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This way to the darkened room, Gordon
Drop those finely honed instructions and plans, scrap those self-audits and bossy, bloated quangos
Long ago I gave up new year’s resolutions for myself. These days I make them for other people, especially for politicians. It is more satisfactory to watch them breaking the resolutions than to watch myself. This year I am going to make only one resolution for one person. It’s for Gordon Brown and it’s simple. If he can persuade himself to make it and to keep it, he will save himself an immense amount of money, time, work failure and blame. Brown’s new year’s resolution should be to do less. Much, much less.
His attitude should be like that of the drawing room exquisite who said that whenever he felt he should be taking exercise, he lay in a darkened room until the feeling went away. So with our hyperactive prime minister. Whenever he is tempted by an initiative or a pledge, he should immediately open a demanding book – such as one by Adam Smith, whom Brown rather oddly admires – and read furiously until the initiative evaporates.
Quite apart from ethical limits to what government should do, there are natural limits to what government can do well or do at all. Going beyond those limits, or failing to recognise them, will end in disaster, as Brown is finding. One of those many limits is what these days we call “resources”, meaning the wherewithal.
For years we have watched Brown and Tony Blair throwing money at health, education and child poverty, with little to show for it. We have put up with all this astonishingly mildly and are only now beginning to recognise the waste and bossy incompetence with which our money has been squandered.
An independent group that has been trying since 2004 to draw our attention to all this is the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Each year it produces a Bumper Book of Government Waste and next week it is publishing its third annual Non-Jobs Report. It is a protest against the prodigality of local authorities, but since their priorities are dictated by central government, the buck stops at No 10.
The survey paints in some detail the flurries of unnecessary activities that councils take on at government behest and their mounting cost to the taxpayer – all this despite the fact that Brown admitted three years ago that savings could be made by cutting non-essential public sector jobs.
That has been screamingly obvious for years. Whether you consider gender awareness outreach co-ordination work a job that is merely non-essential, or whether you consider it a disgraceful nonsense, we can all agree that it is not and should not be a priority, comparable to looking after the sick and the needy and the disabled, or indeed providing proper schools, hospitals, libraries and rubbish collection.
Yet these non-jobs proliferate, while old ladies lie neglected and unwashed and children in so-called care are moved on again and again, like Jo the crossing sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House, from one unhappy place to another, while social workers sip caffe latte on trains to away days.
There appears to be no end in sight to the demand for comfortable, overpaid makework. Under Blair and Brown 800,000 new jobs have been created in the state sector. As is now notorious, advertisements for such nonjobs appear weekly in The Guardian’s Society section – a butt of humour to journalists for some years.
For 2007, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the total cost of the jobs advertised there was nearly £500m. That is merely the cost of hiring these people and giving them generous pensions; it does not include the no doubt greater cost of all the wasteful initiatives they are employed to dream up and implement, intruding into everything that local authorities do.
One ought to point out that not all the jobs advertised in Guardian Society are self-evidently non-jobs and some are not obviously state-funded, although in the case of charities they will be so in practice, as charities become dependent on the state. A more authoritative survey would be a breakdown of what one large inner city council does, who does it and why.
Nonetheless, the TaxPayers’ Alliance report is a useful irritant to all those who ought to be trying to cut their coat according to their cloth, including Brown.
I have another document that is even more irritating and ought to galvanise the prime minister into inaction. It’s a 12-page document of minute and statutory instructions for teachers of foundation stage children from three to five. Put out by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and still extant, it contains no fewer than 107 goals for each tiny child, which must be ticked and perhaps commented upon every term. With a class of 25 that means nearly 2,700 individual goals to monitor and tick each year, along with written elaboration where necessary.
What, you may ask, are the important details that the diligent teacher must painstakingly report upon? Here are a few: “demonstrates fine motor control and co-ordination”; “expresses needs and feelings in an appropriate way”; “investigates places, objects, materials and living things by using all the senses as appropriate”; “knows that in English print is read from left to right and top to bottom”. You get the idea.
Even more absurd are “understands that people have different needs, views, cultures and beliefs that need to be treated with respect” and, best of all, “understands what is right, what is wrong and why”. All this for tiny children.
It is not only breathtakingly banal, stupid and subjective. It is also pointless, because it is insultingly unnecessary for good and good enough teachers and useless for bad teachers, quite apart from the colossal waste of their time and our money. It’s a perfect paradigm of what is wrong with Labour. Don’t do it, Gordon. You know it hasn’t worked and we can’t afford it anyway.
Drop all those finely honed instructions and plans, scrap those endless self-audits and life plans and bossy, bloated quangos. Imagine the energy – imagine the money – that you would release if you told government great and small to get off our backs. Less is better, a lot less. Resolve to do it, in this alarming looking new year, and you might become a great prime minister.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 30, 2007 | Comments (0)
If you want a plan, sack the bad teachers
Last week Ed Balls, the prime minister’s right-hand man, proudly announced in parliament a new 10-year Children’s Plan to make Britain “the best place in the world for children to grow up”. I nearly laughed.
Balls must surely know that after 10 years of Labour, 10 years of his boss as a dirigiste chancellor and 10 years of heavy spending on education and child poverty, Britain is by several independent measures one of the worst places in the industrialised world to grow up, unless you are rich.
In February a Unicef report on child poverty in rich nations put Britain last out of 21 countries on various measures of wellbeing. The number of children in poverty, one of Gordon Brown’s greatest concerns, increased by 100,000 in 2005-06. The details of failed education policies and missed literacy targets must be almost as sickening for the government as they are for parents: Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) figures this year showed Britain falling fast down an international education league table and at the bottom of a social mobility league. A report for the Sutton Trust showed that social mobility in the UK was no better than it was in 1970.
The predictable response of both Brown and Balls to this is yet more government intrusion and yet more micromanagement. The Children’s Plan contains no fewer than 170 pages of initiatives largely based on the idea that when children fail at school it is because their parents have failed at home.
Schools, therefore, will now be required to take over things that parents fail to do: armies of teaching mentors, social workers, health visitors, breakfast club workers, after-school club experts, community police, sex educators and mental health experts.
It is true there will be new parenting support advisers to encourage failing parents to try harder but they will hardly need to; all those experts will do it for them. And schools will come into children’s lives much earlier, with free nursery places for two-year-olds in poor areas and extended versions of wraparound educare. It sounds like, and is intended to be, the state taking over the role of the parent. There is possibly some justification in the case of children from inadequate homes (although the state has an abysmal record in caring for other people’s children). If such plans were well managed, they might genuinely make underprivileged lives better.
However, I suspect that in practice this new official intrusion into every part of an underprivileged child’s life will extend, with unthinking egalitarianism, into every child’s life regardless. What’s more, the knowledge that the school will take over so much - the doctor, the dentist, the after-school club, the music practice, the homework and even breakfast - will tempt better mothers and fathers into parenting-lite. School will provide free (or cheap) childcare for longer hours and earlier years. It will extend the time that parents can spend at work and away from their children and therefore not reading to them. The Children’s Plan runs a real risk of becoming the unparents’ plan.
Fashions come and go in explaining why so many children fail at school. Currently the two favourites seem to be poor parenting and poverty. The Sutton Trust’s research found that bright children from the poorest 20% of households dropped from the 88th centile in cognitive tests at three to the 65th centile at five – a life-changing fall. The least able from the richest 20% of households moved up from the 15th centile at three to the 45th centile at five – an even more striking change.
I do agree that background matters, although you don’t have to be rich to be an excellent parent. However, there is another explanation for why children fail. I remember several international studies that suggested low teacher expectation was mainly to blame for the low achievements of pupils. I would go further and suggest that an obvious explanation is the low quality of many teachers. Contrariwise, a good teacher can compensate for social disadvantage, and traditionally did, especially before the progressive education disaster.
More than 20 years ago Chris Woodhead, the then chief inspector of schools, said there were 15,000 bad teachers in the state system who ought to be sacked; he became a public hate figure. Last month Sir Cyril Taylor, a leading education adviser to the government, said there were about 17,000 poor teachers who should be got rid of; they were, he said, damaging the education of about 400,000. There was barely a murmur of dissent. Things have got bad enough for the truth to be admissible.
It would be a great deal easier to sack a few thousand bad teachers than to impose 170 pages of micromanagement on the lives of millions of parents and children. Teachers’ unions have always passionately resisted the idea of sackings and governments of all hues have weakly given in to them. If they had taken on the unions and allowed head teachers to hire and fire and to pay better teachers more, we might not now find our schools worse than Estonia’s.
The Children’s Plan appears to grasp this nettle. It announced, in its euphemistic way, that government would look “with social partners at whether more can be done to address the performance of teachers who have the greatest difficulty in carrying out their role effectively. . . This should include helping them to leave the profession if that is appropriate”. Well, that’s telling them. The plan also announced ministers would work with the General Teaching Council (GTC) to revoke teachers’ qualifications where necessary. In other words, bad teachers are to be sacked and even disqualified.
However, according to The Times Educational Supplement, this assertion was a mistake. Instead, the existing process of referring competence cases to the GTC will be strengthened. As you were, then. Instead of aiming precisely at one of the central problems in schools – the low quality of teacher recruits, the low entry requirements and the low level of training – the government prefers to spray them with a blunderbuss of misdirected initiatives.
Such is the new Labour way. Despite its excess of planning, it’s not much of a plan and there’s not much new about it
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 16, 2007 | Comments (0)
Your attitude will be the death of us, doctor
Of the many strange sayings of President Bush, my favourite is, “The trouble with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.” In his inimitable way, Bush both disproved the point he was making and demonstrated that the French do indeed have some wonderful expressions that we lack. English would be much poorer without borrowed phrases such as je ne sais quoi, savoir faire and countless others.
One that sprang to mind last week, as I read about the paediatrician struck off by the General Medical Council for serious professional misconduct, was déformation professionelle. There isn’t an equivalent here. It is the slow process of deformity brought about by a demanding trade or profession, of its nature, rather as a ballerina’s toes are slowly distorted and damaged by her art.
In many cases professional deformation goes with an excess of zeal. Hairdressers are all too inclined to cut hair, whether it’s necessary or not, because haircutting is what they are trained to do. If one exists to solve a particular problem, one tends (and needs) to see that problem everywhere. So occupational bias often goes with zealotry. When it does it can be destructive, as in the case of the disgraced Dr David Southall.
The déformation professionelle of doctors is arrogance and sometimes unfeeling arrogance as in Southall’s astonishing case. I am not one of those people with a prejudice against doctors. There are doctors in my close family and among my friends.
All the same, given their power over life and death, and in Southall’s case, over parenthood, and given the superiority of their knowledge (real or imagined) over people in their power, it would hardly be surprising if some of them were to drift into arrogance. By arrogance I mean a loss of that modesty in the face of life’s great complexity and one’s own shortcomings that is an essential part of wisdom.
In medicine another hazard is emotional coldness. From the earliest stages of their training, doctors are confronted with other people’s fear, pain, grief and death. I can never forget my brother’s accounts of his distress as a young doctor. One of the ways doctors deal with this is to distance themselves from people’s feelings and repress their own. Otherwise they could not function. There must be a balance between professional distance and acquired insensitivity, to say nothing of doctors who arrive at medical school insensitive and arrogant by nature. Any natural deformity will be made worse by the profession.
Southall is a man whose arrogance seems breathtaking. In 2000 he felt able, after watching a Channel 4 programme about Sally Clark, then wrongly in prison for murdering her two baby sons, to ring the police and tell them he suspected the father was the murderer and might harm the remaining child in his care. Southall came to this conclusion without seeing any medical or postmortem records. His accusation was based on his expertise, whatever that can mean in such a context.
To accuse a bereaved father, whose wife is in prison for murdering their babies, of committing the crimes himself, with a view to having his remaining child taken away; to do so without the most carefully examined evidence; to intrude in the case without a professional invitation and worst of all to do so when he was prohibited from intervening in such cases because he had been suspended; and to fail to apologise to the Clarks, strikes me as déformation professionelle at its most monstrous.
The General Medical Council found Southall guilty at the time of serious misconduct and banned him from child protection work for three years. Three years later, last Tuesday, the GMC struck him off the medical register for other reasons. Complaints had been made to the GMC about Southall, including the removal of nearly 4,500 hospital case notes to his own files. The panel spoke of his “multiple failings over an extended period” and his “deep-seated attitudinal problems”, but what finally got him struck off, among other things, was his treatment of a woman whose 10-year-old son had hanged himself.
Southall accused this mother, to her great distress, of drugging and hanging the boy herself; this was in front of a senior social worker who was considering removing her other child. He also brought up with this unhappy woman another possibility, only to dismiss it, that her 10-year-old had died in an autoerotic sexual experiment. The scene as Southall himself described on Radio 4 sounded almost insanely insensitive and improper and would have been so even had the mother been guilty, which she wasn’t.
What is disturbing is that many paediatricians and other doctors support Southall. They claim that he is being hounded by a determined campaign to deny the existence of child abuse. This is nonsense. The country is obsessed with child abuse. So far from denying it, we all suspect it or are encouraged to suspect it everywhere. What Southall is guilty of, and what parents everywhere hate and fear, is extreme arrogance, insensitivity and a general indifference to rules, combined with astonishing power. That is bad in anyone but it is completely unacceptable in a paediatrician dealing with other people’s babies and parents’ rights to keep them.
Paediatricians such as Southall, and social workers, have impossibly difficult jobs. With the best of intentions they might accuse an innocent parent or be tricked by a guilty one. They may often be wrong for the right reasons, or for reasons that though wrong are conventionally accepted.
There may often be telltale signs of abuse when, in fact, there is no tale to tell. Later scientific research may suggest other explanations. Southall’s mistakes may be just that. His real crime is his attitude: his insensitivity and his overconfidence, wrong though he has often been, in what he keeps coolly calling his expertise, as if there were any objective expertise in such cases. Other paediatricians should not try to protect him. If they do, they will bring themselves and child protection into disrepute. And they may be suspected of another déformation professionelle – a tendency in doctors to close ranks, right or wrong.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 09, 2007 | Comments (0)
Rape targets are a violation of justice
If a woman gets drunk and appears to consent to sex, she must in many cases bear some responsibility if sex takes place.
n a country such as ours, which values highly the presumption of innocence, it is odd of the government to announce a target for convictions. That, surely, amounts to a presumption of guilt – a presumption that the government knows how many people are guilty of a particular crime and therefore how many people the courts ought to find guilty of it. That’s not only entirely at odds with the essential spirit of English justice. It’s completely unreasonable as well.
Perhaps that is not surprising in the case of the crime in question, which is rape. The thought of rape has a way of driving out both fairness and facts – something that politicians are ready to exploit. Last week the government announced again its determination to raise what it considers a low conviction rate for rape. Vera Baird, the solicitor-general, said that it would design new “guidelines” for judges and “packages” for juries to clarify the law on consent and to dispel the many “myths” surrounding rape, which are said to keep the conviction rate so unacceptably low.
No doubt this flurry of feel-good intentions was in part a response to a successful speech that David Cameron recently made on the same subject. And on the face of it, it seems tremendously worthy and heart-warming, not to say female-voter friendly. However, it is in fact misleading and unreasonable. Rape is a dreadful crime and it is true that, of the cases reported, only about 5.7% end up with a conviction. But the facts would lead any just and sensible person to dump these self-serving plans for targets and rape starter packs immediately.
At the moment in England and Wales, of the rape allegations that women make to the police only 12% end up in court. Given that 5.7% or so of the reported cases lead to the man being found guilty, that means that 47%, not 5.7%, is the true conviction rate for rape. That sounds entirely different and relative to other crimes it is not low. It is slightly higher than the conviction rate for murder.
If the public had been fed the true conviction figure of 47%, rather than the misleading one of 5.7% or so, people would be feeling much less aggrieved. However, ill-informed grievance is grist to the politician’s mill.
As to why so few rape accusations get to court, there are all kinds of possible explanations other than public indifference to the rights of women. There may be some truth in the feminist view that policemen (and presumably policewomen) are sometimes inclined to dismiss women’s claims as exaggerated or frivolous or unimportant. If the complainants are drunk, or were drunk at the time, they may arouse prejudices in the Old Bill. All the same, the government’s own surveys point in a different direction.
According to Home Office research of two years ago, a sixth of the rape complaints that the police dropped were classed as false allegations. A quarter were dropped because of insufficient evidence or none. A third were dropped because the complainant withdrew her allegations. There are many ways of explaining those findings, but they all tend towards the same conclusion: there are many entirely respectable reasons why so few accusations of rape, true or false, get to court.
I do not want to make light of rape; at its worst it is a dreadful crime and in every case it is unacceptable. However, there does, as always with rape, seem an astonishing amount of room for doubt, even for self-doubt.
Years ago, researching this subject, I read to my amazement the results of a questionnaire in a women’s magazine, in which many readers commented that until they had answered the questions, they had not been aware that they had been raped. Call me oversensitive, but I think one would notice if one was being raped. And if one wasn’t capable of noticing at the time, how could one know afterwards?
In rather the same strange spirit, at least according to a recent Home Office analysis of the British Crime Survey, “only 60% of rape victims were prepared to self-classify their experience as rape”. This is a most odd kind of doubt. If nothing else, it suggests that the subject of rape is surrounded by irrationality.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when the members of a jury are confronted with a rape case, they will be both confused and cautious. It is not often easy to decide between one person’s word and another’s. It is not easy to decide what a woman really wanted at the time, if she herself doesn’t know or isn’t sure. And it can never be easy to convict a man for taking advantage of a woman he knows well and imagines is up for it, when he will receive the same minimum sentence, of five years in jail, as a sexual predator who violates a stranger. In justice there are degrees of rape and unless the law recognises those degrees, there will be no true justice in court.
As to the question of consent, and particularly consent when drunk, that is yet another can of worms. It is in the nature of many forms of rape that it would take the judgment of Solomon to apportion guilt and blame.
It seems to me that if a woman gets drunk, and is willingly spending time with a man, and appears to consent to sex, then she must in many cases bear some responsibility if sex takes place. It all depends on the details of each story, but women sometimes do give out mixed messages, as any juror will be aware. No amount of distinguished quangocrats and lawyers could dream up a guideline for every possibility.
Apart from creating different new levels for the offence of rape, from drunken errors with a friend right though all degrees of abusing a wife to attacking a stranger or a child, there is little more that anyone can do to find and punish the guilty. And given that, one wonders why the government is striking such attitudes about it. The research needed for the guidelines and packages may take a long time, so nothing needs to happen immediately.
Meanwhile, our government is seriously proposing to hand out carefully packaged material to jurors with the express intention of making them more likely to convict a certain group of defendants. Is this a rape of justice or are we consenting to it?
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 02, 2007 | Comments (0)
