« February 2001 | Home | April 2001 »
Stop forcing those with different needs to live in the same way
At last: something good has happened. Hardly announced, almost unreported, entirely eclipsed by all the slaughter and cynicism in the news these days, a White Paper has just been published by the Department of Health about the future of people with learning disabilities. I can't pretend to be surprised that nobody much noticed.
I did - in fact I'd been waiting for it - because my own sister has a learning disability and I'm involved in that world. But generally speaking, people with learning disabilities arouse very little public interest. There aren't many of them - only about 1.5 million in England.
Unlike the mentally ill, they tend not to make news. They don't make alarming scenes in public. They may seem a little odd, but they aren't frightening and they aren't particularly appealing, either; compassion fatigue often means that the needy have to be either newsworthy or attractive to get attention.
At long last, this White Paper - it is 30 years since the last one - has taken a clear public stand against this indifference. It is called Valuing People, and that is what it sets out to do, in its "New Strategy for Learning Disability".
This attitude alone is immensely welcome, immensely encouraging. I suppose it would have been too much to hope that it could have been written in plain English throughout; at times it is almost incomprehensible to anyone who isn't used to reading such stuff. And there is a great deal that I would take issue with, still more that is nothing but wishful thinking. Moreover, the sums of money it promises are negligible. Never mind. Its heart is in the right place.
That, in large part, is due to the minister responsible, John Hutton, who took the trouble genuinely to listen to all concerned. He has been that rare thing in politics, a man doing his job. For me, the best thing about the paper is its clear commitment to choice, and to the inclusion of families in making choices.
One of the most important choices for adults, obviously enough, is where and how they live. Valuing People states the objective of giving people with learning disabilities - and their families - greater choice and control over where and how they live. To anyone outside this world, that might sound entirely unremarkable - a matter of common sense and right feeling. But actually this whole question has been hotly, and unhappily, controversial for years. And this stated objective - Objective Six - and Mr Hutton's determination to enforce it represent a very big change.
For years now, many local authority social services departments have been in the grip of a powerful orthodoxy. According to this orthodoxy, there is only one acceptable model of care for adults with learning difficulties, and that is for them to live in the community, in a small house or flat, like a normal person in every way, with all the same rights. This is the golden norm; anything else is less good, a denial of the right to normality.
In fact, there are many other, less conventional, ideals of the good life for vulnerable people, including a small cluster of houses, or little communities, or villages. They can, at best, be truly inspiring and there are many people who would prefer these instead.
And many families fear, with good reason, the golden norm, which is all too often badly or cheaply run; ironically enough, care in the so-called community can often mean loneliness, neglect and social exclusion. But for years, families' preferences were often ignored; the local authorities held the purse-strings and, in practice, the choice was theirs.
Besides, there was - and still is - a widespread feeling among social services professionals that families shouldn't be involved; they supposedly have no actual right to be included and anyway they tend, according to the orthodoxy, to be over-protective, and retrogressive in their thinking.
What is more, local authorities have tended to put great pressure on charities and other "service providers" to change radically, and provide services tailored instead to the requirements of the care in the community orthodoxy. Parents' wishes were over-ridden, again and again.
Well, for all of us who care about these things, who worry terribly about the future of our adult children or brothers and sisters, the cavalry has suddenly come galloping over the hill, in the form of John Hutton MP. Recent extensive research commissioned by the Department of Health - Mr Hutton again - found that no one model of care was best for adults with learning disabilities. All could be good, when well managed, including special villages and smaller communities, and all had some advantages.
An adult with learning disabilities can now look for the good life in different directions, not just one. And Valuing People insists that families must be valued, too; they have inside knowledge and a lifelong commitment. Out with the received wisdom, in other words.
The Conservatives had 18 years to challenge this bullying orthodoxy. Many of us warned them about it, again and again, but either they did not listen or else they couldn't do anything; the circulars they sent round to local authorities were regularly ignored, as Mr Hutton has acknowledged.
It has taken a Labour minister to try to stand up to them and I can only hope he succeeds. It's enough to make me think of voting Labour.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, March 31, 2001 | Comments (0)
Is your journey necessary? It could bring disease in its wake
Seven years ago, when visiting my sister-in-law in a west London hospital, I discovered that the sandwiches provided for the patients' miserable cold lunch were delivered every day, by refrigerated lorry, from Wales. From Wales. So simple a thing as a second-rate ham sandwich had travelled nearly 200 miles to get to my sister-in-law's bedside. At least, I suppose, it was dead.
At the time, I assumed that this was simply another example of mindless NHS incompetence. Later, I came to realise it was, in fact, an example of our unthinking obsession with ceaseless motion. Lorries and trains and people and animals and goods are constantly thundering up and down the country, day and night, for no obvious purpose, wasting time and energy, and polluting the atmosphere.
Some of it, presumably, is profitable to somebody. Some of it creates jobs, no doubt. But it is done at a huge hidden cost, as the Greens say. And I can't help suspecting that a great deal of it, such as importing sandwiches from Wales, is entirely unnecessary. People do it only because people do, and people do because we live in the grip of a thoughtless addiction to movement; we suffer from senseless kinetophilia.
One of the most striking things about the current foot and mouth crisis is the astonishing amount of travelling that, in large part, has caused it. To a complete outsider, it seems ridiculous - and worse - that live animals should be transported long distances. For one thing, it is cruel. Even under the best conditions, with properly ventilated lorries and all the rest, it is still cruel. And what is the point? To ensure that the wretched creatures can be stamped with the mark of a foreign slaughterhouse?
Now it emerges that all this travel is not only pointless and cruel, but also dangerous. The unfortunate Dutch believe that their first cases of foot and mouth could have been brought in by imported Irish cattle that had passed through an area of France infected by British sheep.
It almost defies belief. What is this senseless motion for? The Irish cattle must have been subjected to a journey of many hundreds of miles and at least three days, with all the associated confusion and disorientation, if nothing worse. If the Dutch feel that they must have Irish beef, and the French insist on English lamb, they should import it already slaughtered. Otherwise they should breed their own. They may grumble about slaughterhouse standards elsewhere, but it is not as though abattoirs in the EU go unsupervised; on the contrary, they are all covered with EU vets.
I don't want to sound unsympathetic to the unfortunate countries that have contracted foot and mouth, probably from us. On the contrary, I could not be sorrier for them, or for our own farmers. My point is that every instinct is, and ought to have been, against the perpetuum mobile of contemporary life.
Since time immemorial, travel has brought disease with it. The epidemic of Aids and tuberculosis in Africa has, in many places, been transported by civil war and the migrations that follow. Mass air travel has provided easy transport for all kinds of viruses that attack humans. Britain's elm trees were killed by an imported disease.
The virulent contemporary strain of foot and mouth was first isolated in India, according to Britain's Institute of Animal Health. It then spread, probably through trade in live sheep and goats, to Saudi Arabia and neighbouring countries, and then to the Middle East and the rest of Asia. It then arrived in South Africa last year, and was blamed on pig swill containing waste from a ship from the Far East. No one seems to know how it entered Britain, but meat imports into this country from South Africa were not immediately banned - not soon enough, according to the Tories.
What all this suggests is obvious. Movement is dangerous, and unnecessary movement, where the risk outweighs the reward, should be avoided. Often the risk is worth taking, not least in the name of free trade, but now, in this crisis - not just our crisis, but a Europe-wide crisis, affecting all Europeans - people cannot be allowed to move around freely.
The virus is vigorous and extremely mobile. There are huge piles of unburnt, infected carcasses on farms; there is infected carrion in the wild. Birds peck out eyes and fly long distances; there are plenty of other forms of transport, such as human feet, clothes and rubbish. It is outrageous for Tony Blair to try to insist, and make our ambassadors abroad insist, that tourists are free to move round large parts of Britain. They aren't, and they shouldn't be.
The real truth is told by the picture of the wastebin at Stockholm airport, into which all the left-over food from Robin Cook's plane was put, and sealed for immediate anti-foot and mouth incineration - the peripatetic sandwich once again, and this time a health hazard.
It would be the height of cynicism and irresponsibility for the Prime Minister to insist on holding his unnecessary election, with all the unnecessary movement involved. For the future, we should stop the movement of all meat and livestock into this country, and probably out of it, too. We should stop any long-distance travelling for livestock within the country. In the name of animal health and welfare, local slaughterhouses should be revived.
It will be very difficult for a man who has always confused ceaseless movement and talk with actually doing anything, but the Prime Minister has a clear duty to stop our national hypermobility, at least for the duration of this disease.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, March 24, 2001 | Comments (0)
State obsession with fairness just means more injustice
The way to hell is paved not only with good intentions; it is also bumpily cobbled with good ideas. One of the worst of this world's good ideas is the concept of fairness. Of course, fairness seems good in itself. It is a universal value; even tiny children appear to be born with the idea, and protest ceaselessly against unfairness, as soon as they can lisp. Yet the pursuit of fairness in practice all too often does extraordinary damage, and actually works against what it seeks. Some of the gravest problems faced by social services, state schools, charities, the National Health Service and even the Inland Revenue are directly caused by institutional fairness.
Anyone contemplating the Chancellor's recent Budget must have been struck, yet again, by the astonishing complexity of the tax and benefit system. First one group is "rewarded" or privileged, so another is disadvantaged, so a further allowance is made, and so on ad infinitum. Now, says the taxman, we're going to give you a tiny new tax break here, and a slightly bigger new benefit entitlement there, and a special allowance for a quite different reason, which is nullified by a drop in a different allowance, and the net result might be that you are marginally better off, but then you will be taxable on the benefits that we have given you. Oh, and we need to raise more tax to "target" all those people, who, like you, are not claiming what they could, because they are completely confused.
All this absurd complexity - so wasteful in time, money and administration - is caused solely by the obsessive pursuit of fairness. Tinkering breeds tinkering. The taxpayer is poorer, but fairness is no nearer. If anything, it is still further off, like a will-o'-the-wisp. Everyone would do better if the Chancellor abandoned the pursuit of fairness, and went after efficiency instead. Efficiency would mean scrapping all the allowances and the exceptions and the administration. It would mean big tax cuts. That would not necessarily mean less revenue: with much lower administration costs, much more money could be raised and then sent directly to where it is needed.
All this is obvious, but it will never happen, not even, I am afraid, under the Conservatives, because of the public obsession with fairness. I notice that fairness is not called that these days; rather confusingly, people now often say "equity", meaning equality; what is fair is now not only what is just but also what is demonstrably equal. So, like the tax system, all public and voluntary services in this country are weighed down with infinitely complex rules and requirements, all in the name of fairness. It is hugely counter-productive and, ironically enough, unfair.
Take, for example, a small community project in a poor inner-city area. I'm thinking of an inspiring and well-known scheme in Poplar, in the East End of London. It is quite possible for local people to get together and find their own ways of making life better. Everyone seems to agree that this is a good idea, not least the Prime Minister, with his talk of communitarianism and local empowerment. In practice, however, the dead hand of "equity" is hanging over any such project, and will probably stifle it before it starts.
Try employing someone - the local person everyone knows, who himself had the idea of the drop-in centre, or whatever; you will immediately find you are in breach of equal opportunities legislation. You did not advertise the job, or not widely enough, and you did not consider applicants of another race or sex. Which is more important? Getting the right, and indeed the only, suitable local person, who is already part of the project, or abiding by abstract and irrelevant ideas of fairness?
Take the provision of care for mentally handicapped adults. I possess a handbook for the training of carers for such people. What are the crucial issues with which this "learning package" starts? The very first exercise considers what a worker should do if two of his mentally handicapped clients describe the homosexual kissing they've just seen on television as disgusting and dirty. The next chapter considers oppression, in particular racism, sexism and ageism. Words almost fail me. Fairness to all, not least to homosexuals, is indeed important. But the lack of perspective here is astonishing. It is due to the same old well-meaning obsession with fairness, but this obsession with one kind of fairness can be unfair to the clients themselves - it is putting other issues ahead of their pressing individual needs.
The same is true of the thinking behind the disastrous care-in-the-community policies for the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped - known to have failed horribly, but still being pursued by professionals, regardless both of failure and of higher costs. The same is true of the ludicrous principle of "inclusion" in schools; it is obvious that those with genuine special educational needs must have special education in special groups, but in the name of fairness, children with very grave problems must be included in normal classes, where their needs go largely unmet. That is fair neither to them nor to the other children, but in the name of fairness, every child must lose. Life, sadly, is inescapably unfair; the pursuit of fairness is doomed not only to failure, but to further unfairness.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, March 17, 2001 | Comments (0)
It's not just foreigners who find Britain a foreign land
The past is a foreign country, according to one of the most famous first lines of English literature. Now William Hague tells us that the future will be a foreign country, at least if the Labour Party wins the election. But for many people, it is the present that is the foreign country. That must be so, in the nature of things; all those who have reached middle or old age will inevitably feel that the country of their youth was different; "brought up in the culture and mores of one place, they are involuntary immigrants to another".
I wish I had said that, so I am saying it now, but I owe the thought to an extremely thought-provoking review by Christian Tyler of Roger Scruton's book England: An Elegy, published several weeks ago. There are a great many people here who regret the passing of this country as they first knew and loved it, and part of that regret has to do with the sense of loss that comes with the passing of youth, and power. It must also have something to do with the astonishing rate of change in this country since the war; for anyone over the age of 40 it is hard, sometimes, not to feel like a displaced person, as so many said they did in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. And that is regardless of whether one likes or dislikes this rapid transformation. One does not need to be a xenophobic little Englander to regret the past, at least a little, and to wonder anxiously about the future.
Mr Hague may have been trying to exploit feelings more sinister than that in his "foreign country" speech last Monday, as claimed in the liberal press. I think he probably is guilty as charged of going cynically for the xenophobic vote. But I do also believe that in insisting, as he did, on this idea of a foreign country, he has tried to force a central issue into public debate. Who we are and what we will become does matter, very much, to all of us. It is changing constantly, in front of our eyes. Foreign and country are words that are central to those questions, whatever conclusions we may come to. We ought to be able to talk about it freely. Yet all we get is argument by abuse. For instance, the word "foreign" is rapidly becoming an unword.
This first became plain to me about a year ago, having dinner with friends who could be described as fashionable liberals. We were discussing asylum seekers, and in trying to explain a point I used, completely neutrally as I thought, the word foreigners. This clearly outraged one English woman, who demanded angrily: "What do you mean 'foreigners'? What makes you think there are people who have no right to be here? What makes you think you own this country? What makes it yours?" Genuinely amazed, I said I thought it was generally accepted that while there are many foreigners (like me) who do have, or can acquire, a right to live here, not all foreigners have the right to live here. Or anywhere else, for that matter: other countries take the same view.
Clearly I was wrong. That is no longer generally accepted. This highly intelligent woman, I believe, is one of those intellectual weather vanes; what she thinks is what right-thinking liberals think, or will think before long. Of course, she has a point. It is merely a historical convention that countries belong to those who live in them; their ownership is often rather recent, or dubious, after all. Many countries are themselves of recent or dubious origin. And on this assumption, there can indeed be no foreigners. And then, of course, there need be no painful disputes about immigration or asylum or whether one's country may be losing its identity.
The most remarkable thing to me about this argument was the deep disapproval that came with it. Clearly liberals think that the word "foreign" has become code for something else, like mentioning St George's Day, which seems to encourage the Nazis. Even Michael Heseltine won't say the word now, demanding angrily whether any one "seriously" thinks that France or Germany is a "foreign" country. In his righteous anger, Mr Heseltine was clearly demanding the answer "no". But the true answer must obviously be "yes". What on earth is wrong with saying so? I don't suppose the French or the Germans would have any such footling scruples; in fact, only recently, both their ambassadors to this country spoke with reckless abandon of "foreign" languages.
Debate on such matters is smothered in cant and censoriousness. For instance, it is true that many people in this country have come to feel rather like immigrants, finding themselves in a society in which they feel to some degree foreign. And that is in part quite correct; older people find themselves surrounded by people they used to think of as other; they have moved from a monocultural society to a multicultural one. Yet they, uniquely, are not really permitted to celebrate, or to mourn, the country that they have, metaphorically speaking, lost. Theirs is an identity that is not valued - indeed, theirs is a tradition which the Government allows - encourages - the race relations lobby to insult. To those who valued Britain's institutions and traditions, the present is indeed a foreign country, some of the time: they do things differently here.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, March 10, 2001 | Comments (0)
Dishonesty of minimalism - less is not always more
All little boys like taking things to bits. Perhaps little girls do, too, but it is something I have noticed only in their brothers; boys like to undo things, unscrew things, deconstruct things and cut things up, or, if all else fails, simply stab at things with pointed sticks, like monkeys at an ant hill.
This may be irritating, but there is something admirable about it, even in the most tiresome little boy; it suggests, and perhaps it helps to form, man the question-asker, man the investigator, homo forensicus. It is fun, obviously, but it is not simply destructive and pointless fun, for all its powerful appeal to the natural-born wrecker in boy and man.
That, I imagine, is why my husband took two 13-year-old boys to a recent art exhibition in the old C & A store in Oxford Street in London at half-term; it was the only cultural event he could think of that they might, despite the determined philistinism of teenage boys, be persuaded to visit. It was a show - or rather happening - called Break Down; the artist, Michael Landry, over two weeks, was systematically taking to bits and destroying every single thing he possessed.
It sounded pretty silly. I had read a lot of the well-orchestrated publicity about it, and it seemed to me that - in so far as the very simple idea went - I had already got it, without needing to struggle down Oxford Street for any further and better particulars.
Any implications of the idea could be perfectly well examined from the comfort of my black leather and chrome pre-post-modern armchair. That is the trouble with conceptual art; as a contemporary art dealer friend once explained, conceptual art is art you can explain down the telephone. In that case, you might think, you might as well let your fingers do the walking, and not bother to go in person.
However, like a member of the crowd jostling to get a glimpse of the emperor in his new clothes, I never feel quite sure just what I might be seeing. Secretly I suspect that the emperor must really be naked, but (surrounded as I am, like the boy in the fairy story, by patronising cognoscenti) I am constantly nagged by the feeling that, if only I could move closer and get a better view, then perhaps some higher truth might be revealed. So it was that I went off to Oxford Street on the last day of the show, encouraged by the uncharacteristic enthusiasm of the boys.
The whole thing was very good to look at, and surprisingly moving. The artist had arranged some very authentic-looking industrial conveyor belts, going round and round and up and down, carrying large industrial plastic containers of neatly sorted debris. Inside the conveyer belt were groups of boiler-suited workers, diligently taking things apart with serious looking industrial equipment, small and large. One man was carefully dismantling the artist's Saab, bit by bit.
There was a lot of shredding, smashing and bashing at certain stages, but this had been designed as a very careful disassembly plant. Meanwhile the eye was drawn to sad and strange little things in plastic boxes, going round and round in a kind of limbo.
What they were, or had been, was itemised very precisely in an inventory of the artist's possessions, which was posted up on all the walls, in painstaking detail - letters, LPs, toothbrush, PlayStation, diaries, clothes, paintings, holiday brochures, and absolutely everything, allegedly.
There were surprisingly few items - 7,006 altogether. But I no longer have my notes - I abandoned them to the greater authenticity of destruction - and must rely now, like the artist, on my imperfect memory, which is already fading.
I still think that the interesting questions suggested by Landry's central idea are intellectual. However, this show did that rare thing of expressing intellectual ideas in an idiom more powerful than words - the Holy Grail of conceptual art, I suppose, and usually entirely elusive.
The experience of seeing it was moving, intriguing and full of nameless complexities. Anyone who has ever emptied an attic, or disposed of a dead person's possessions, must have had many of the perceptions underlying this show. Landry achieved an extension of that understanding.
All the same, I think there is a dishonesty somewhere in all this, or, at least, there is a dishonesty at the heart of minimalism. It is profoundly dishonest and decadent to take a dismissive view of objects, in the way that minimalism does.
Of course it is true that, in the rich world, we are almost overwhelmed with hideous and unnecessary objects. However, we cannot live without objects and most of us cannot always have the luxury of choosing between objects, or having the things we need at all.
Given these obvious facts, it seems perverse to imagine that there is some greater authenticity in having very few objects, or even none at all. However irksome it may be to the free artistic spirit, part of our identity, our sense of meaning and our history does reside in objects, whether we like it or not.
Objects have great power. That is presumably what draws artists into making art out of objects, after all. To junk all one's objects is to junk one's past, one's sense of self and (obviously) one's independence in the world. In this sense, the minimalist emperor really has no clothes; he has deconstructed them out of existence.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, March 03, 2001 | Comments (0)
