flirtations with things have done. I think this is a classic example of a riposte to the group 'Familes Need Fathers', proof is stacking up that they do not at all.
Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.
In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.
Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.
I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.
There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.
P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.
Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.
In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.
Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.
I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.
There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.
P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.
Being Ethnically Reclassified in the UK
Many readers will be familiar with the character in many of the Agatha Christie detective novels called Miss Jane Marple. She is an elderly woman who solves crimes by relating them to parallel incidents that she had experienced in her own small village. Authors soon become familiar with the fact that whatever the setting whether it is Ancient Egypt, contemporary Britain or a colony many light years away then people generally behave the same, they have anger, jealously, envy, pomposity, compassion, love and many other factors. Being human even when we write about alien or fantastical species we do it through the vision of being human and we make these characters as human or as anti-human as we choose, but for us we define them on the spectrum. Sorry, back to the point. Anyway, for me, I tend to analyse things less by incidents I have witnessed in real life, I tend to spend a rather reclusive existence, but parallels in fiction whether written or in movies. I access the global village of fiction which of course is based on numerous incidences that the authors and scriptwriters and to some extent actors and directors have experienced themselves.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
It is in this context that I am going to turn to an interesting problem which I have seen unfolding over the past few weeks. As regular readers will know I live in a house with a white woman who was from South Africa and is now naturalised British and her six-year old son who attends a local Church of England school. Now, this is where the problem started. Each year the school sends home a list of all the information they have about the children for parents to update, especially as mobile phone numbers for emergency contact change so often. We have moved house twice since the boy started the school as well. The peculiar thing was in the category marked 'ethnicity' they had put 'East European' which in southern England these days is usually taken to mean Polish. Whilst people have been arriving from many states of Eastern Europe which are now in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria; Greece has been a member since 1982 and was never a Communist state, so I leave it out of this category) the Poles have been most visible with Polish shops appearing and Polish DVDs in rental shops. Around 10% of the population of Southampton is now Polish and cars with Polish registration plates are a common sight on the roads of South of England. I have no problem with immigrants, by arriving they have proven they have 'get up and go' and clearly there is demand for their labour in the UK. Many people forget that vocational training in Eastern Europe is often of a higher standard than in the UK for people such as builders and nurses.
Anyway, the background of the woman in my house is that she was born to a mother of Afrikaaner descent (originally back in the 18th century Huguenot settlers, i.e. Protestant refugees from France) and a father who was of German descent and his birth certificate was issued during the war so shows he is German back generations, certainly not Polish. I suppose this is the closest to Eastern Europe she has come, but German is not usually seen as East European. This is the terrible thing about the school defining the boy's ethnicity, we have all begun to analyse our antecedents on their basis of racial definition and it has terrible overtones of Nazi racial policy. The boy's father was white British with some Dutch connections.
Why did the school redefine the child from British to East European? For a start East European is not an ethnicity (British is even less so), it includes Slavs as the predominant people, but there are others such as the Magyars of Hungary who come from a different context and many people in those countries are also descendants of German medieval settlers. Ethnically most East Europeans are Caucasians (in Syria there are people called Circassians who are of Caucasian descent but presumably in this system would be labelled 'Arab') but as in the UK people can be a range of ethnicities and can come from a country. You can be black British or black Polish. So East European like British is a regional specification not an ethnic one. If you ask the child himself he defines himself as 'White African' and is very proud even at six of coming from Africa even though he has only spent a total of 2 months there in his life.
To some extent I think the school is conscious that its intake is almost exclusively white. When the boy started the only non-white pupil was a single Korean but now, even though the mix has widened to include mixed-race (predominantly White with Afro-Caribbean), Afro-Caribbean, East and South Asian children they are in a complete minority and make up only 1-2 children per class of 30 pupils. Maybe the school thought they could gain some credit by moving some of the White British into the East European 'ethnicity' and thought no-one would notice: they were very wrong. This is where I begin referring to the media because in fact it has unleashed a level of reaction which is quite stunning. If you have ever seen the movie 'Brazil' (1985). In this film set in a dystopian 'Nineteen Eight-Four' type world an insect falls on a typing machine changing the details of the arrest of a revolutionary Archibald Tuttle to that for a Mr. Buttle and much of the movie is about a civil servant trying to rectify this situation as the authorities close in on the wrong man. You will see why I draw a parallel in the moment.
The mother returned the form, corrected, to 'White British' to the school but the information that she was in fact 'East European' seemed to have leaked out. Many parents volunteer in the school and some of the clerical staff are harridans very much like doctors' receptionists and so a parent may have seen it or a member of staff gossiped about it. Teachers often like to bring out children's multi-culturalism. In my youth for some reason people thought I was Scottish and would ask me to talk about my 'home country' when I never actually went to Scotland until I was 36, so a teacher may have asked the boy to say something about Poland and this was reported back. Given the hostility to Poles which is growing in the South of England, it was probably unsurprising that at the school sports day a father of another child came up to the mother and said 'I cannot say what I want to say to you in a school playground' implying it was going to be very offensive and said 'I do not talk to people like you'. He then shepherded other parents away from the woman and spent the event scowling at her, implying that she was somehow soiling the event by being there. He said his son who is friends with her boy would never be permitted to come to our house or socialise with her son.
Now, for someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa and has witnessed racism of a perverted sophistication on a scale that no-one (especially whites) who has lived all their lives in the UK has ever experienced, you can imagine how offensive it was to treat the woman in this way. She left South Africa to get away from such attitudes and found them thrust back at her. She showed immense courage to stand there and stay for the sake of her son. Now, I know racism is a common disease in the UK, but as someone who is a white man, I have rarely experienced (once in West Germany I was told to 'get back on the ferry') so it has brought it home to me. What is bizarre is that this all stemmed from an error on the part of the school office.
I was reminded of the novel by James McClure (1939-2006) called 'The Steam Pig' (1971). McClure wrote crime novels set in apartheid South Africa and this one is about a woman whose father is ethnically redefined when he attends hospital, away from white to mixed race (in South Africa they had a long list of physical characteristics that they used to define people and would sometimes redefine people when characteristics became apparent) and so refused treatment at the whites hospital. The woman 'goes for white' bleaching her hair had wearing blue contact lenses to make herself appear more white so that she can have access to better housing and jobs than her father was pushed into when redefined. As readers know I am always interested in settings in which crimes or particular motives can occur which would not work elsewhere/when and this is a classic, but is chilling in its exploration of the implications of racial classification.
To some extent we are now entering into their game by worrying about how the mother and child have been ethnicall classified and getting this rectified. They should not behave in that way to any parent or child, and especially given they are a specifically Christian school. What sort of lesson does that teach for the future? I heard a headmaster from a school in Birmingham talking back in the early 1990s and he said that often teachers are challenged about why they cannot do more to stem the rise of racist attitudes and he said that 30 hours a week for nine months per year that children spend in school is insufficient to overturn the brainwashing in racism that they get at home. Schools do not give up in challenging such attitudes, but they are often fighting a losing battle.
No-one has pushed flaming rags through our letterbox or written grafitti across our house, things that so many people from ethnic minorities still experience. To some extent inadvertently the woman and child have become a rallying point for some of the mothers from other ethnic groups now that they have been thrust into that category. It does indicate that close beneath the surface of even a prosperous, overtly Christian sub-set of British society racism is very strong and leads people in almost a mundane way to be offensive and through segregating schoolfriends on racial grounds as this father is doing, give such an appalling message to the next generation which should be growing up with different attitudes if multi-cultural Britain is going to have any chance of surviving let alone thriving.
Thursday, 3 July 2008
Unemployment as the Whip
At the end of the Second World War there was obviously a concern not to return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s, partly this was because it was blamed for aiding the rise of Nazism in Germany that had led to the war breaking out. In addition right across Europe by 1938 there were very few democracies left and even if they had not become as extreme as Nazi Germany, most Europeans were under the rule of a dictator in a society that was authoritarian and discriminatory on grounds of race and religion. There was also a fear in 1945 of a repeat of what had happened 1919-21 with the end of the war and the return of demobilised troops leading to unemployment that was hard to decrease before the really bad levels that followed in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929.
In the UK in 1945, under a Labour Government, and even before then when civil servants had started thinking about the post-war economy, one issue was how far the UK could get to full employment. It was believed that Keynesian economics which had begun to be experimented with in the UK from the 1941 budget onwards could get the UK in a better shape in terms of unemployment. There was a great deal of debate about how high unemployment should be kept at, because it was feared that if everyone had a job then there would be no incentive for workers to work hard and they could effectively blackmail employers for higher wages. So it was believed that to achieve flexibility in the economy that unemployment should be somewhere between 3%-8% of the working population with left-wingers favouring the lower figure and the right-wingers the higher level.
In fact as it turned out, injections of US capital through Marshall Aid from 1948 onwards and the demands of reconstruction and then the various wars of the Cold War, combined with cheap oil kept unemployment low right until the mid-1970s and really there was no need for Keynesian economics. By the time they were tried in 1976, the world had become so used to not using deficit finance, and to a more stable budget pattern that such an approach was seen as unacceptable and the UK began to go into its highest levels of unemployment since the 1930s. This was not helped by the Thatcher government's privatisation of nationalised industries which then cut cost and the strict monetarist policies which exacerbated the shift from manufacturing to service dominance of the UK policy. There was also an increasing maldistribution of wealth as salaries of the richest pulled away further from the bulk of the working population. This in fact reduced consumption in the economy and millions of poor people actually consume a great deal more than a few rich people and so even the service sector did not prosper. The vigorous encouragement for people to buy rather than rent property also increased frictional unemployment as it made it far harder to move to a new area to find work, especially with the sharp disparaties between (not only in terms of housing but also food and other essentials) prices in different parts of the UK. Official OECD figures put UK unemployment in the mid 1980s at around 3.6 million, it was probably in fact over 4 million out of a working population of somewhere around 22-25 million. It also concealed all of those in part-time, insecure low paid jobs.
Unemployment now in the UK is around 1.65 million people out of a working population of 29 million, so 5.7%. We use ILO figures much more these days than simply counting the people who are claiming benefit was was the case in the 1980s and which actually excluded lots of people seeking work (such as married women whose husband worked, people between the ages of 55-65, etc.). The right-wing press, notably 'The Daily Mail' still complains that there are too many economically inactive people, they claim 7.95 million who they seem to condemn as being unwilling to contribute to the economy and thus should be chasitised. In fact of these 1.89 million are students, the bulk of whom work to pay their way through university and college given the high costs of study. They often take the low paid casual jobs that anyone supporting a family could not live on. Also it is still the case that the more someone studies the more they rise their income. Universities also generate a lot of wealth and in some areas are now the main industry of the town, often employing 3-5000 staff who contribute. Portsmouth claims that even just visits by parents of students who are studying in the city, bring £26 million per year into the economy, let alone what the students and university staff spend themselves. So I would hardly call students economically inactive. These days may go on placements into companies as part of their studies and so form an educated free labour force for part of the year.
Of the economically inactive, 2.35 million are either caring for elderly relatives or for children. Mothers are now condemned as 'stay-at-home' mothers. The thing is the policy of the Blair government and the Conservative ones that preceded it was that having mothers at home was a good thing to be encouraged but at the same time they should also go out to work. This contradictory policy has never been reconciled in the past 30 years in the UK so mothers are attacked from both directions. It is seen as alright for them to stay at home as long as they do not claim benefits. Women in the workplace still earn 17% less than a man in the same post, so where is the incentive to go out and be criticised for not looking after your child when you are going to get paid less. Mothers at home save the state millions of pounds. Private childcare is beyond the reach of most parents in terms of cost so to bring more mothers into the workforce would need a huge increase in cheap nursery places probably supplied by the state. The same goes for carers of the elderly and the disabled. The Thatcher government ran down many long-term care institutions to save money and forced 'care in the community' on the population. Scotland has reintroduced some of the provision for elderly people, England has not. Again, then, these carers might not be economically active, but they are effectively saving the state millions of pounds in the care it would be obliged to provide.
Apparently 619,000 people have retired early. Now, given that unemployment is 1.65 million, if these people were still in the workforce you would actually raise unemployment by 36%. These people tend not to be a burden on society and they are consumers so stimulating the economy. It seems perverse to want them back in the workforce in the place of younger people. By definition people who have retired early do not need to work to earn an income, so why should they not yield their place to those who need a job to support their family? It seems ridiculous to concern ourselves about the early retired they are a benefit not a burden to the economy. We were all encouraged during the 1980s to make millions and retire at 30, so is it any surprise that many people have done that? Again it seems like a contradictory policy. Conservatives want it both ways, it is a very old-fashioned attitude that is reminiscent of the 19th century attitudes of Non-Conformist denominations, that somehow it is sinful not to be working and those who do not work are guilty of committing an offence. We are long passed such attitudes and also to cling on to them suggests we put no value on study or caring.
There are people in the economy who do not want to work, these are the 34,000 termed 'discouraged workers'. Interestingly this figure is almost exactly the same as the number in the 1960s despite the increase in the size of the population. The question is would you want to employ such a person anyway? It is clear that such people are a smaller percentage of the population than they were, say, in 1968 and the number does not necessarily mean it is the same 34,000 people as some will drift in and out of this category as economic pressures dictate. If you think of the homeless people in the UK, of those with mental conditions who have been pushed out from institutions and so on, then this figure actually seems quite low, representing 0.12% of the total working population, actually probably lower than those people who are economically active but making their income from crime and probably scooped up in the 3.75 million people described as self-employed and lionised by the right-wing press!
The other neglected sector is the under-employed, those people who want a full-time permanent job but can only get temporary or seasonal work with very little security or rights. When I lived in East London, this characterised the employment of literally hundreds of people in any given street. When the minimum wage came in many doubled or tripled their weekly income though they had no access to the employment rights that should be taken for granted and in many cases their employers were scooping back their wages through introducing various charges and most often through not paying the national insurance contributions. In some parts of the UK, this grey economy which has legitimate businesses behaving in illegitimate ways is terribly common as the bulk of the employees have no other option bar crime or going back on state benefits. Contrary to the portrayal of the bulk of the population, the large majority of people hate to subsist on handouts and will go out of their way to get a scummy job with no rights, long hours and low pay rather than stay on benefits. However, such jobs do not pay enough and you are at risk of losing them on the whim of the employer. Tax credits have helped for those in such situations with families, but if you lose the job they stop too and you are back to benefits, constantly flickering between the two states.
Why have I got on to unemployment today? It is not because new figures are out, it was stimulated by a report (reported in 'The Guardian' on Saturday) that employers are complaining that people under the age of 40 lack the experience of mass unemployment (you could argue those under 34 as if you are 34 now, you were 16 in 1990) and so do not work hard enough as they have insufficient fear of losing their jobs. This goes back to the thoughts at the end of the Second World War about how much unemployment was needed to prick people into accepting low-paid work. No-one seems to realise that a worker who is in fear of unemployment is not an efficient worker. I am in this situation at the moment. I am likely to be unemployed from August 2009 onwards and yet I am already in fear that I will lose my house and other things despite their being a year to go. I am 40 so maybe I have that fear of the Thatcherite years still lodged in my brain. The effect is though that the fear of unemployment is causing sleepless nights and utter despair. I feel there is little point in putting in any effort to a job I will not see out. I am refusing to start projects that I know I will not see the end of. It causes arguments with my housemate and my family. Is this the kind of situation we want for younger people to be in terror all the time?
The thing about being threatened with unemployment is that it breaks any common interest between you and your employer. I have seen this happen so many times. In the past year two women who knew they were going to be layed off at my work (by a very bullying very misogynistic boss) simply stopped working, minutes were not typed up, things were not filed, they left everything in a mess because they no longer felt any obligation to the boss who had treated them so shabbily. Such fear stunts initiative. I have no incentive to start new things or even make suggestions on how to improve them. There is no point in me receiving training; there is no point going for promotion to work for the employer I will be parting company with so very soon. Fear of unemployment does not make people work harder, it instead quickly leads them to draw in and work less effectively. The hardest workers are those who are valued and feel they have a future in the company they are working in. Employers tend to see their workers simply as a resource like they electricity or raw materials, they forget that workers engage emotionally in their workplace as often the spend more time there awake than they do with their families.
One thing that the employers overlooked about people under the age of 40 is that they tend to view their life as much more changeable. They tend not to have mortgages or families, especially these days when people are leaving (or being forced by the economy) to leave buying a house or raising children until much later in their life. In addition, the age at which it is seen right to do certain things has shifted greatly. In my youth, you were deemed to be entering middle age at the age of 40. These days people in their early 40s carry out the kinds of activities that would have been done by 25-year olds in my youth. A colleague of mine in her 50s water-skiied for the first time last week and another who is in her mid-40s regularly goes scuba diving in tropical waters. Back in the 1970s these women would not think of doing such thing. Despite British people being pretty unadventurous when compared say to their French or Australian counterparts we are all constantly encouraged to get 'out there' travel and experience life. Given this context it is unsurprising that people under 40 are not keen to keep their heads down and work solidly at a job particularly when (in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s) there is no guarantee that they will not be dropped with minimal notice and minimal redundancy pay. Commitment is two-way and employers cannot whine that their employers make no commitment to the business when the employers make it clear they are making no commitment to the workers.
This leads on to the other complaint from employers that workers under 40 see going to work as an extension of their social life. If employers have suddenly discovered this then they have been blind about employee behaviour for decades. In terms of marriages in the UK, 40% are between people who met at work and this figure has continued to be the case for decades even if the level of marriages (climbing again) has fluctuated. This does not take into account the other relationships and friendships established at work and often promoted by employers through 'team building'. Again employers' expectations are unrealistic if they think they can have their employees working as a team and not for social contact to develop. The shift has been in terms of the media used for the contact. People do not stand around the 'water cooler' as they used to and far fewer gather in the smoking room and many workplaces no longer have a canteen where people socialise. A decade ago people complained that employees used the telephone to talk to friends and relatives now of course they email or text or instant message. This makes it more visible to some employers and in fact more in their control as many now block the usage of such websites through work machines. Another factor is now that we are all service sector workers it is much easier than if you are bellowing across to your colleague standing the other side of a production line. However, I bet if you measured how much time spend socialising at work now and compare it to 1958 or 1978 or 1998 you would find the time would be pretty much the same.
Thus, unemployment is still seen as the necessary whip in the UK to get a higher level of work out of employees. The fact that we work longer hours and have fewer holidays than our European colleagues is not factored into this at all. Fear, despite what employers think, does not make people work harder, it makes them work less efficiently. Society has changed and so have our expectations but people who feel happy and above all secure in their job work hard and make sacrifices for their employer. People who feel they are simply a disposable commodity and are threatened to make them work harder are not going to do. To get a good return on people you have to invest in them as you invest in the other aspects of your business. Of course as in so many facets of British business there is under-investment in this aspect as well as many others and so companies see the consequences of their policies.
In the UK in 1945, under a Labour Government, and even before then when civil servants had started thinking about the post-war economy, one issue was how far the UK could get to full employment. It was believed that Keynesian economics which had begun to be experimented with in the UK from the 1941 budget onwards could get the UK in a better shape in terms of unemployment. There was a great deal of debate about how high unemployment should be kept at, because it was feared that if everyone had a job then there would be no incentive for workers to work hard and they could effectively blackmail employers for higher wages. So it was believed that to achieve flexibility in the economy that unemployment should be somewhere between 3%-8% of the working population with left-wingers favouring the lower figure and the right-wingers the higher level.
In fact as it turned out, injections of US capital through Marshall Aid from 1948 onwards and the demands of reconstruction and then the various wars of the Cold War, combined with cheap oil kept unemployment low right until the mid-1970s and really there was no need for Keynesian economics. By the time they were tried in 1976, the world had become so used to not using deficit finance, and to a more stable budget pattern that such an approach was seen as unacceptable and the UK began to go into its highest levels of unemployment since the 1930s. This was not helped by the Thatcher government's privatisation of nationalised industries which then cut cost and the strict monetarist policies which exacerbated the shift from manufacturing to service dominance of the UK policy. There was also an increasing maldistribution of wealth as salaries of the richest pulled away further from the bulk of the working population. This in fact reduced consumption in the economy and millions of poor people actually consume a great deal more than a few rich people and so even the service sector did not prosper. The vigorous encouragement for people to buy rather than rent property also increased frictional unemployment as it made it far harder to move to a new area to find work, especially with the sharp disparaties between (not only in terms of housing but also food and other essentials) prices in different parts of the UK. Official OECD figures put UK unemployment in the mid 1980s at around 3.6 million, it was probably in fact over 4 million out of a working population of somewhere around 22-25 million. It also concealed all of those in part-time, insecure low paid jobs.
Unemployment now in the UK is around 1.65 million people out of a working population of 29 million, so 5.7%. We use ILO figures much more these days than simply counting the people who are claiming benefit was was the case in the 1980s and which actually excluded lots of people seeking work (such as married women whose husband worked, people between the ages of 55-65, etc.). The right-wing press, notably 'The Daily Mail' still complains that there are too many economically inactive people, they claim 7.95 million who they seem to condemn as being unwilling to contribute to the economy and thus should be chasitised. In fact of these 1.89 million are students, the bulk of whom work to pay their way through university and college given the high costs of study. They often take the low paid casual jobs that anyone supporting a family could not live on. Also it is still the case that the more someone studies the more they rise their income. Universities also generate a lot of wealth and in some areas are now the main industry of the town, often employing 3-5000 staff who contribute. Portsmouth claims that even just visits by parents of students who are studying in the city, bring £26 million per year into the economy, let alone what the students and university staff spend themselves. So I would hardly call students economically inactive. These days may go on placements into companies as part of their studies and so form an educated free labour force for part of the year.
Of the economically inactive, 2.35 million are either caring for elderly relatives or for children. Mothers are now condemned as 'stay-at-home' mothers. The thing is the policy of the Blair government and the Conservative ones that preceded it was that having mothers at home was a good thing to be encouraged but at the same time they should also go out to work. This contradictory policy has never been reconciled in the past 30 years in the UK so mothers are attacked from both directions. It is seen as alright for them to stay at home as long as they do not claim benefits. Women in the workplace still earn 17% less than a man in the same post, so where is the incentive to go out and be criticised for not looking after your child when you are going to get paid less. Mothers at home save the state millions of pounds. Private childcare is beyond the reach of most parents in terms of cost so to bring more mothers into the workforce would need a huge increase in cheap nursery places probably supplied by the state. The same goes for carers of the elderly and the disabled. The Thatcher government ran down many long-term care institutions to save money and forced 'care in the community' on the population. Scotland has reintroduced some of the provision for elderly people, England has not. Again, then, these carers might not be economically active, but they are effectively saving the state millions of pounds in the care it would be obliged to provide.
Apparently 619,000 people have retired early. Now, given that unemployment is 1.65 million, if these people were still in the workforce you would actually raise unemployment by 36%. These people tend not to be a burden on society and they are consumers so stimulating the economy. It seems perverse to want them back in the workforce in the place of younger people. By definition people who have retired early do not need to work to earn an income, so why should they not yield their place to those who need a job to support their family? It seems ridiculous to concern ourselves about the early retired they are a benefit not a burden to the economy. We were all encouraged during the 1980s to make millions and retire at 30, so is it any surprise that many people have done that? Again it seems like a contradictory policy. Conservatives want it both ways, it is a very old-fashioned attitude that is reminiscent of the 19th century attitudes of Non-Conformist denominations, that somehow it is sinful not to be working and those who do not work are guilty of committing an offence. We are long passed such attitudes and also to cling on to them suggests we put no value on study or caring.
There are people in the economy who do not want to work, these are the 34,000 termed 'discouraged workers'. Interestingly this figure is almost exactly the same as the number in the 1960s despite the increase in the size of the population. The question is would you want to employ such a person anyway? It is clear that such people are a smaller percentage of the population than they were, say, in 1968 and the number does not necessarily mean it is the same 34,000 people as some will drift in and out of this category as economic pressures dictate. If you think of the homeless people in the UK, of those with mental conditions who have been pushed out from institutions and so on, then this figure actually seems quite low, representing 0.12% of the total working population, actually probably lower than those people who are economically active but making their income from crime and probably scooped up in the 3.75 million people described as self-employed and lionised by the right-wing press!
The other neglected sector is the under-employed, those people who want a full-time permanent job but can only get temporary or seasonal work with very little security or rights. When I lived in East London, this characterised the employment of literally hundreds of people in any given street. When the minimum wage came in many doubled or tripled their weekly income though they had no access to the employment rights that should be taken for granted and in many cases their employers were scooping back their wages through introducing various charges and most often through not paying the national insurance contributions. In some parts of the UK, this grey economy which has legitimate businesses behaving in illegitimate ways is terribly common as the bulk of the employees have no other option bar crime or going back on state benefits. Contrary to the portrayal of the bulk of the population, the large majority of people hate to subsist on handouts and will go out of their way to get a scummy job with no rights, long hours and low pay rather than stay on benefits. However, such jobs do not pay enough and you are at risk of losing them on the whim of the employer. Tax credits have helped for those in such situations with families, but if you lose the job they stop too and you are back to benefits, constantly flickering between the two states.
Why have I got on to unemployment today? It is not because new figures are out, it was stimulated by a report (reported in 'The Guardian' on Saturday) that employers are complaining that people under the age of 40 lack the experience of mass unemployment (you could argue those under 34 as if you are 34 now, you were 16 in 1990) and so do not work hard enough as they have insufficient fear of losing their jobs. This goes back to the thoughts at the end of the Second World War about how much unemployment was needed to prick people into accepting low-paid work. No-one seems to realise that a worker who is in fear of unemployment is not an efficient worker. I am in this situation at the moment. I am likely to be unemployed from August 2009 onwards and yet I am already in fear that I will lose my house and other things despite their being a year to go. I am 40 so maybe I have that fear of the Thatcherite years still lodged in my brain. The effect is though that the fear of unemployment is causing sleepless nights and utter despair. I feel there is little point in putting in any effort to a job I will not see out. I am refusing to start projects that I know I will not see the end of. It causes arguments with my housemate and my family. Is this the kind of situation we want for younger people to be in terror all the time?
The thing about being threatened with unemployment is that it breaks any common interest between you and your employer. I have seen this happen so many times. In the past year two women who knew they were going to be layed off at my work (by a very bullying very misogynistic boss) simply stopped working, minutes were not typed up, things were not filed, they left everything in a mess because they no longer felt any obligation to the boss who had treated them so shabbily. Such fear stunts initiative. I have no incentive to start new things or even make suggestions on how to improve them. There is no point in me receiving training; there is no point going for promotion to work for the employer I will be parting company with so very soon. Fear of unemployment does not make people work harder, it instead quickly leads them to draw in and work less effectively. The hardest workers are those who are valued and feel they have a future in the company they are working in. Employers tend to see their workers simply as a resource like they electricity or raw materials, they forget that workers engage emotionally in their workplace as often the spend more time there awake than they do with their families.
One thing that the employers overlooked about people under the age of 40 is that they tend to view their life as much more changeable. They tend not to have mortgages or families, especially these days when people are leaving (or being forced by the economy) to leave buying a house or raising children until much later in their life. In addition, the age at which it is seen right to do certain things has shifted greatly. In my youth, you were deemed to be entering middle age at the age of 40. These days people in their early 40s carry out the kinds of activities that would have been done by 25-year olds in my youth. A colleague of mine in her 50s water-skiied for the first time last week and another who is in her mid-40s regularly goes scuba diving in tropical waters. Back in the 1970s these women would not think of doing such thing. Despite British people being pretty unadventurous when compared say to their French or Australian counterparts we are all constantly encouraged to get 'out there' travel and experience life. Given this context it is unsurprising that people under 40 are not keen to keep their heads down and work solidly at a job particularly when (in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s) there is no guarantee that they will not be dropped with minimal notice and minimal redundancy pay. Commitment is two-way and employers cannot whine that their employers make no commitment to the business when the employers make it clear they are making no commitment to the workers.
This leads on to the other complaint from employers that workers under 40 see going to work as an extension of their social life. If employers have suddenly discovered this then they have been blind about employee behaviour for decades. In terms of marriages in the UK, 40% are between people who met at work and this figure has continued to be the case for decades even if the level of marriages (climbing again) has fluctuated. This does not take into account the other relationships and friendships established at work and often promoted by employers through 'team building'. Again employers' expectations are unrealistic if they think they can have their employees working as a team and not for social contact to develop. The shift has been in terms of the media used for the contact. People do not stand around the 'water cooler' as they used to and far fewer gather in the smoking room and many workplaces no longer have a canteen where people socialise. A decade ago people complained that employees used the telephone to talk to friends and relatives now of course they email or text or instant message. This makes it more visible to some employers and in fact more in their control as many now block the usage of such websites through work machines. Another factor is now that we are all service sector workers it is much easier than if you are bellowing across to your colleague standing the other side of a production line. However, I bet if you measured how much time spend socialising at work now and compare it to 1958 or 1978 or 1998 you would find the time would be pretty much the same.
Thus, unemployment is still seen as the necessary whip in the UK to get a higher level of work out of employees. The fact that we work longer hours and have fewer holidays than our European colleagues is not factored into this at all. Fear, despite what employers think, does not make people work harder, it makes them work less efficiently. Society has changed and so have our expectations but people who feel happy and above all secure in their job work hard and make sacrifices for their employer. People who feel they are simply a disposable commodity and are threatened to make them work harder are not going to do. To get a good return on people you have to invest in them as you invest in the other aspects of your business. Of course as in so many facets of British business there is under-investment in this aspect as well as many others and so companies see the consequences of their policies.
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