Horror Excess

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Simon

For the last few days, the subject of boardroom excess has been brought firmly to the forefront of the news. That news has been firmly fixed on what should have been a government owned bank – the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose disastrous purchase of failing Dutch bank ABN AMRO was in no small part responsible for the near-collapse of the British banking system. The targets of media – and thus public – ire have been its former chairman, ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, and its current CEO, Stephen Hester. Politicians and their supporting press have had their knickers all in a twist over, firstly, Hester’s surprisingly large £963000 ‘bonus’, then Goodwin’s apparently undeserved knighthood.

Both narratives have reached a convenient resolution, so convenient it actually looks a bit contrived. And, as far as I’m concerned, so it is – contrived to distract people from a much larger systemic problem of which these two rapacious capitalists are merely the tip of the iceberg.

I can’t help wondering what backroom deals and political pressure caused first RBS’ chairman, Philip Hampton, to decline his own £1.4m share gift ‘bonus’, then Hester to finally relent and decide he wasn’t going to take his. Both made their decisions amid a mounting storm of public anger; but as usual where a press narrative is concerned, the shades of grey were barely touched upon.

The assumption that RBS is ‘publicly owned’ is close to, but not the actual, truth – the bailout of £45 billion of OUR money to rescue the bank from its own unthinking greed actually left 17% of the bank outside government hands. This was in the dying days of the New Labour government, when the party was somehow still desperate to avoid associations with its own socialist past; so buying the whole thing and effectively nationalising it was right out. Nobody, they thought, wanted to be reminded of British Steel, British Leyland and British Rail – ignoring the fact that privatisation has in many cases rendered formerly nationalised industries worse than they previously were.

So RBS, remained, effectively, a private organisation – albeit one in which the public had a vast majority share of 83%. David Cameron had a point when he said that it wasn’t the government’s place to interfere with remuneration arrangements in a private company; but as shareholder rather than legislator, it certainly could have had a say. It now seems that they did, and Hester’s £963000 bonus had actually been halved at the hamfisted insistence of our beloved Prime Minister. How he thought that kind of sum would be in any way more acceptable than twice the amount shows his trademark lack of empathy with those who aren’t hyper-wealthy millionaires, but hey, at least he made the gesture.

Trouble is, the gesture WE all saw was a middle finger to those who thought senior bankers were already being paid an insane amount, and the PR pressure didn’t let up. And the discussion of the issue was starting to lead onto a wider discussion of, well, if we can’t control the rampant excess of a company that’s 83% publicly owned, maybe, just maybe, something’s wrong with the entire system that allows this to happen.

I’m only theorising, but I wonder if, at this point, a quiet word was had from ‘someone’ in the Treasury (perhaps with the initials G.O.) with the board of RBS, to the effect that, unless they sacrificed their goodies this time, the whole comfy system might come crumbling down for the entire sector. And again, just theorising, but maybe Mr Hester was prepared to call the bluff, but Mr Hampton wasn’t. So, when Hampton gave up his bonus, it really did become politically untenable for Hester to cling on to his.

At this point, another banker was thrown to the wolves – step up, Sir Fred Goodwin, the ‘mastermind’ behind the ABN AMRO takeover and chief architect of RBS’ near-collapse. There’d been quiet rumbling for a while about the prospect of ‘punishing’ Goodwin by stripping him of his knighthood. Lest we forget, this knighthood was given out – in happier financial times – by New Labour in yet another attempt to prove that they weren’t so different from the Tories when it came to looking after The City. There’s a revealing clip of Harriet Harman defending this at the time by saying she “believed” the honour wasn’t for services to the banking sector, but more because Goodwin was such an all round nice bloke.

Buckingham Palace would beg to differ. It was indeed for ‘services to the banking industry’ that Goodwin was knighted, although with hindsight it’s easy to wish the Queen hadn’t just used that big sword to cut his head off and save her country a lot of money. Now though, with the public mood towards bankers something akin to their feelings for Nazi war criminals, it’s been arranged that Goodwin will no longer be “Sir Fred” and revert to plain old “Mr Goodwin”.

This was arranged by a little seen body called the Forfeiture Committee, staffed by civil servants and entirely apolitical – you know, just like the whole Honours system isn’t. There is, undoubtedly, a certain amount of satisfaction to be gained from Goodwin’s stripping of his title. Mind you, I at least might have preferred it if he’d instead been stripped of his pension – a pension that leaves him struggling on a mere £350000 a YEAR from the funds of a bank that WE paid to rescue from his calamitous mismanagement. Still, could have been worse – the original pension was nearly twice that amount, but Goodwin grudgingly ‘agreed’ to sacrifice half of it at the urging of then Chancellor Alastair Darling, himself being leaned on by his Opposition equivalent – one Mr George Osborne. How times change!

So yes, I’d have been happy for him to keep his meaningless knighthood if he’d given back the pension that we’ve paid for. After all, the knighthood’s costing us nothing. And I suspect “Mr Goodwin” has enough of a personal fortune from his obscene pay while still working for RBS that he could probably manage without a pension at all.

Richly deserved fates for both Hester and Goodwin, many are saying, and I find it hard to disagree. Many others, however, are saying that these men have been sacrificial lambs on the altar of public opinion, and I find that hard to disagree with too – but not for the reasons most are saying it. Stripping Hester of what was actually a share gift rather than a cash settlement doesn’t actually achieve very much; he couldn’t have sold the shares until they vested after four years, in which case it would surely have been in his interest to make RBS do well, which presumably is what we want. And removing an archaic medieval title from Goodwin, while it’s nice to see him humiliated, is little more than a meaningless gesture.

No, the reason these two men come across as scapegoats is that, presumably, we’re meant to be satisfied with these two highly-publicised bits of ‘justice’ and stop talking about the problem they actually represent – the increasingly insane levels of remuneration at the top of not just banks but every substantial private organisation.

Yes, Hester has given up his bonus – but he still draws a ‘basic’ salary of £1.2m. This, it is argued, is because it’s the going rate for a talented CEO, and such a person is necessary to restore ‘confidence’ (a word that so easily precedes ‘trick’) in the RBS. The tradition of ‘bonuses’ is justified in the same way – they must be doled out, regardless of merit, because everyone else does it (although this seems to be a tradition largely confined to the UK and the US). Indeed, so great is the expectation of this kind of entitlement among bankers now that the former employees of failed bank Dredsner are actually suing their now-defunct employer for the $66m in bonuses they didn’t get this year – because the bank went bust. That’s some brass neck.

Meanwhile, CEOs and board members routinely award themselves annual pay rises of around 40%, at a point when the lowest ranking members of staff are seeing regular pay freezes. Just ask the employees of HMV, whose Christmas bonus has now been abolished, and have been told that Bank Holidays no longer count as public holidays, so must be worked by all without overtime pay. So they’re working slightly harder than most board members, whose jobs are so undemanding that many sit on multiple boards drawing huge salaries from each.

As with so many political issues, there are two aspects to this – the moral and the pragmatic. A moral argument on the topic is almost impossible to win, because everyone’s morals are subjective. Anyone criticising the state of affairs regarding income inequality is immediately branded as using “the politics of envy” by supporters of the status quo. Bloody right we’re envious – when Tesco CEO Philip Clarke gets paid £6.9m a year while his lowly employees have to use tax credit just to survive, I’d say there was a right to envy. But envy doesn’t mean critics of the system want to be in the same position as Clarke; it’s not a binary argument. They just want some form of fairness restored to a system in which the tax rate tops out when you’re earning £150000 a year, and men like Clarke earn many multiples this amount.

Still, some argue that this IS a fair system – I can see the point about rewarding hard work and keeping the state out of it. That’s plainly not the case – but it’s their moral stance, and unlike religion, it’s virtually impossible to proselytise your own moral code. But there’s the pragmatic argument too, which is harder to shoot down. There’s a finite amount of money in the system. If CEOs and board members continue to get annual raises of 40% or more, they’re increasingly going to be hoarding the vast majority of that finite amount at everyone else’s expense.

I say “hoarding”, because that’s what they do. They’re not actually spending these vast sums of money, which might help stabilise the economy. No, it sits, often untaxed, in foreign banks and tax havens. It’s been estimated that, currently, there is $18 TRILLION worth of untaxed assets sitting in offshore havens. That is, I believe, more than a third of the GDP of the entire planet. And if the rich keep getting 40% pay rises, that figure is only going to get larger.

Unfortunately for such vested interests, the issue has become a hot political topic, even with the apparent dismantlement of the Occupy movement. It was unsurprising to see Barack Obama address income inequality in his State of the Union address this month; but more surprising to see Republican hopeful Mitt Romney vilified by his own party for paying a meagre 15% tax on his gigantic income. Ordinary Republican voters, it seems, are no longer being conned into voting against their own interests by the vague promise that they too can be hyper rich and benefit from the system.

Over here, motivated by political necessity, there have been things afoot too. Many are somewhat ineffectual, if well-meaning. Vince Cable’s much-publicised proposals on curbing boardroom excess strike me as weak at best. Full disclosure of executive pay may well lead to execs saying, “why aren’t I getting as much as he/she does?” Shareholder voting on pay rises is largely irrelevant when most shareholders are vast, impersonal pension funds. Having employee representation on pay committees is a nice idea, but hinges on the concept that execs wouldn’t have the cheek to vote themselves massive increases when faced by their lowest ranks across a table. As we’ve seen time and again, execs have this much cheek and much more besides.

Other ideas, though, seem rather better – and sadly less likely to happen. The Lib Dems’ proposed ‘mansion tax’ on properties above £2m in value is quite a good one – after all, you can’t shift your house to an offshore haven. Trouble is, it’s likely to be shot down by their Tory partners in the interests of fairness –after all, Mr Cameron and his Chipping Norton friends do have VERY big houses.

Then there’s Land Value Tax – again, you can’t move land out of a taxation regime. To some extent, countries like Australia do this already. Perhaps by coincidence, Australia’s economy is doing rather well. However, despite some Lib Dem fondness for the idea, nobody else seems to want this one either.

Then there’s the rather more bonkers idea espoused by a few left wing commentators recently of a one off 20% ‘wealth raid’ on the assets of the tiny proportion of the hyper-rich. This, the commentators argue, could raise £800bn at a stroke – more than enough to pay off the £149bn deficit, and start making a dent in the national debt itself. Trouble is, I can’t see how this would work realistically, when so much of that wealth is based in property or moored anonymously offshore.

As with so much of economics, there are plenty of proposed remedies floating around at the moment, and it’s hard to see which are workable, realistic or fair (there’s that moral judgement again). But the only thing that is clear is that the current system is unsustainable. CEOs aren’t going to sod off overseas if you deny them the contents of Scrooge McDuck’s Money Barns – somehow Mervyn King manages to run the Bank of England on a mere £300000 a year, and he’s not clamouring for a giant increase. No, this whole thing needs more comprehensive debate than this long ramble can cram in, but it’s a debate that shouldn’t be shut off because we’re sated with the sacrifice of two of the small fry villains of the tale.

Notes from the Trenches–Journal of a Dole Scrounger

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Simon

“Yes, I’d seen that one,” I said, as the harassed looking Job Centre clerk handed me a vacancy printout. “I’m actually looking for something permanent, so I haven’t been bothering with temporary positions.”

She looked askance at me for a millisecond, before declaring, in a schoolmarm-who-will-take-no-objections sort of voice, “You will if you want to claim benefits.”

And there was me thinking the Department of Work and Pensions might want me off its ever growing list of the unemployed for good. Apparently they’re so desperate for the appearance of one less NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) on their figures, even a job for a few months must be chased – regardless of the fact that it was fixed term contract work that got me into this position in the first place.

Welcome to the wonderful world of unemployment. With the Coalition government’s proposed welfare reforms all over the papers right now, it’s a topical place to be. But contrary to the overwhelming media narrative, not a nice one.

The ‘reform’ of the Welfare State is yet another in a long line of Tory ideological dreams that somehow conveniently fit the purpose of bringing down the deficit – or to use Tory Central Office language, “sorting out the mess left by the last government”. To this end, a media narrative has been carefully framed, helped by the sympathetic right-leaning press. The DWP and other august government bodies have been calculatedly releasing a series of sensationalistic sets of statistics that have shifted public opinion of the jobless to seeing us as bloated, obese couch potatoes, shovelling down crisps while watching Jeremy Kyle all day in our palatial mansions – all at the hardworking taxpayers’ expense. When we’re not on those all expenses paid holidays, of course.

Think it’s an exaggeration? Just try looking at a few newspaper websites. Inevitably, the Daily Mail leads the pack; searching their website with the keyword ‘benefit’ calls forth a massive list of articles about fraudsters and scroungers. Ooh, a naughty man pretended to be disabled, but he can do gardening! Judge’s fury at alcoholic on disability! 76% of those who say they’re sick could actually work!

A similar search on the Daily Express website brings similar results – albeit slightly more tempered by the fact that the word ‘benefit’ doesn’t always apply to state welfare. Those ‘sick note scroungers’ are here too, though oddly this time only 57% of them are lying. Playing to the Express’ usual concerns, they note how immigrants are falsely claiming benefit. And then there’s the usual ‘scandal’ of people deliberately having huge families just to claim enough benefit not to have to get a job. Even if you believe that one, it’s hard to imagine that the “190 families” cited in the article are enough to break the state welfare budget.

The Sun, meanwhile, focuses more on the sensationalistic individual “what a bloody nerve” stories. What about the disability claimant who was caught skydiving, eh? Ooh, a friend of 12-years-dead TV host Paula Yates has made a fraudulent claim! And those sicknote scroungers are here as well – this time it’s a massive 80% of them who could go to work! And what about the fact that “one in three” benefit recipients is a criminal,eh? Bloody scrounging scum!

Well, we’re all familiar with the thorough research and impartial reporting brought to us by the British tabloids, so this should surprise no-one. But it’s the government’s steady stream of press releases, reports and statistics that feed the beast. Those last two stories in the Sun were brought to you courtesy of the Department of Work and Pensions and the charming Employment Minister Chris Grayling – a man who almost scuppered his chance of a ministerial post because he stated that Christians had the right to exclude gays from their businesses on religious grounds. What a nice feller. Isn’t the country lucky to have him extolling such Christian values as compassion and giving to the needy? Oh wait…

Trumping Grayling is the architect of the Coalition’s grand welfare reform scheme, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. Another committed Christian, Smith was formerly an ineffectual caretaker leader of the Tories in opposition, and gained the less than thrilling nickname of ‘the quiet man’. Apparently he took this to heart, and seems to have become some kind of jobless-persecuting Torquemada in his quest to bring down the insane levels of benefit fraud that are so crippling the Treasury – estimated to be a staggering less than 1% of the benefit budget. But just in case tackling this massive army of scroungers doesn’t do the job, he seems intent on prying benefits back even from those who currently need and are entitled to them – like the disabled, those with large families, and those living in expensive-rent areas like, say, the entire South East of England.

But surely the welfare system needs reform, doesn’t it? Well yes, to be fair, it does. It’s massively overcomplicated for a start. You claim your Jobseekers’ Allowance (a princely £67.50 a week) from the DWP, your Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit from your local authority, the many and varied disability benefits from the DWP again, Child Benefit from the DWP, emergency crisis loans from the DWP – for now. Soon those too will be handed over to cash-strapped local authorities with no obligation to dispense them when they might need the cash to replace non-existent buses.

So right now, there’s a baffling array of benefits potentially available, all of which need to be applied for by in separate ordeal-by-complex-form, dealt with and paid by different departments. Under the circumstances, Iain Duncan Smith’s idea of a ‘Universal Credit’, which takes into account all your entitlements to form one conglomerated payment, seems like rather a good idea.

What doesn’t seem such a good idea is using this reform – and the sacred cow of deficit reduction – to massively slash existing payments to those who really need them. Especially in a climate where public sector job losses and increasing business closures due to unnecessary austerity are causing a massive rise in the numbers of jobless. With fewer and fewer jobs around, the long term unemployed will not be ‘scrounging’ off benefits to fund a lavish lifestyle. They’ll be trying their best to make the already meagre payments available last long enough to pay the rent, buy the shopping and, potentially, move to an area which might have more available jobs. Like, say, the South East of England. Where they won’t be able to afford to live, even if they scrape a low-level job at Tesco, since the paltry minimum wage has to be topped up by tax credits to provide a normal living. And the state won’t be funding those if Mr Smith has his way.

Of course, the increasing level of unemployment, which the Coalition presumably believe to be a price worth paying to enact longstanding Conservative ideology, will inevitably mean a bigger welfare bill. So surely cutting it makes sense? Well, it’s true that, according to statistics, the welfare budget for 2009-2010 was £192 billion, massively greater than most areas of government spending. But the key to bringing this number down is not to slash that spending and send hundreds of thousands into poverty and homelessness. It’s to try and create jobs to get people off those benefits.

Because, contrary to what Smith, Grayling and their press puppets would have us believe, the vast majority of jobless people are not idle scroungers. They want to work. But the high levels of unemployment means that companies can be choosier than ever when looking for employees. Even to get a job as a labourer now requires previous experience, and sometimes a professional qualification. Retail jobs demand knowledge of the precise commodity they sell, meaning if/when HMV goes under, their thousands of redundant employees won’t be able to just haul ass to Next without clothing retail experience.

Yes, there are job opportunities out there. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are about 439,000 of them across the country. But that’s against 2.685 million unemployed people. At its most basic, that means there are six times fewer jobs than there are jobseekers. And that’s before you take into account the regional variations that push that ratio even higher in some areas of the country. The government/media narrative that the unemployed are just lazy simply doesn’t add up.

Which brings us back to me, and my experience of unemployment. Am I one of those crisp-guzzling, Jeremy Kyle-watching scroungers that the narrative wants to portray us all as being? Of course I’m not. I was made redundant nearly five months ago, from a fairly high level job in education management, so you’d think I’d have pretty good prospects. And yet after five months of looking, I’ve found a surprisingly small amount of jobs I can even apply for.

It’s the usual paradox. Even if I set my sights much lower than I had been at (and I’m looking at jobs that pay less than half my previous wage these days), I’m considered too old (I’m 42) and too overqualified to take on the kind of jobs that rapacious employers can easily underpay kids for. And as for the kinds of jobs that equate to what I’ve been doing for the last four years, they mostly have experience requirements so precise that literally only someone who’s done that exact job before stands a chance. Which means that my best bet is to try and get another job back at the place I’ve just left – since they’re the only employer who has that exact position within 70 miles or so.

In the mean time, it may sound like a life of Riley to some – having no job to go to, no set time to get up, all that free time to do what you like…Well, no. Not really. Just looking for a job can become a full time occupation in itself. I spend an inordinate amount of time searching the myriad job sites and agencies on the internet, compiling lists of jobs I could apply for, however tenuous. Each application, if done properly, can take two hours or more – there’s the time spent researching the employer, writing a good cover letter, tinkering with the CV, sometimes filling in application forms or going through online hoops to submit information. To do four job applications can easily take more than eight hours.

Not that I do that every day. Even the stern-faced Job Centre lady I mentioned at the start advised me not to spend more than a couple of hours per day looking, and she was right – it’s spirit crushing (though I do spend more time than that, whatever the advice). Because what the ‘scrounger’ narrative doesn’t mention is the sheer sense of worthlessness, purposelessness you feel. You’ve gone from being a productive member of society to a drain on it, no matter how much you try not to. It is staggeringly, mind-bogglingly depressing.

And you can’t do much with all that free time – because doing things requires money, and you’re only getting £67.50 a week. In the mean time, I do not watch Jeremy Kyle; the TV is seldom on, and when it is, it’s usually tuned to BBC News. Sometimes I watch a film – this morning it was the less than cheery Revolutionary Road, which didn’t help my mood much. Or I’ll read a book. Currently I’m halfway through Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. How’s that for your uneducated couch potato?

I’m better off than most. I’ve worked consistently for most of the last twenty years (though my contribution based allowance will be cut after six months, just like anyone else), and I’ve managed to pay off all my debts and put aside a reasonable level of savings. Of course, they were going to be put towards a deposit on a house, but right now they’re supplementing my benefit, because £67.50 isn’t a whole lot to live on in Cambridge. My partner still has a job and a reasonable income, so I don’t need to claim Housing Benefit (not that I’m entitled to it under those circumstances). Nonetheless, I’ve used my savings to pay my share of the rent for the next year. And we don’t have children to think of.

So compared to a lot of the jobless, I don’t have a whole lot to worry about – even though it’s taking me longer to find a job than it ever has before. And yet my self-esteem is lower than ever. I feel useless, rejected, worthless. Now try and imagine how that would feel if I’d worked for twenty years at a decent career, had a mortgage on a nice house and a couple of kids (with all the attendant debt), and suddenly found myself on the scrapheap. Thanks to Iain Duncan Smith’s proposed benefit cap, if I lived in London, I’d probably have to sell up and move somewhere cheaper, like the North. Where the jobs aren’t.

Think of those people, because they’re going to be getting more numerous in coming months if the government have their way. I don’t have all those problems, and even I’m getting pretty depressed – not to mention resentful at the relentless media insinuations that I’m a lazy scrounger. The unemployed are not subhuman, and the continued demonisation of them to justify a Tory ideological wet dream should be a national scandal instead of a commonly accepted Goebbels-style Big Lie.

SOPA–Free Speech Vs Profit

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Simon

So, it looks like yesterday’s internet protests by the likes of Reddit and Wikipedia may be having an effect, as US representatives back away from supporting the controversial SOPA and PIPA bills in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The White House is said to be looking dimly at the legislation. But we shouldn’t get complacent – much as I want to like Barack Obama as a President, he does have something of a history of doing the opposite to what he’s publicly said. Just ask the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay.

So what’s the problem with these bills? Ostensibly, their supporters claim, their purpose is to stop those dastardly pirates from ‘stealing’ copyrighted material such as music, films or TV shows, thus depriving the poor, starving artists like Bono and Steven Spielberg from their pittance of a living wage.

Obviously I’m being flippant – piracy is an issue, but this isn’t the right way to deal with it. The various techies opposed to the legislation point out that this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut; when you’ve used it, you won’t have any nut left to eat anyway. The bills would provide the US federal government (and its ever-attentive corporate lobbyists) with a legal mandate to force websites to remove apparently copyright-violating material, without any recourse to argument, or face having their sites shut down by law.

This is plainly not a transparent process, much like the UK’s ‘Control Orders’, which have frequently allowed the detention without trial of ‘terror suspects’ without giving them any knowledge of the supposed case against them. But it’s not just the lack of an ability to challenge the rulings which make SOPA and PIPA so disturbing. It’s the fact that it gives the US government legal authority to shut down websites, in direct contravention of the Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

The United States paints itself as the standard bearer for democracy. And yet these bills allow, in the name of monetary profit, the same kind of internet censorship regularly practised in repressive dictatorships like Syria, Iran and China. The legislation is (presumably intentionally) so loosely worded as to effectively allow the federal government to use it as a pretext to censor virtually anything. And not just in the US – given the internet’s global reach, they’re attempting to extend their legal control beyond their borders and across the entire world. Think that’s an impossible challenge? Tell that to 23 year old Richard O’Dwyer, shortly to be extradited for trial from the UK to the US for hosting a site which linked to illegal downloads, despite not having broken any law in the country of which he is a citizen.

That also highlights the ridiculous nature of the UK/US extradition treaty, but that’s an argument for another time. Suffice to say, the US has similar extradition treaties with numerous other countries. If any person has posted anything the loosely worded legislation prohibits, on any website at any time and in any country, not only could said website be removed from existence, but the person concerned could find themselves locked up. As a friend of mine on Facebook put it, if you upload a Michael Jackson song, you could face up to five years in prison – one year longer than the doctor who killed him.

“Ah, but,” supporters of the bill say, “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear.” But who’s to say what you’ve posted is ‘wrong’? The government of course, with the helpful advice of their corporate lobbyists. You might be surprised how easy it is to infringe the labyrinthine intellectual property laws – just ask Lamar Smith, the Republican Congressman who actually wrote SOPA. His campaign website has been shown to use stock images from a photographic library for which he or his organisation never paid. They’re barely visible, but they’re there. In the unfortunate event that these bills pass into law, he could well find himself one of the first to be prosecuted.

This leads into the popular perception that this is a solution being proposed by befuddled, elderly politicians and media moguls who have no clue about the technical intricacies of how the internet actually works, and are unaware of any potential unintended consequences. I’m not so sure. As Dan Gillmor argued, even if these people are really that dumb, their advisers most surely are not. The people agitating to get this draconian legislation passed must be well aware of its potential for totalitarian suppression of any dissent.

And then there’s the ridiculous binary argument that if you oppose SOPA, you must be in favour of untrammelled piracy. Well, aside from the fact that piracy always has existed and likely always will, this is not the way to go about stopping it. Nothing has ever stopped it, and the kind of totalitarian control this legislation advocates is certainly not going to. All it will do will be to make ordinary people suffer the consequences of lessening profits for companies, to the advantage of a censorship-hungry state.

So who are the people who want this? Well, inevitably it started with the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America were quick to jump aboard a ship that was ‘hunting pirates’. These guys have been ineffectually playing catch-up since 1999, when Napster’s file sharing innovation created a seismic shift in the way entertainment was distributed. Suddenly, it was possible to get your hands on music – and later films and TV shows – without actually paying for it. And when corporations are deprived of profit, they get angry.

Of course, Napster was quickly stamped out. But the idea had taken hold, and multitudes of file sharing websites, in multitudes of countries, sprang up to take its place. A sea change had occurred, and suddenly an industry that had held entertainment in a dollar-squeezing stranglehold for the better part of a century was being rendered impotent. And worse, less profitable.

But is this, in itself, so bad? Record companies, film studios and TV producers would say yes. However, it’s worth looking a bit at the history of profit from entertainment; when you do, what you see is a redressing of the balance that existed prior to the monetisation created by the advent of recording what entertains us.

Before CDs, before vinyl, even before wax cylinders, there was still music. And musicians earned their living by playing music live. Your entertainment was a transient thing; in order to experience it again, you had to pay the musician to play it again. Most, if not all, of the money therefore went directly to the musicians themselves, and they in turn actually had to work to earn it.

But at the tail end of the 19th century, recording devices were invented, and suddenly you could listen to one of those transient performances as many times as you liked, without having to pay the musicians again. Naturally, the musicians weren’t too happy about this, and recording companies came into existence. They provided the technical means by which the music could be reproduced, and they, along with the new figure of the ‘agent’ made sure that musicians were recompensed for the loss of earnings caused by no longer having to repeat their performances so frequently.

Not so bad, surely? But fast forward a hundred years or so, and record companies are making vast sums of money, with an entire industry of many thousands most of whom have nothing to do with actually creating the music. Sure, there are musicians who, as a result of record sales, became phenomenally rich – Elvis, Frank Sinatra, U2 etc. But however much money they got, you can bet the record companies got more. And for the vast majority of musicians, record companies and agents ended up netting far more from their work than they ever would. David Bowie may be an industry titan these days, but in his early years apparently made the disastrous decision to allow his manager to control the rights to his songs; with the result that he was virtually penniless by 1980 despite his records still selling by the bucketload.

Piracy, in the form of file sharing, undoubtedly does deprive artists of revenue. But not half so much revenue as it deprives record companies of. And pragmatically, it’s a shift in the way entertainment makes money that cannot be reversed – no matter how much the RIAA tries to clobber it into submission with insanely draconian laws like SOPA. The music industry is changing, and cannier musicians appreciate this. Recorded music will never go away, but downloading can be, and has been, monetised with reasonable efficiency. The problem of ‘piracy’ will never go away either – remember the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ campaign in the 80s? It wasn’t killing music then, and neither is file sharing now.

Instead, the future of music may be back where it began; in live shows, with musicians entertaining their fans in person. But there are other ways to use the new mould to musicians’ advantage. Radiohead famously self-released their last two albums digitally, allowing fans to set their own price for the first one. Canadian singer-songwriter Jane Siberry does the same thing, and goes further; her website allows fans to download (at any cost or none) her entire back catalogue, going back to her first album from 1981.

The record industry, of course, hates this – because they make no money out of it. Only the musicians do. Many musicians – including the aforementioned Bowie – recognise the change that has taken place, and are moving on. Record companies are not – hence the arrival of mad schemes like SOPA, which try desperately to cling on to an outdated business model and, in the process, allow a supposedly democratic country an unprecedented level of global control of free speech. Profiteers and political control freaks – are these really the people we want policing everything we say?

As of now, it’s looking less likely that this legislation will be passed. A grassroots protest of actual democracy on the internet has made plenty of US lawmakers step back and think. But as I said at the outset, the bills are far from dead, and Lamar Smith – that dirty ol’ copyright thief – has pledged to keep on fighting for them. This struggle is far from over as a result of one day of mass protest – and in that spirit, I hope Jimmy Wales won’t mind me reproducing his Wikipedia front page from yesterday. To quote Bertolt Brecht, “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”

Crumbling ironwork – The Iron Lady

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Simon

“All I wanted to do was make a difference in the world.”

There have been many onscreen depictions of Margaret Thatcher, both during and after her highly divisive Premiership. She’s been portrayed by satirists (Janet Brown, Jennifer Saunders), respected actresses (Lindsay Duncan, Maureen Lipman) and the just plain unlikely (John Lithgow on Saturday Night Live). All of these have tended to focus on one particular incident in her turbulent time in office – her struggle to become MP for Finchley, her conduct of the Falklands War, her relationship with Chilean dictator and all round bad guy General Pinochet. But Phyllida Lloyd’s much trumpeted new biopic The Iron Lady is the first attempt to make a comprehensive biography of this most divisive of Prime Ministers. Generally, it succeeds. But there are some massive, glaring flaws.

Margaret Thatcher is a difficult figure to approach objectively. Not for nothing have I used the word ‘divisive’ twice in the last paragraph; this is a woman whose leadership polarised political factions more than any other. To the left, she’s a catch-all demon, to be invoked as an example of everything that’s wrong with free market Conservatism. To the right, she’s the perfect angel, in her defeat of socialism, quashing of troublesome trade unions and championing of that very same free market. The truth is almost certainly more complex and nuanced than the popular perception, and it’s that truth that Abi Morgan’s screenplay tries to get at here – not the truth about Thatcher as a politician, but Thatcher the human being, Thatcher the woman, Thatcher the mother, and most of all, Thatcher the wife.

To do this, the film tries its level best to be generally apolitical, not passing any moral judgement on anything Thatcher did or didn’t do, but merely attempting to depict it without comment. But Margaret Thatcher can’t be separated from her politics – politics is what drove her, what made her the person she is or was. The trouble is, with feelings about her still very strong on both sides, it’s difficult for a film maker to produce a partisan piece; support her, and you’ll win firm condemnation from any left-leaning viewers, condemn her, and you’ll be damned as a leftist yourself. The trouble is that sidestepping the moral issues of the politics makes the movie seem in some ways rather anodyne.

I’ve generally enjoyed Abi Morgan’s work as a writer, most recently her 1950s set newsroom thriller The Hour, but in order to walk this apolitical line, the script she’s come up with here is a curious mixture of the cliched and the inspired. In keeping with the most overused of Hollywood tropes, it shows Thatcher as a woman triumphing over all the odds against her, fighting against the (male) establishment and winning. Now, no doubt there’s a fair bit of truth there. But the presentation, all sneering men against our plucky heroine, Thomas Newman’s score giving us swelling strings as Margaret triumphs yet again, recalls all the numerous Hollywoodisations of women triumphing over adversity – Silkwood, Erin Brockovich et al.

In keeping with that style, they’ve got a Proper Hollywood Star in to play Maggie – no less a luminary than Silkwood star Meryl Streep herself, in case you’ve been living in a cave and missed the insane amount of media coverage her casting has had over the last year. But while I wanted to dislike her – how dare this American try to portray our most famous post-war Prime Minister, even if I did hate her? – I have to join in the rest of the critical worship and admit that Streep simply makes the movie.

Her performance is extraordinary, and extraordinarily good. With some clever and subtle makeup, she somehow manages to pull off the tricky feat of convincingly impersonating a well-known public figure while simultaneously giving a nuanced performance. For most of the time she’s onscreen, you forget to admire this, because she so thoroughly inhabits the role, your brain never questions that what you’re actually watching is Margaret Thatcher herself. Not only that, but Streep shows us Thatcher developing over decades, from Education Secretary to Conservative leader to Prime Minister to frail old lady, and catches all the mannerisms that we, the public, always saw in her. That shrill, hectoring voice, trained downwards for authority in her run for party leader, is easy to impersonate, but not so easy to incorporate into a performance; but a real performance is what Streep pulls off, and talk of Oscars seems perfectly justified to me.

The trouble is that, while Streep towers over the rest of the movie, other aspects of casting and characterisation are less successful. There seems to be, in British drama, a standard roster of character players you’re used to seeing as Parliamentarians in this kind of thing, and they all seem to be present and correct here. Nicholas Farrell is Airey Neave, Roger Allam is Gordon Reece, Richard E Grant is Michael Heseltine, etc. For the seasoned viewer of TV satire and docudramas, the struggle was to not associate them with all the other parliamentary dramas they’d been in, and remember that they were playing real people.

And since the movie isn’t being outright political, they’re playing those real people as cyphers, two-dimensional cutouts that lack even the depth given to them at the time by Spitting Image. This is a shame; there are some good actors here who do the best with the material they’re given, but it’s telling that, some of the time, I couldn’t tell who they were meant to be until I looked at the cast list. Given the most screen time is Anthony Head, trying his best to dull down his natural smooth good looks and impersonate Geoffrey Howe. He does pretty well, but his attempt to imitate Howe’s flat drawl comes across as rather forced, as though he’s smoked 80 Marlboro a day then taken a dose of Mogadon.

That the movie chooses to avoid politics by sidelining figures like these is actually a shame, because anyone who lived through those years knows that the British politics of the 70s and 80s was genuinely colourful and dramatic. In the days before spin, before focus groups and the domination of PR companies, politicians seemed like real, often wildly eccentric personalities. The movie catches a little of that, in a couple of montages that show the House of Commons to be a kind of shrieking Bedlam (accurate enough), but reduces some real, flamboyant figures to little more than extras. Grant’s Heseltine, for example, is barely seen, even when he stabbed Thatcher in the back to challenge her leadership; Ted Heath, portrayed rather colourlessly by John Sessions, only gets one scene before he is deposed (offscreen) by Maggie and her scheming cohorts. The few occasions which do show Thatcher sparring with her opposition in the House give a little glimpse of how well this could have been done, with Streep electric in catching her subject’s vehement, strident certainty. But even here, her main opponent is Michael Foot (a convincingly scruffy portrayal from Michael Pennington), though her most fondly remembered scraps of the 80s came with Labour leader Neil Kinnock, not even shown here.

Of course, like her or loathe her, everyone has their favourite Thatcher moment, and it would be impossible for the movie to please everyone on that score without being longer than The Godfather. But for the sake of the drama, it seems odd that some moments have been left out – most notably, Thatcher’s own ultimate downfall could have been neatly counterpointed by details of how she inflicted an identical betrayal on Heath, heightening the sense of hubris when she is ultimately deposed in the same way. Instead, we get an almost disturbingly messianic sequence in which, composed apart from a glistening tear, she exits 10 Downing Street along a bed of rose petals to the accompaniment of a mournful operatic aria.

This kind of virtual deification is disturbing, and recurs at key moments in her career, most notably her ascension to Prime Minister. Streep delivers the “where there is despair, may we bring hope” speech well – perhaps better than the real thing – but for a movie that tries to avoid being partisan, it’s difficult to rein in the triumphalism that’s so key to ‘women triumphing over adversity’ movies. The main side effect of which is that, in portraying her as the conquering heroine, the script seems to implicitly side with her politically. It’s hard to admire her as a person without admiring her politics, and oft times, the movie seems to do that.

As it progresses then, we get a potted history of her political career, which tells us little we didn’t already know. We see her intransigent stand against the trade unions, but with little conveyance of the consequences it had; the miners’ strike is glossed over in a couple of minutes. We see her agonising over the deaths in the Falklands (though, significantly, not the Argentinian ones). And we see her shaken by terrorism, as she is (implausibly) the first one to the scene when Airey Neave is blown up by a car bomb, then victim herself in an effective recreation of the Brighton hotel bombing. All of this is well enough done, but has an almost ‘tickbox’ approach. The scene late in her Premiership in which we see her ruthlessly bullying her Cabinet at a meeting is brilliantly done by Streep et al, but is nonetheless nothing more than a convenient dramatic shorthand to emphasise her ego and hubris, which made her downfall inevitable. Done better, this could have been almost Shakespearean; as it is, it just seems workmanlike.

But even if the movie seems (to me) to fail by divorcing Thatcher from the politics that were so much an integral part of her, it does rather well on its own terms, at portraying her as a flawed human being in her relationships with her family. This is best shown by the framing narrative which actually takes up about half the film; Margaret as she is now, a doddering frail old lady, guarded by machine gun wielding policemen who keep her a virtual prisoner, and most notably haunted by the shade of her beloved Denis, dead eight years previously. As Denis, Jim Broadbent is reliably brilliant, making him loveable in a way that he actually really did seem at the time. Broadbent has two tasks here. In the flashbacks, he’s the real Denis, curmudgeonly, irascible, but part of a loving relationship in which the participants endearingly refer to each other as “M.T.” and “D.T.”. In the present day, he’s a hallucination of the increasingly frail Margaret, prone to sharp observations that logically must have come from deep within her own fragmented mind.

This framing narrative is where the movie works best, though as a consequence, it’s quite uncomfortable to watch. The ageing make up on Streep is thoroughly convincing, as is her body language as she shambles, lonely, through her dimly lit flat. Since by this point you’ve virtually come to believe that she really is Thatcher, it’s hard to watch the indignity to which she’s come. Which isn’t entirely helped by the presence of Olivia Colman as her frequently visiting daughter Carol. Colman, a skilled actress does pretty well, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the glaringly obvious false nose she had to wear – evidently all the good makeup had been saved for Streep.

But these scenes do work extremely well, though I can see why some real life acquaintances of Thatcher find them in poor taste, particularly while she’s still alive. Interestingly, the other really effective sequences are the flashbacks to Margaret’s early years, in which we see her enthusiasm for politics fired up by her small business owning father, and falls in love with an improbably pretty young Denis. For all the praise that’s been heaped on Streep, it’s fair to note that Alexandra Roach also makes a real impression as the young Maggie; Harry Lloyd effectively twinkles as the young Denis, though he’s a little distractingly good looking.

It’s a telling point that the screenplay works best at being apolitical in these sequences particularly; it’s a tightrope it can’t quite walk depicting her actual time in office. As a director Phyllida Lloyd teases out some great performances, and also has the occasional flash of visual brilliance. In particular, there are some very effective overhead shots; of Margaret, the only flash of colour in a crush of black-clad MPs, or of Margaret surrounded by a crush of the admiring press at her ascension to PM, who gradually fall back from her as if in worship. But Lloyd is a little hamstrung by the movie’s low budget. It really needs a sense of scale to match the real life events, but this can only be provided by the insertion of grainy contemporary news footage, stretched to fill the widescreen image so that people in it look oddly wide. This is generally jarring, and actually has the effect of highlighting the lack of budget, making the viewer even more conscious that the filmmakers couldn’t afford to restage these events in the manner of movies like, say, Gandhi (and that’s a comparison I never thought I’d be making).

The Iron Lady is, at best, a deeply flawed film which can’t quite find an identity. But it is very watchable, if only for Streep’s magnetic performance. And it might be interesting to find out the reaction from people who have little knowledge of the real events portrayed – mostly more than 20 years in the past now – who would be able to take the movie on its own terms rather than as a recreation of times they actually lived through. It comes across as a TV movie writ large, elevated beyond BBC4 by the casting of an international superstar and little else. Not that that’s any reason to condemn it, and as an attempt at a proper biography it works pretty well. But I do wonder whether, with a perspective of distance, later films about Thatcher might be able to come up with a better judgement of her leadership than simply her triumph over adversity as an undeniably formidable woman.

Shocked by Sherlock? – The problems with diversity on TV.

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Simon

As hypothesised in my review of Monday’s Sherlock, the pre-watershed broadcast of (discreetly shot) nudity (only Irene Adler’s, I note, not Sherlock’s) has got certain people all hot under the collar. Well, the Daily Mail, inevitably. Indeed, so eager were they to condemn this filth being available to those children still up at 8.10pm, they printed the above picture of it for children to see at any time of the day, alongside their usual sidebar parade of bikini-clad celebs cavorting on the beach.

It is debatable whether a show where one of the central characters is a paid dominatrix who uses her sexuality as a weapon in her games is acceptable pre-watershed viewing. But I stick to my guns of saying that it walked a thin line without falling off; think of all the pre-watershed crime dramas in which prostitution is a key part of the plot. It used to be almost a weekly occurrence in The Bill, back when that was a half hour show on at 8pm. Not to mention the downright dirty jokes in sitcoms and sketch shows as far back as the 70s – did anybody really not get the double entendres about Mrs Slocombe’s pussy in Are You Being Served?

Nor is (I’ll repeat, discreetly shot) nudity anything new in pre-watershed programming. I don’t recall any storms of protest over pre-9pm broadcasts of Carry On Camping, which contains that scene of a young Barbara Windsor accidentally losing her bra. And oddly, less discreetly shot male nudity seems to go without comment on many occasions – what about that bit in Doctor Who episode Love and Monsters where man-hungry mum Jackie Tyler contrives to get Marc Warren’s shirt off?

No, the Mail’s usual hysteria didn’t strike me as anything to worry about. But as a bit of a lefty liberal, what did concern me was a couple of articles condemning Steven Moffat’s portrayal of Irene Adler as demeaning to women, and a retrograde step from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original character. Both Jane Clare Jones’ piece in The Guardian and its presumable inspiration on the Another Angry Woman blog maintain that the final few minutes of the show undercut a previously good portrait of a strong female character, by having her machinations revealed to have been planned by Moriarty (a man), then falling for Sherlock despite having previously claimed to be gay, and finally and most ignominiously of all, having to be rescued from peril by Holmes himself. Both argue that this reduces the ‘strong woman’ status of a character who, in Doyle’s original, needed no help from a man.

It’s certainly a reading you can make. And I can understand all sorts of objections to that final flashback, which tonally did reduce a previously cerebral drama to the level of Boys’ Own heroism (and yes, I did choose that particular comic as an example intentionally). However, it has provoked the same heated online debates as so many feminist articles in The Guardian – it’s anti-men, it’s humourless, it’s just a TV show etc. I must admit, this was my first reaction on reading the original blog post, but then I realised it was a topic worth thinking more seriously about. And to give her credit, blogger Stavvers posted a well-reasoned follow-up in light of the controversy, making a good argument for the need for diversity in mainstream TV. But in defence of Steven Moffat, I’d like to add my two cents worth as to why I didn’t – quite – see it this way.

Firstly, it must be remembered that the original Irene Adler only appeared in one, pretty short, Holmes story – A Scandal in Bohemia – and that Arthur Conan Doyle was, at the time, writing basically pulp literature for those with short attention spans (one reason I’ve always found it so accessible, I guess). As such, detail on Irene’s character, her personality and her past is necessarily sparse, and much of the popular perception of her is based on the reams of theses and fan fictions produced by scholars and fans of the Holmes canon.

Yes, in the incident with Holmes she is a strong female character, who achieves everything she does independently, without male help. And yet, how do we, the readers, know that she’s always been this independent? Doyle provides no definitive answer either way. Like so much perceived prejudice on TV, our perception of Moffat’s version of Irene depends on preconceptions we ourselves have developed before watching; I really don’t think we can categorically say that Doyle’s character was definitively a more independent woman than Moffat’s.

The nudity in that scene where Irene first meets Sherlock has been seen as exploitative, too, but I took it to be rather cleverer than that. Most obviously, she’s done her research on Sherlock, and knows how much he can deduce about a person from their clothing. Her nudity is a deliberate attempt to prevent that – as shown by his visualised inability to work out anything about her from her initial appearance. But it does go deeper than that. This Irene, extrapolating from what we know of Doyle’s original, is empowered enough to use her sexuality as a weapon. And while John is most obviously discomfited by this, it’s worth remembering that Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Sherlock is cleverly poised between genuinely asexual and deeply repressed. I don’t think he would have been entirely immune.

Which also has a bearing on another big objection both Stavvers and Jones have to this portrayal. It can seem as though Irene (who has stated that she’s gay) has overcome her sexuality to fall for Sherlock because he’s just so great, while he, conversely, is free of such ‘feminine’ things as emotions, and therefore superior to her.

Again, though, I disagree on almost every count. Sherlock is portrayed, both in the writing and the performance, as deeply emotionally repressed – but that doesn’t mean he’s without emotions (or superior for that matter – in this regard, John comes off as the better human being). The whole point of the relationship is that, yes, she does have feelings for him, feelings she can’t admit – and so does he. Cumberbatch’s performance sold that to me totally, and I’m surprised anyone missed it.

As to Irene’s apparent disregard of her sexuality, it should be noted that the context of her statement about being gay is very significant. It comes just after she’s been taunting John about the homoerotic undercurrents in his relationship with Sherlock, and he’s exasperatedly exclaimed, “I am not gay!”, with hints that this is just denial. When she follows it up with, “I am.”, I took that as yet another dig at him and his apparent denial, as we’d already seen that Irene’s sexuality was rather more fluid than that from her ‘clients’. And speaking as a man who is – mostly – gay, I always prefer my TV characters to be sexually fluid rather than rigidly pigeonholed by attraction to one gender or the other; that was one reason I found the portrayal of Captain Jack Harkness in the recent Torchwood so disappointing, as he’d gone from being ‘omnisexual’ to just plain gay. That, to me, felt like more of a retrograde step than this portrayal of Irene Adler. And there, I’m willing to admit, is a view shaped by my preconceptions…

That last flashback, though, in which Sherlock rescues a prone Irene from decapitation-hungry terrorists, is harder to defend. Aside from lowering the tone of the drama rather (not that this bothered me particularly at the time), you can see how Irene ends up as the traditional damsel in distress, dependent on the hero for rescue – very much the antithesis of how the character is usually seen.

The problem here is one that I know has offended Holmes purists as well as feminists – Irene doesn’t win, as she did in the original story. As a Holmes fan, I wasn’t sure I liked that either. But if the final story in this three part series is indeed based on Doyle’s The Final Problem, we’re going to see a cliffhanger which looks like Moriarty has beaten Sherlock – or at the very least ended up with a no-score draw, as both characters are seen to die. I don’t think the series is established enough yet to start showing Sherlock as so fallible at he loses more than he wins in one year. That’s not sexist, it’s just the nature of a show which depends on having a (nearly) infallible hero.

But speaking of Moriarty, what of the claim that his assistance renders Irene’s independence as a woman invalid? That’s an interesting one, precisely because I originally wondered whether, in this new ‘reinvention’, Moriarty would be ‘reinvented’ as a woman. There’s precedent for that kind of thing – Blake’s 7’s ubervillain Servalan was originally conceived as a man, apparently, but the casting of the majestic Jacqueline Pearce in the role gave the narrative a whole new dynamic.

With that in mind, I’d thought that a female Moriarty (the Imelda Marcos of crime?) would be an interesting idea. But I can see precisely why Moffat didn’t do it – because, as a Holmes fan, he wanted to feature Irene Adler as ‘the woman’. So we’ve ended up with a male Moriarty, although I wonder whether, given his level of camp, he’s actually gay. More likely, as a counterpoint to Sherlock, he’s similarly ascetic, I suppose. But I didn’t get the impression that he’d masterminded Irene’s scheme. Again, quite the reverse – he was willing to postpone killing Sherlock and John when he had the chance, simply to allow Irene to use them as tools in her game. That’s how I saw it, anyway.

As Stavvers notes, Doyle’s Irene does what she does to ensure the security of a good marriage, but that’s the social context of the period in which the story was written. Fair enough, but what about the context of this time period? Have we reached a stage where mainstream TV diversity is so guaranteed that it’s irrelevant, plotwise, what gender/sexuality/ethnicity a character is and how independent they are? Both Stavvers and Jones maintain that we haven’t, and further that Steven Moffat is a serial offender in negative portrayals of women as weak and dependent on men.

I find the second point hard to accept about the man who created Lynda Day in Press Gang and River Song in Doctor Who. In fact, I tend to find River Song annoying precisely because she eclipses the (male) main character so much of the time. And Coupling, which Stavvers condemns as “heteronormative” and “binary-obsessed”, was surely a typical situation comedy, not seeking to broaden horizons but merely to entertain in a mainstream way. Besides, from what I’ve seen of it, both genders come off equally unfavourably.

But the argument that we still haven’t reached a point where diversity is the norm is harder to refute. Many moons ago, Star Trek sought to redress a criticism that its ‘inclusive’ universe didn’t include any LGBT characters, with the awful Next Generation episode The Outcast. This totally fudged the issue in two ways. Firstly, by evading the actual subject, introducing an asexual species for whom any sexuality was a thoughtcrime. Secondly, and more significantly, by making it an issue at all. In a truly inclusive future, it simply wouldn’t be a big deal, which Star Trek later did right in a throwaway line in Deep Space Nine. Confronted by a ‘reincarnation’ of a former lover, now female like herself, Jadzia Dax is torn over whether to rekindle their relationship. But it’s not a gender issue; rather, it’s a cultural one relating to her race. As far as same-sex relationships go, the rest of the crew just shrug and wonder why she isn’t just getting on with it.

That’s the right way to handle it, as soap operas are slowly realising with some believable storylines in shows like EastEnders and Hollyoaks. But there are still plenty of plotlines revolving around homosexuality as an issue in itself. Regardless of Harvey Fierstein’s one-time assertion that any visibility is better than none, I’d rather see LGBT people not ghettoised on TV as they were in the 70s, when John Inman and Larry Grayson were everyone’s TV shorthand for homosexuality.

Of course, Russell T Davies made giant strides here, first with the breakout success of Queer as Folk, then with the “just like anyone else” gay characters in Doctor Who. For which he was, of course, accused of having a “gay agenda”. Again, this is an issue depending on the preconceptions of the viewer, and this viewer saw it as a positive step that, in the Whoniverse, gayness was just accepted (except in the historical context where it wouldn’t have been, in stories set in the past, but even this is generally handled well). For my money, Moffat’s run on the show has continued this trend, with characters like the “thin, fat, married, gay Anglican Marines” in A Good Man Goes to War, and the Doctor’s general acceptance of every kind of relationship – as exemplified by his kissing James Corden to distract him in Closing Time.

In terms of diversity, though, some insightful bloggers like Jennie Rigg have noted a tendency, particularly over the last couple of years, for non-white characters to be treated as cannon-fodder – in Star Trek terms, disposable red shirts. Having watched the show recently, I can see this point, though it’s worth pointing out the flipside of this. Basically, there are now so many characters with no script-specified ethnicity – as it should be – that many of them, including the more numerous background characters, are non-white. The flipside of this, of course, is that non-recurring characters in Doctor Who have a tendency – even under Steve Moffat – to die.

I’d argue that the reason it might seem like Who has a racist agenda in this regard is actually as a result of increased inclusiveness in its casting. This is, after all, the show whose reintroduction featured its white heroine in a relationship with a black man, something some more conservative territories found hard to stomach. True, she did almost immediately run off with a dour Northerner, but Mickey Smith went on to show himself as one of the strongest characters in the show, as did, later, Martha Jones. That’s a non-white, female character saving the world when the Doctor can’t, right there. And it didn’t even seem like an issue, because that’s one thing Who tends to get right.

One that did stand out this year – and this was remarked on – was the death of Muslim character Rita (Amara Karan) in Toby Whithouse episode The God Complex. But here again, this was the most positive portrayal, without being overly earnest, of a Muslim I’ve seen on TV recently. And in that episode, every – human – character died, white or not, leaving the only survivor of the episode David Walliams’ weaselly alien Gibbis – was the episode anti-human?

No, I think Doctor Who’s got it about right, in terms of the balance between ethnic diversity in major, minor, regular and non-regular characters. But having done that, it’s churlish to complain of perceived racism if some of them get killed in a show which, let’s face it, has a lot of death in it. After all, how many white people got killed in the show the last few years. Come to that, how many non-humans? There’s only one ethnic boundary left to conquer – the first black Doctor. How about the brilliant Daniel Kaluuya? Or perhaps a female Doctor, as we know from Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife that Time Lords can change gender when regenerating. If we’re concerning ourselves with diversity, it’s interesting to ask yourself which of those – if either – you’d find harder to deal with. (Clue – it should be neither of them.)

This has ended up being a longer ramble than I originally intended, and the fact that there is so much to say on the subject shows, in my mind, that there are still are problems with diversity on television. But I think we’ve made bigger steps than Stavvers or Jane Claire Jones think. Again, this is a result of my preconceptions, but I’ve tried to examine them and think it through, something I’m not sure those with less reflective agendas have. There are often hints that some commentators believe writers should be issued with an equality checklist for every character like the ones you get on job applications, to ensure that each TV drama/comedy contains the requisite proportion of demographics, and that none are portrayed in any way negatively. But on television, as in life, positive discrimination is still discrimination, and reaching a decent balance needs to be achieved some other way than by militancy.

The trouble with exams…

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Simon

Those hard hitting undercover reporters at the Telegraph have been at it again today. After nearly scoring rather an own goal in the Murdoch Sky takeover by entrapping Vince Cable into saying inflammatory things with two pretty young ladies, it seems they’ve now been looking for another potential long running story by latching onto the perceived corruption of the British exam system. Their undercover reporters went to “13 meetings organised by (exam) boards used by English schools”, looking for evidence of what can be painted as corruption. And guess what? After looking pretty hard, it seems that they’ve found some.

The video on the Telegraph website, secretly filmed at one of Welsh exam board WJEC’s teacher training sessions, certainly looks damning. In it, senior examiners appear to tell the attending teachers what areas of the GCSE History syllabus will be covered in the upcoming exam paper. Because this fits the narrative the Telegraph are trying to shape, they comment that their investigations showed this to be a routine occurrence; that “teachers were routinely given information about future questions, areas of the syllabus that would be assessed and specific words or facts students must use to answer in questions to win marks”.

Fresh from his somewhat bizarre expenditure in sending schools across the country new copies of the King James Bible with a foreword he wrote (perhaps at God’s urging), chinless Education Secretary Michael Gove has been quick to leap onto a potentially non-controversial (for the government) issue about which he can be seen to be “doing something”. Eager for any opportunity to get his less than aesthetically pleasing mug into the papers, Gove has commented that such incidents "confirm that the current system is discredited", and has ordered new qualification standards watchdog Ofqual to conduct an investigation, the results of which may, politically, be a foregone conclusion.

The trouble is that, like so many recent media storms, this isn’t as simple an issue as the Telegraph are making out, and their pejorative language isn’t helping to clarify the issue. The sinister, X-Files-style air of conspiracy is generally enhanced when they claim that what they’ve been investigating was “series of secretive exam seminars, which are thought to have rapidly grown in popularity in recent years”, and for which shady examiners charge “up to £230 a day”.

Speaking as someone who used to work for one of the country’s leading exam boards, and administered one of these qualifications directly, I’m afraid I have to pour a little cold water over the Telegraph’s Oliver Stone-ish picture of a sinister cabal of exam boards and examiners conducting backroom deals in anonymous hotels. The “secretive exam seminars” they refer to are in fact very standard training days for teachers in how best to teach the courses prescribed by the board. Every exam board uses them, and the obvious advantage of having senior examiners present the courses is that they generally set the standards for the marking, and so are in the best position to advise on how students can get good marks.

Yes, these ‘sinister’ meetings can indeed cost £200 or so a day (though better financed exam boards sometimes offer them gratis). But the Telegraph story’s implication that this is some kind of bribe trousered by corrupt examiners is, frankly, bollocks. It’s charged by the boards, goes into the overall budget for training and marketing, and used to fund further training programmes. It is not, however much the Telegraph would like it to be, used by corrupt examiners to fly back and forth to shadowy meetings held by the Bilderberg Group, the Masons and the Illuminati.

But let’s look a little closer at the video evidence of the particular case that has sparked so much fury this morning. Are these examiners, as the Telegraph implies and so many people have clearly inferred, stepping over a line and revealing the questions in the upcoming exam to the privileged few teachers whose schools are prepared to fork out the training money?

Well, as with the Clarkson debacle last week, the selective clips used in some news outlets (including the BBC) certainly make it appear that way. But to give the Telegraph credit, they’ve been even-handed enough in posting a much longer clip that gives a better sense of context to the remarks. The oft-quoted soundbite (it’s in big letters on the Telegraph’s front page) is “We’re cheating. We’re telling you the cycle. Probably the regulator will tell us off.” That certainly sounds like someone who knows he’s doing wrong.

But if you look at the whole clip, it’s clear that the trainer is telling teachers that a particular topic is likely to come up, rather than a specific question on that topic. At this point, I should mention (as none of the press have) that every qualification is underpinned by a very carefully worded exam board document called a ‘specification’. Having been involved in developing and drafting these for new qualifications myself, I can tell you that they are obliged to cover the exact details of the course, and that no exam question can be set on a topic outside the areas of study contained therein.

Now I’m not familiar with the exact details of the WJEC History GCSE specification, but judging by the clip, this is a compulsory question which may be asked on one of three potential topics. As topics cannot be repeated from year to year, and there are three of them, anyone could check the past papers (freely available on boards’ websites, incidentally) and make a reasoned guess as to how these three topics will cycle round. In this case, these are newish qualifications, though, so the information couldn’t be surmised yet. But it could be within a year or so.

Undoubtedly this examiner is crossing a line in explicitly spelling it out to teachers, which illustrates how amazingly careful you have to be in wording what you say. But what he’s doing is simply telling the attendees what they could, in all likelihood, have worked out for themselves. It’s not the same as telling them the actual question, which is likely to be a bit more specific than “write something about Germany between 1933 and 1939”.

One teacher then asks whether, as educators, they should be teaching the children all the topics, rather than just the ones likely to crop up in the exams. And the trainer says that in an ideal world, they would indeed. But he acknowledges that teachers, driven by the tyranny of league tables and the political pressure to improve results year on year, may well find this an impossible demand; despite sailing way over the line, he’s trying to help – and these are the sort of questions teachers always ask in these training sessions, for precisely these reasons.

The second presenter is trying to spell out a section relating to modern US Presidents, and has incurred the wrath of the Telegraph by saying “off the record” that no question is likely to come up relating to “the Iraq war”. Again, this is clearly crossing a line, but not to the extent that it might appear. The examiner has just said that this section “now extends to 2000”, and points out the unlikelihood of questions coming up relating to “Clinton or Bush”. OK, it sounds as though the paper should cover Clinton. But which Bush, and which Iraq war? I’ll agree, the most likely interpretation is the ones from 1991, but there’s some doubt there.

Still, having said that, both trainers do seem to cross a line between helpful hints and actually breaching confidentiality. As Chief/Principal Examiners, they would be the ones responsible for setting the questions, and would have the necessary insider knowledge; this is clearly grounds for disciplinary action.

But speaking as someone who’s organised and on occasion presented such training, this debacle shows very clearly how careful one has to be, as a board representative, in wording what you say. Teachers, under pressure to deliver good results, often leap on potentially different interpretations of training speeches or even specifications themselves to justify their claims that markers have treated their students unfairly, and in representing an exam board you have to be conscious of the fact that anything you say is likely to be dissected with the sort of linguistic attention rarely seen outside a legal chamber. I’m not sure that what we’re seeing with these two trainers is outright corruption; more, it seems to be incompetence at knowing how far they can go in their statements as representatives of their exam board.

All of this, however, has been leapt on by the Telegraph and now our esteemed Education Secretary as evidence that the entire system of exam boards is riddled with corruption, and must be fundamentally reformed. The first contention is clearly nonsense – this is one qualification at one level from one (fairly small) exam board. WJEC don’t have the dominance of AQA, OCR or Edexcel, but even they presumably offer dozens, if not hundreds of qualifications at each of a variety of levels, each comprising multiple modules with their own exam papers. Discovering this kind of indiscretion in two senior examiners is like saying that all male film stars must be gay on the evidence that Rupert Everett and Neil Patrick Harris are.

But the idea that the system could do with fundamental reform? I actually think there might be something to that. The trouble with this kind of media shitstorm is the tendency for politicians (who usually have no personal experience of the issues surrounding education) to act in a knee jerk way and change the system for change’s sake, without considering whether the changes are the right ones. Every incoming government (and this one is no exception) wants to radically change the education system; in part, it’s to stamp their own authority in it, and in part it reinforces the standard party mantra that everything the other party did must be wrong. But that doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is right. As Sir Humphrey once spelled out the politician’s creed in Yes, Minister: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it”. Or, more populist, Jeff Goldblum’s admonition to Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should”.

The most obvious bone of contention is that there are three (major) exam boards, and they’re in competition with each other. This should, logically, appeal to the Conservatives, with their mantra that free market competition guarantees quality. The trouble here is that, in education, standards should be consistent for everyone; how, then, should exam boards compete for schools’ business? Oh sure, there’s cheaper (or free) teacher support, or the advancement of new, innovative, technical systems. But ultimately, what schools want from an exam board is for a high proportion of their pupils to get good grades. With this being the sole criterion for choice, the logical progression is that boards can only compete by tacitly implying that schools will get better results with them – ie, that their courses are simpler and their exams easier. This is, of course, against the letter of the law; but it’s amazing the sophistry that can be employed to circumvent this.

In practice, if the mode of competition is to lower standards, the ultimate result is that well-worn phrase “a race to the bottom”. The ever-increasing numbers of students achieving high grades seem to bear this out; surely it should be impossible for these to increase every year without some lowering of standards?

Again, the reasons for this trend are more complicated, and have as much to do with politics as education standards. Under the current system, the marks required to get particular grades can vary, according to senior examiners’ assessment of an exam’s difficulty. These are set at a meeting presided over by a Chair, who is ultimately the person responsible for the qualification’s standards. The trouble is that, to meet government regulatory requirements, the Chair may be (and frequently is) obliged to overturn the examiners’ judgments to maintain the percentage of entrants at particular grades – this is seen as the only way to guarantee consistency of standards.

But a statistical standard really shouldn’t be how we judge the quality of education. A fundamental misunderstanding that it’s possible to quantify the unquantifiable is, in my view, at the root of much is what is wrong with the current system. That’s what gave us the overly simplistic school league tables under the Thatcher government, the continual tyranny of statistics under the Blair government, and now the addle-headed English Baccalaureate under the current one. None of these take into account the complexities of the issue; in their attempt to boil down so many things into a set of judgmental statistics, it’s along the lines of the oft-heard complaint against the Conservatives – that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

How to change it, then? To be fair to the Coalition, they have got all sorts of committees investigating that very question, although politicians rarely listen to reports that contradict their pre-existing prejudices (just ask the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs). One common suggestion is to scrap the element of competition and simply have one, publicly owned, exam board. This is the case in many countries (Australia for one) with higher recognised educational standards than this one. On the face of it, that has a lot of merit – one standard, applied consistently to every school, with no ‘dumbing down’ and as much independence from ill-qualified politicians as possible.

In practice, unfortunately, it seems impossible. We have a long entrenched system of competing boards, originally sponsored by the Universities (OCR still is). The practicalities of buying their interests (though OCR and AQA at least are classed as charities) would be highly complex and expensive. And at a time when the government are busy introducing the most nakedly ideological Conservative policies since Mrs Thatcher, it hardly seems likely that a Conservative-led government would suddenly spend masses of public money to, effectively, nationalise a whole sector of employment. Not to mention the fact that they’re keen on introducing even more privatisation to education, with Free Schools and the ability of corporations such as McDonalds’ and JCB to award qualifications – initiatives started under the more-Tory-than-Tory New Labour.

Oh well, if we can’t do that, why not try removing politics from education? Altogether? Reduce the demand to boil results down to meaningless statistics for populist reasons; if no votes depended on the percentage of students getting an A, I suspect we’d soon see a fall in those levels to reflect real standards. But while political popularity is tied to such statistics, it would be a ‘courageous’ politician who would stand up and say “what we need is fewer people doing well in exams”.

A properly independent publicly funded education system, regulated independently with the minimum of government oversight and organised by actual educational professionals would be a real step forward. You’d think that would find favour with the laissez-faire, keep-the state-out-of-things Conservatives. But again, sadly where public money is concerned, the politicians are convinced that only they can make the best-informed decisions – a timeworn fallacy that’s applied to governments of every party over the years.

I appreciate that this has been a long ramble on the subject, but to return to the original point – two bad apples does not a rotten barrel make. The system we have is far from perfect, and I’m always glad when the debate about fundamental changes is spurred. But this knee jerk media-generated scandal is entirely the wrong way to go about that debate, and it’s appalling (but not surprising) that policy makers should so easily leap onto the mob bandwagon. There is scope for real change in this area, but I suspect we won’t see anything I’d consider improvement as a result of the Telegraph’s scandal mongering.

We’re all in it together–especially the public sector

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Simon

On Wednesday, most of Britain’s public sector employees will be going on strike in what the BBC News continually refers to as “the biggest strike in a generation”. The buildup to this has been long and full of posturing from both sides; each has presented reams of ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ that the other side is factually mistaken, morally wrong, or just plain selfish. Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard so many conflicting arguments made with so much confidence that, unless you’re easily swayed by demagogues such as union leaders or secretaries of state, you have to acknowledge that this is probably a more complex issue than either side is making it out to be.

Or is it? To boil it down to the essentials we’ve been hearing, it’s about pensions. Unions insist that their members will be working longer and paying more to receive less when they retire. Initially, government spokesmen took the tack of agreeing that this was so, but claiming it was necessary to reduce public sector spending, as the ‘overblown’ state sector was a huge contributor to the country’s unsustainable debt. By a strange coincidence, this happily fitted in with the Conservative Party’s longstanding policy to shrink the public sector; indeed, this is another in a long line of Conservative bugbears that have conveniently been judged to contribute to the dastardly deficit, and must therefore be cut.

So up until recently, it was more of a moral judgement than anything else. Both sides agreed that the proposed reforms would make pensions worse. One said this was regrettable but necessary; the other said it was unjustified and avoidable. Both sides have invoked Lord Hutton’s recent report on the state of public sector pensions, a massive 215 page document apparently capable of supporting any argument providing one takes a choice quote from it out of context.

As the wrangling’s been going on, however, it’s got more vicious, and often more surreal. Yesterday, Education Secretary Michael Gove popped up at a convenient press conference to assert that the unions were full of militant hardliners itching for a fight with the Conservatives, an increasingly popular government stance that’s been echoed by every opponent of the strikes.

Lib Dem puppet and Tory stooge Danny Alexander popped up to inform strikers that “a better deal” was on the table (for “better” read “still not as good as what we want to take away from you”) and issue the threat that if the strikes went ahead, he’d take it away again. It was like that bit in The Empire Strikes Back where Darth Vader sternly tells Lando Calrissian, “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” At least it was probably like that in Alexander’s mind; to everyone else, he came across like a 10 year old schoolyard bully.

Earlier, Alexander’s boss Francis Maude came up with the frankly bizarre idea that the strikers should content themselves with stopping work for 15 minutes instead of striking for a whole day; because obviously, the main aim of striking should be to cause nobody any inconvenience at all.

All of this smacks of a government floundering in panic at the prospect of some very bad PR, which the strikes would surely be. The various union leaders have generally come across as a little more reasoned, but they have a longstanding spectre of 70s militancy to overcome. The government’s current “militants spoiling for a fight” caricature is designed to play on this; if you think a one day strike is inconvenient, try one that lasts for weeks, as they frequently did over more trivial issues in the 70s.

But this isn’t a trivial issue. We’re talking about millions of people having their conditions of employment altered, to their detriment and without their consent. And as a direct result (and probably an intended one), it’s become a highly divisive issue between those who work in the public sector and those who work in the private sector, which misses the point that everyone’s getting worse off. A reduction in public sector pensions can be used to justify further squeezing of what’s left of the private sector’s, which can in turn be used to justify a further reduction of the public sector’s and so ad infinitum, in what’s being described with irritating frequency as a “race to the bottom”.

A prevailing view among many unsympathetic to the strikers (usually from the private sector) is that “my pension’s terrible, so I don’t see why I as a taxpayer have to pay for you to have a good one”. Leaving aside the fundamental anti-tax “I’m all right Jack” attitude, this still misses the point. What these people should be saying is that, if their pensions are terrible, something should be done about that. If the strikers succeed in getting the government to relent, there might be a chance of that (albeit a slim one). Ironically, it was Gordon Brown’s tax credit raid on private sector pensions that largely left them so much worse off; one more reason why I’m as disillusioned with the Labour Party as I am with either of the others.

Then there’s the view (taken by Call Me Dave Cameron) that the strikes are irresponsible because they’ll cause inconvenience. Well, of course they will! What on earth would be the point of striking if nobody noticed? As pointed out above, this is ONE DAY. And for those who say that the long strikes of the 70s happened under Labour, I’d point you to the 1980s Miners’ strike as evidence that the Conservatives have no better record on industrial relations.

Of course, the trouble with that is that the NUM’s defeat effectively broke the power of the unions (much to Mrs Thatcher’s delight), as a direct result of which so many in the private sector have had so much stripped away from them with no one left to represent their rights. It is probably true to say that the unions had too much power in the 70s and 80s; the problem is that, as their ideological opposite, the Conservatives left them with too little power to be of any use (in the private sector at least) in protecting the rights of workers. With this government poised to do away with the EU Working Time Directive, charge £1000 for unfair dismissal tribunals whether won or lost, reduce the consultancy period for involuntary redundancies and extend probationary periods to make it easier for firms to sack employees without consequence, the irony is that the private sector could really do with good representation right about now. Though I doubt the Conservatives and their friends the “wealth creators” would agree.

In fact, Call Me Dave has said that the strikes will cost the economy £500million, a figure so suspiciously round as to have probably been plucked from midair (or the fevered imagination of George Osborne). It’s hard to know whether this is true or not; certainly the strikes will cost the country something. But somehow our failing economy managed to accommodate two extra days of unproductivity to celebrate some irrelevant royals getting married this year, and will somehow manage to accommodate yet another for the Golden Jubilee next year. You don’t have to be anti-monarchist to think that the working rights of doctors, teachers and firemen are a more important issue than that.

But it’s not just doctors, teachers and firemen; the popular view of the public sector is that it’s massively overstaffed with midlevel bureaucrats who have no real function. On this, I’m really not qualified to say, without doing a lot of research. But I can say, having been an administrator myself, that it’s unlikely the public services could function without at least some of those. Notice the objections to Andrew Lansley’s proposed NHS reforms from doctors insisting they don’t have the time or the training to perform administrative functions. And given that the number of public sector redundancies has just been projected at 500,000 (another suspiciously round number) over the next year, if there is any deadwood it can surely be stripped away as part of that process without having to cut the pensions of those who are left.

In fact, if the public sector is as full of lazy, sick-day taking, workshy, useless bureaucrats as the more extreme right-wingers claim, how can they then go on to say that the strikes are going to cause so much inconvenience? For that matter, how can those critics in one breath say that the strikers are selfish, and in the next moan about having to pay them out of their taxes?

No, the caricatures are running riot on both sides, oversimplifying an actually fairly complex issue. Pensions (and finance generally) are a very nuanced and complicated topic, and I’ve seen debaters on both sides of the argument pull out some very convincing looking statistics and internet links that nonetheless flatly contradict each other. Bear in mind that, whatever you think of Hutton’s report, it took him and a large panel several years to properly examine the issue. That’s why – unlike some armchair internet warriors – I’m not under the impression that I’m infallibly correct in my views.

But they are my views, and like so many political issues, people’s stances on this issue tend to be shaped by personal ethics as much as reasoned argument. I try and balance both, and on this matter have come to the conclusion (informed by both) that I’m behind the strikers. Yes, negotiations are still ongoing (as Ed Miliband told us six times over when the last strike happened). But the details of the government’s new offer have yet to be supplied to the unions, and these ‘negotiations’ have now been going on for over a year. They may not have formally broken down, but I think a year’s worth of wrangling with no satisfactory result comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s not to say that there isn’t scope for reform of public sector pensions. It’s just that, curiously, the reform seems to be targeting the lower earners rather than those like, say, Eric Pickles (estimated pension £43,000 a year, index-linked) or the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury (not sure of the exact figure, but it’s more than the Prime Minister). And don’t forget they’re (unbelievably) still entitled to their state pension on top of this. Why not start by targeting the public sector’s massive pension inequality (which is what pushes the much-quoted average pension up anyway) rather than hitting those in the middle and at the bottom? That could make a start at saving money, surely.

And to all those persisting in demonising teachers, who seem to be the most conspicuous part of this strike – if you think they’re bad now (and they’re not, mostly) how do you think they’re going to get any better if you cut the incentive to do the job? So you have to take one day off work to care for your child rather than rely on state education as a free childcare service? Pardon me if I don’t feel too sympathetic. You may be losing a day’s holiday, but you’re still getting paid, which is more than the striking teachers are.

And just before you bring up the short working days and long holidays teachers get, do you honestly believe that the job consist of nothing more than manning a classroom in the school day? A decent teacher has to get in early, work late (usually at home, into the evening) and may well spend those long holidays researching the next term’s lesson plans and teaching. Or marking exams to get a better understanding of how to teach the qualifications. I think, if you do the sums, you’ll find that teachers aren’t having the great time you think they are. In fact, in my experience, a lot of them have so much stress it’s a wonder they don’t have nervous breakdowns. You think it’s hard doing a Powerpoint presentation to a hostile boardroom? Try doing something similar with 20 belligerent sixteen year olds all day every day, and see how stressful those board meetings seem after that.

Anyway, teacher-based rant over – for now. I will acknowledge that both sides of this debate are over simplifying it, but thus far no political party (even the suspiciously silent Labour) is helping at all. The cynic in me says that the strikes will almost certainly not win the cause of retaining the current pension arrangements, and also does run the risk of the government taking the excuse to further cut down workers’ rights to strike. But even if the strikers don’t win, they are, like the Occupy movement, sending a message – a message that there are other ways to pay for the country’s problems rather than stripping everyone’s rights to nothing. It’s a message that politicians would do well to heed, if only to win back the increasingly large proportion of the electorate who, right now, wouldn’t vote for a single one of them.

Go to…Ludicrous Speed!

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Simon

So, The Guardian have got themselves all agitated about Transport Secretary Philip ‘Mr Slimy’ Hammond’s proposal to raise the national speed limit to 80 mph, in this editorial, this article about speed safety and this article about environmental damage. And do you know what? Despite being a person of normally strong views, both a Guardian reader and a Top Gear fan, it’s an issue I find hard to care about either way.

On one hand, it’s true that the national speed limit was set at a time when most people’s cars would struggle to exceed 60mph. Nearly 50 years of advancement in automotive technology means that today, most cars can exceed 70mph routinely, and with far greater safety than cars travelling at 55 in the 60s. Would you feel safer to do a nice, modest 50mph in this:

Or an admittedly naughty 90mph in this:

I’ll grant, you shouldn’t be speeding in either. But if the limit was raised to 80 mph and you had a crash at that speed in the Mini, I think you can safely say you’ll stand a better chance of walking away from it than a 50mph crash in the Austin 1100 – well below the 70mph that was already the national speed limit when it was built. So the safety argument, for me, doesn’t really hold water.

On the other hand, the argument about fuel profligacy does – a bit. With fossil fuel dwindling rapidly, to the extent that wars are fought over it, it does seem illogical to tacitly condone driving at speeds that cause cars to consume far more of it. Fuel economy in a modern car is leagues ahead of one from the 60s. But it’s still true that the faster you go – and the higher your engine revs – the more fuel you will consume. In the case of a 10mph increase in the speed limit, with a modern car, it is possible that the increased fuel usage will be so negligible as to make little difference. Whether you support it depends on whether you believe any increase in fuel usage, however infinitesimal, is acceptable.

There are, of course, engineering solutions to that problem. Better chosen gear ratios is the most obvious, though the most sensible would be a more thorough approach to developing alternative fuels. I totally agree with the principle of making motoring more efficient rather than trying to stop it altogether, but until we come up with a realistic alternative to fossil fuel, it’s still ultimately an unsustainable activity. More efficient vehicles do postpone its inevitable end, but affordable and convenient public transport would postpone it still further. Not to mention making congestion far lighter for the inevitable people who still insist on driving. Ultimately though, the ideal would be to try and lower the amount of cars – and freight – on the roads.

A good start would be a decent rail network with financial incentives for companies to use it for freight. The sheer volume of large trucks on the road contributes vastly to both congestion and fuel usage. If this worked, profits from it could be used to subsidise passenger fares – right now, it’s always cheaper for two people to drive to a destination than buy train tickets. Even if they’re driving a 4 litre Jeep that does 15 miles to the gallon.
This would require massive investment in a decent public transport infrastructure, which in the short term would haemorrhage money. It’s the only sensible thing to do, but even if any politician had the guts to try it, I’ve no idea where they’d get the money from at this point. The private sector is unlikely to front up the money and the government simply can’t. So, making the current activity more efficient is probably the best solution we have right now.

Given all of that, I think that a 10mph rise in the speed limit comes off as a trivial, political, vote chasing move that ultimately makes very little difference to anything. So trivial in fact that I find it hard to care enough to support or oppose it. But if Mr Hammond must try to buy votes by allowing speed crazy Clarkson wannabes to tailgate me in their BMWs with impunity, so be it. I don’t think it will make much difference either to accident rates or to fuel usage. The one thing I’d ask is that it starts getting actually enforced – not by revenue generating speed cameras, but by actual, real human police officers who can make human judgements.

There’s the obvious fact that motorists slow down for speed cameras then speed right back up again once past them; average speed cameras help somewhat, but still have the basic flaw that, if you drive at 50 for half the distance between them, you can then drive at 90 for the rest without incurring any penalties. Two officers with a radar gun, placed at random times and random places, is a far better approach – and allows for human judgement about cases that aren’t clear cut, for example accelerating out of the way of a hazard. And speeding may be symptomatic of a driver in no fit state to drive anyway. A police officer would recognise this and stop the driver from going any further, potentially preventing accidents; a speed camera would merely issue them with a penalty after the fact.

But of course, we can’t have real policemen any more, because they cost too much. If The Guardian’s columnists are genuinely worried about reducing accidents, they might want to start with that. As to the 10mph increase in the speed limit, it’s a storm in a political teacup whose effect on the real world will be hard to even notice.

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