After the longest convalescence since (recorded) recessions began, the UK economy is showing clear recovery signs. Year-on-year national output (GDP) growth doubled to 0.6% in the second quarter, according to estimates by the widely respected National Institute of Economic and Social Research.  The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its full-year growth forecast to almost 1% while downgrading the rest of the EU. On top of this, the Office of National Statistics recently revised its national output data to show that the widely lamented ‘double dip’ recession never actually occurred. 

Even more remarkably, the recovery is being led by consumer spending. Households that shunned the shops after 2008, to cope with falling real incomes and reduced credit options, are starting to splash out again. Although strong second-quarter retail sales growth helped online channels more than embattled High Streets, upbeat buyer-intention surveys suggest it will be more than a warm-day wonder. 

This isn’t quite the promised ‘rebalancing’ recovery, which was meant to be driven by exports and investment. Businesses are still refusing to invest despite large cash piles and record low interest rates, and the current-account deficit is at its widest for almost 25 years as consumer spending draws in imports with which UK producers still can’t compete. But whatever is driving it, this change of fortune should be celebrated. When debts are too high in relation to national income, growing the income is a better route out than unlashing inflation to shrink the debt. 

More than a baby boom?
New royal arrivals and sporting heroes have done something to revive the ‘feelgood factor’. But there are more objective reasons for thinking that a corner has now been turned. After house- and share-prices crashed in 2008, households responded by paying down debt and building up savings. More loans were paid off, and many fewer were taken out.  As a result, the UK’s household debt has dropped back down to pre-recession levels as a proportion of household income. The government can claim to have helped this improvement with pro-poor measures, including a rise in tax-allowances that raised post-tax income for some of those most heavily in debt.

Although households’ debt-to-income ratio is still above 120%, compared to less than 80% when the long boom began in the late 1990s, other changes may mean they can sustain this and still spend again. In particular, the recovery in share prices and (over the past year) house prices means households have more assets to offset those liabilities. Their ‘net worth’ (the difference between the two) is back to healthier pre-2002 levels on some counts. And while debt is still higher, the cost of serving it has been brought down by low base lending rates, which new Bank of England governor Mark Carney won’t want to abandon any time soon.

Inevitably, some economists don’t see this as a solid foundation for recovery. Although falling, the household debt ratio is much higher (over 140%) on measures that use a tighter definition of post-tax income. Because real incomes have fallen since 2008 (as prices rose faster than average wages), leaving them no higher than a decade ago, all the improvement has been due to debt reduction, which gets harder as refinancing and consolidation options are exhausted.  Present low mortgage costs can’t last for ever – and when interest rates rise, many households will find their debts are still too large to handle, as a new Resolution Foundation study reveals. Some are already struggling, and sinking further into high-cost debt through the use of payday lenders, whose rapid expansion is, like that of food banks, one of the gloomier contributors to that rising GDP.
Any reversal of the house-price recovery could, likewise, push many households back into negative equity (meaning negative net worth for some) despite their lower debts. And further price rises for fuel and other essential goods and services – which could result from a weakening of the pound made necessary to revive exports – would undermine the still fragile revival of disposable income. On this basis, some economists believe belt-tightening must continue until household debt drops below 120% of income, which could mean the recession has several more years to run. 

A deeper problem is that, while UK households may have reduced their debts (or de-leveraged, as the jargon goes), the UK as a whole has not. Continued borrowing by government and banks means that total UK debt has gone on rising since 2008, despite many large businesses also boosting national saving by sitting on large cash piles. This contrasts with overall debt reduction in the US and most other parts of Europe, and means the UK now vies with Japan as the world’s most-indebted large economy.  Many economists doubt that this is a solid foundation for recovery, especially as some banks may still be too weak to absorb a widespread write-off of household and business debts that have become unrepayable. But with the government desperate to reduce its own debt, and main Eurozone markets still sinking, the better alternative – an investment-led recovery – is unlikely to happen unless households can somehow keep spending. 
Alan Shipman 19 July 2013 

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

In the first of three posts, Meg Barker examines how romance is explored in the movie Ruby Sparks.

Recently I got round to watching last year's movie Ruby Sparks on DVD. I'd been looking forward to watching this film for some time because it is a meditation on what would happen if we could create our perfect partner. The film was everything I'd hoped for. However, when I gushed about it on Facebook, several people said they had felt let down by the ending. Here I want to present my take on the film, and to explain why I think the ending needed to be the way it was.

In the film an isolated writer (Calvin Weir-Fields) has writer's block, having published one highly successful book when he was pretty young. His therapist encourages him to write a brief account of a positive encounter with another person. He invents a scenario where he meets his perfect girlfriend in the park. Soon he is writing more and more about her because he enjoys imagining her so much. He describes her to his therapist:

Spoiler alert: Don't read on if you want to watch the movie without knowing what happens.

During the time that he is writing about Ruby, Calvin starts to find bits of women's clothing around his house and things in his bathroom cabinet that don't belong to him. Then one day he returns home to find that Ruby exists and is living with him. She believes that everything from their first encounter to her moving in with him has actually happened.

After initial confusion Calvin is delighted and throws himself into a real relationship with Ruby. The two enjoy a perfect honeymoon period captured in a movie montage of dancing, beaches and running around town. But things start to sour when Calvin introduces Ruby to his family whom she loves whilst he finds them problematic. He begins to become grumpy with the very things that he created Ruby to be.

Calvin's brother, Harry, has suggested that Calvin should continue writing about Ruby in order to make her into whatever he wants. However, even when she is getting on his nerves Calvin refuses to do this. Then Ruby begins to pull away for some independence: wanting to start a job, hanging out with her friends, and deciding to spend one night a week back at her own flat to give them some space. Calvin panics and returns to his typewriter. He writes that Ruby was sad whenever she wasn't with Calvin. Ruby then becomes needy and tearful, unable to be parted from Calvin for a moment. Calvin writes that Ruby was effervescently happy all of the time, in order to try to keep her with him but not so demanding. This also backfires because constant happiness is hard to take, and because it is clear that Ruby isn't choosing to be with Calvin at this point, so he writes her back to normal.

The couple return to bickering and fighting when Ruby doesn't do what Calvin wants her to do. There is also the sense that the constant changes have taken a toll on Ruby emotionally. At a party she is left alone and flirts with Calvin's agent. At this point Calvin explodes and tells her what she is, forcing her to do things by typing them out as she stands in front of him. Finally he stops and she runs to her room. He is struck by the horror of what he has become and leaves all of the pages that he has ever written about Ruby outside her room with a final line saying that Ruby is no longer bound by the past and that as she leaves the house she is set free.

The following morning Ruby has disappeared and Calvin is left alone to mourn. Eventually he pulls himself together and buys a computer instead of a typewriter. This was a relief to me because the main problem that I had with the film was understanding how somebody could write a perfect first draft into a typewriter! Calvin writes the story of his time with Ruby, anonymised, and it is a great success.

At the end of the film – which my Facebook friends found so problematic – Calvin bumps into Ruby in the park. She is reading his new book but clearly she has forgotten everything that happened due to being set free. They have some banter similar to the first time that they met and it seems that Calvin has been given a second chance at the relationship, but this time having learnt his lessons in love.

There are probably many different readings of this film, and perhaps the way in which you read it affects how you view the ending. Two readings particularly struck me: we could understand the film as an exploration of gender in relationships (and wider society), and/or we could understand it as an examination of how people relate to each other more broadly. We don't have to discard one reading in order to accept the other as both are possible through the same situations, and indeed the way we relate to each other is generally infused with gender. However, the latter reading perhaps invites a more sympathetic understanding of Calvin: and one in which we might be more likely to wish him the redemption he receives in the final scene.

To be continued...
Meg Barker 23 July 2013

Meg Barker is an Open University lecturer teaching mainly on counselling modules, and is also a therapist specialising in relationships. Find her other blogs here. 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Do you get a living wage? Would you pay one? John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, wants to hear your views.

Millions of people across the country will get up today, leave their families and travel to work to carry out jobs that we all depend on. They will care for people, serve us food, clean the spaces that we all use and share. They will do more than a fair day's work, but they won't get a fair day's pay.

The scale of low pay in Britain is a national scandal. Come pay day, nearly five million people in this country won't have been paid at a rate high enough to live on. Just think about that. Nearly five million people give their time, their skills and their energy to perform jobs – many of which we all depend on – but don't get paid enough by their employers to even get by. That means not enough money to heat their homes, or feed their families, or plan for a rainy day.

So far, all governments have been merely applying a sticking plaster to the crisis of low pay. The holes in millions of pay cheques are being plugged by in-work support to the tune of £4bn a year.

But why aren't those who are profiting from their workers paying up? Why is the government having to subsidise businesses which don't pay their employees enough to live on? These are questions we need to answer and act on – fast. The cost of living is rising but wages are not.

In the rush for profit, and for high pay at the top, too many companies have forgotten the basic moral imperative that employees be paid enough to live on. So how do we resurrect that imperative?

The living wage: three words that provide hope of an alternative. Championed by community groups across the country, it is a deceptively simple idea. A wage rate set to ensure a basic but acceptable standard of living.

Over the past decade, workers, trade unionists and campaigners at Citizens UK and the Living Wage Foundation have seized on this idea and driven it into mainstream Westminster policy debates.

Because of their tireless efforts, 284 businesses have adopted the living wage, which is currently set at £8.55 an hour in London and £7.45 throughout the rest of the UK. (The minimum wage required by law is £6.19). Around 45,000 people have seen their pay cheque boosted as a result.

Politicians have started to sing the praises of the living wage, too. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, called it "an idea whose time has come". Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, said: "A fair and decent wage for Londoners is critical if the capital is to remain diverse, inclusive and prosperous", while the prime minister, David Cameron, has described it as a "good and attractive idea".

I agree. At the end of the day, though, what workers really need is pay, not platitudes. The reality is that despite these warm words, too few companies have stepped up to the mark. For the vast majority of low-paid people in the UK, the living wage remains an abstract concept, not a description of their pay rate.

That has to change. But how is change to be achieved? That is what the Living Wage Commission, which I will be chairing over the next 12 months, will set out to uncover. With colleagues from business, trade unions and civil society, we will investigate the future of the living wage.

What is the full potential of the living wage to both change people's lives and change the way we do business? What are the barriers to companies adopting the living wage – and how could we surmount them?

To answer those questions, we need to have a national conversation about low pay in Britain. If you are paid less than the living wage, I want to hear from you. If you are a business which is considering the living wage, or which thinks it would be untenable to adopt, I want to hear from you, too.

By mapping the potential of the living wage, and facing the challenging questions about implementation head on, I believe that we can not only build fairer workplaces but also help build a just and good society.
John Sentamu

This article originally appeared in The Observer on July 21 2013.  It is reproduced here with kind permission.

More information

• John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, launched the Living Wage mission on July 22. You can find out more on the Archbishop of York's website. 
• For more information on the living wage see the Living Wage Commission. 
• For previous Society Matters posts on the living wage see The new working class and Minimum wage declines.

 
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Ticket prices for sport and entertainment events are rocketing. Are these sky-high charges just a bubble, or here to stay, asks Alan Shipman.

Wimbledon has, of course, chosen to give men and women equal prizes – unlike the economy in general, whose median £26,500 figure that glosses over a tramline-sized gender gap. The average man in full-time employment took home £28,700 in 2012, while female full-timers averaged £23,100. But even with very above-average scrimping, or some extraordinary success on the horses, few tennis fans had any chance of stretching their pay-packets further than the big screen on Henman/Murray Hill.  

If they looked elsewhere in the great British summer of entertainment and sport, it was a similar story for those who follow superstars but can’t quite earn like them. The Rolling Stones brought music to the huddled masses when they performed in Hyde Park in 1969. But when they returned in 2013, it cost over £300 just to stand near enough to notice that Charlie Watts has gone a bit grey. 

Even when the Stones aren’t filling football stadiums, the ordinary fans aren’t getting satisfaction, as season ticket prices arc skywards like the ball in England’s penalty shootouts.

In case this all sounds anecdotal, superstar economist Alan Krueger has carefully tracked the rise in concert ticket price, relative to the general price index, and showed that a substantial inflation was well under way before the turn of the century. 

Raising the roof
The reasons for sky-rocketing admission charges to big events seem fairly obvious. There is, by definition, only one Number One tennis player, and one World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band. In a city the size of London, the number of people who want to see them live exceeds the number of stadium seats (or park standing-areas) available, even if they play for several nights. Event organisers have a choice between setting an ‘affordable’ price and letting people queue for tickets until they sell out, or charging a price that will chop down the demand to match the limited supply.
 
In practice, they tend to mix the two approaches – making some of the tickets available at reasonable prices for those willing to queue overnight or book months in advance, while putting a premium on the best seats, so that queues are confined to the lower tiers.

This dual pricing carries risks. Even after trying to ban re-selling and clear away the ticket touts, it’s impossible (especially with the growth of online auctions) to stop some of those who get the cheap tickets from selling them on at a premium as the final date approaches. Even West End theatres, which hope their shows will run and run, have seen the resale ratchet unleashed for those who can only stay for one night.

But why has the superstars’ premium grown, so that people pay (after adjusting for price changes) far more to spectate on Murray than Perry, and more for Mick & Keith at age 69 than at 19? It could be argued that the standard of their play is now higher. But it’s not clear that this is true – some bands allegedly auto-tune and mime their way through ‘live’ sets, and no-one has yet emulated Rod Laver’s double grand slam – or that it makes for greater entertainment value. Undoubtedly, the uncontrollable copying and ‘sharing’ of video footage of past events makes it more important for artists and sportspeople to make money from ‘live’ events. But if recordings have been eroded as a revenue stream, plenty of celebrity endorsements and perfume ranges have opened up to replace them. And while stadiums have been upgraded, with health-and-safety more in evidence as today’s crowds assemble, a cramped patch of Hyde Park grass is much the same now as half a century ago. 

'media exposure has reinforced the winner-take-all effect'

Economists point to two other reasons for the remorseless inflation of big-event prices. First, the UK’s average wage is now almost three times what it was in 1936 (the year of Perry’s last Wimbledon victory), after adjusting for price increases and despite stagnation in the past ten years. This ‘real’ average wage has risen 82% even in the shorter interval since the Stones first stormed the Park in 1969. These and many other price and wage changes can be quickly gauged from the immeasurably worthwhile Measuring Worth website.  

As people get richer, they spend a declining proportion of their income on food and other necessities, and an increasing proportion on the slightly less necessary. You might regard ‘Gimme Shelter’ as essential listening, and England’s certain march to the next World Cup as unmissable viewing; but that’s the point. Income has risen, and demand for these events has risen much faster than income – so as they are staged no more frequently than before, their price has inevitably been bid up. 

The bidding is intensified because the quality of base-lines and bass-lines isn’t the only source of value on these occasions. There’s also a reward just from being in the crowd that’s there to witness them. Tickets to Meat Loaf’s farewell performances, and Usain Bolt’s Olympic 100m appearance, are ‘positional goods’, deriving part of their value from the fact that few people could be there because of the exorbitant entrance fee. Tickets prices’ initial boost, due to scarcity, leads to a second boost responding to the scarcity. The first boost may be driven by those who are desperate to watch history being made; the second is from those who might not even watch or understand the history, but just want to be able to show that they were there.

On top of this, there’s live television coverage, in its ever-escalating high-definition, three-dimensional glory. In principle, the opportunity to watch a good-quality telecast at home (or on the hill outside the stadium) should reduce the competition for tickets, and bring prices down. But this is now a paid-for opportunity – increasingly confined to subscription channels and pay-per-view screens, now that private media groups have broken the public broadcasters’ monopoly. And the global availability of TV pictures at big events has magnified demand for the biggest events, at the expense of the more minor ones.

Before TV and cheap travel, people mostly went to local concerts and sports events, involving their neighbourhood players. Now, a growing portion of the world’s population can travel to see the ‘best’ exponents of each art and sport, or have film of the ‘best’ channelled into their homes. Manchester United now has thousands of followers across Africa, Asia and the Americas, who in consequence are less likely to turn out to watch their local team (unless it signs a prominent ex-ManU midfielder). Bob Dylan has a similarly global band of loyal followers, who consequently pay less attention to other singer-songwriters who may be equally erudite but still haven’t toured further than the next-door pub. Media exposure has reinforced the ‘winner take all’ effect that concentrates global demand on a handful of performers, while confining to shrinking local markets those with slightly less good lyrics or a slightly slower left foot. 

A creative bubble?
The continued rise in main-event prices, despite a lack of growth in European and American real wages since 2000, may contain a warning for tomorrow’s impresarios. The biggest tickets may now be experiencing a bubble, driven more by cheap credit than the increased scarcity or quality of top performers. But whereas those who anticipate a housing or stock-price bubble can profit by selling now and buying-back after it bursts, that tactic isn’t available to sports or arts fans. Would you forgo the chance to see Bruce Springsteen this year on the basis that he might do the next tour at a discount? Those whose best-known work is mass-produced and pickled in formaldehyde, like Damian Hirst, may be heading for that kind of ‘correction’. The Boss is unlikely to suffer such a loss.
Alan Shipman 7 July 2013

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Her invite was linked to The Bisexuality Report, which was published by the OU Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance (CCIG) last year.

But Meg told Society Matters she felt highly ambivalent about attending the event, because as well as 'highly positive' she sees 'very negative' aspects to this change in the law.

"When we look back a few decades to the time when same-gender attraction was regarded as a psychiatric disorder, and was not allowed even to be discussed in schools, this seems like a huge step forward," she said.

"However there are remaining issues facing LGB&T people that the act does not address; and there are relationship and family issues which the focus on romantic/sexual relationships (whether same or different gender) does not cover.

"People are worried that funding will be withdrawn from LGB&T organisations or that remaining issues will be dismissed.

"It was concerning that the presentations by both David Cameron and Ben Summerskill at Downing Street seemed to suggest that same-sex marriage meant that we had achieved total equality around sexuality."

Also, the same-sex marriage act unfortunately reinforces the idea that romantic and sexual relationships are more valid than any other kind, she said.

"I’m not convinced that commitments between romantic/sexual partners should be regarded as the most important kind of commitment, or the only legitimate basis of families and societies." 

Meg explores the issues in greater depth in her blog Rewriting the Rules. 

Photo shows Meg (left) with Jen Yockney of BCN at No.10

Dick Skellington shares some thoughts on his visit to the Eden Project.

For an online version of the mural, see here.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Some surnames are at risk in 21st century Britain, including the Deputy Prime Minister's and the Shadow Chancellor's, writes Dick Skellington.

The family history website ancestry.co.uk reports that appendages such as Sutcliffe, Cohen, Kershaw, Butterworth and Greenwood, are among those at risk. They compared surnames from the 1901 census with contemporary records and found that many had simply disappeared. Intriguingly, among the disappearing surnames in Britain, Clegg is one of those facing extinction. 

Some of the surnames which have already vanished were, like mine, anglicised by their owners, often immigrants who changed their name to avoid complications with foreign spellings. My forefather originally settled in England from Scandanavia at the end of the 18th century.

Among the 200,000 surnames which have disappeared in the past century are Hatman, Chips, Woodbead, Funk and Arrendale. Some surnames, including those of famous actors, are increasingly rare. There are now fewer than 50 individuals named Mirren, Nighy or Bonneville, for example. 

The research backs up previous studies. Census returns from 1881 to 2001 concluded that a reason some surnames declined was that their owners were too embarrassed to be called a Cock, Shufflebottom or Gotobed, so changed them. In 1881, the census identified 3,211 Cocks. But even this study still found 785 Cocks, 360 Dafts, and 322 Shufflebottoms still residing in Britain in 2001, along with, I gather, 121 Skellingtons. 

And while we mention the decline in the number of Cleggs, which some might argue the Deputy Prime Minister has further imperilled, it is worth pointing out that the number of Balls is down too, though Shadow Chancellor Ed does not seem to care. 

I must say that being targeted at school as 'bones' made me think about changing my surname when I grew up, but I thought it would be more distinctive to go through life with a surname not shared by too many others. Perhaps I simply should have added a hyphenated name. This certainly is far more popular than it was 100 years ago. In 1901, one in 50,000 people had a hyphenated name, now the number is one in 50, probably down to the increase in divorce rates, as well as perhaps an increase in the snobbery factor.  

Ancestry.co.uk reveals that innocuous sounding surnames are in decline too, surnames like Jelly and Cockcroft. On the other hand some surnames are increasing for no apparent season. Among them Wanklyn, Bluck and Feek, along with Murphy, Black and Johnston.

Of course while anyone can change their surname by deed poll there are of course some people who have been given embarrassing Christian names, which means that when they go with their surname they have to carry them like a millstone around their necks for the rest of their lives.  

I went to school with someone called Roland Butter. It seems Roland's parents shared a sense of humour with the parents of Paige Turner, Nary Christmas, and Stan Still (see Unfortunate Names).
 
But if you are reading this with a surname of Chips, Hatman, Rummage, Nithercott, Raynott, Temples, Southwark, or Woodbead, ancestry.co.uk reports you shouldn't be. You don't exist. 

If there is a Mr Chips out there who hasn't said 'Goodbye' yet, please let me know!  And if there are any Skellingtons, do get in touch. We need to put the wagons in a circle.
Dick Skellington 14 August 2013.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

The Queen’s undelivered nuclear-war speech in 1983 is a reminder of a still uncertain future while weapons stocks last, argues Alan Shipman.
  
There’s been an oddly dismissive reaction to the Queen’s speech on the outbreak of nuclear war, drafted in 1983 and released in July under the 30-year rule. 
 
Some have found it comical because of the archaic tone and 'Beyond the Fringe' phrases. Others are horrified that Her Majesty chose to focus on abstract national virtues and family values rather than suggesting something practical, like opening up the Buckingham Palace wine-cellars as shelters, or sending Prince Andrew up in his helicopter to clog up the enemy’s radar. 
 
Most found greater amusement elsewhere in the archive, such as the prime minister’s refusal to let 21-year-old William Hague take control of the economy.  
 
Very much the same mixture of indifference, hilarity and horror greeted another nuclear-related statement of the time: the Protect and Survive nuclear preparation programme. This tried to explain how a Cold War-weary nation could best preserve itself if the bomb should actually drop. Unlike the 1965 War Game, which governments suppressed in case it undermined public confidence in the UK’s resilience to nuclear attack, this official civil-defence guidance was intended for a wide audience. That’s partly because it dispensed with any suggestion of disorderly or ineffective reaction, showing how the nation could dust itself down and start again once the radioactive dust had settled. And partly because, whereas the War Game focused on national solidarity and self-sacrifice, Protect and Survive left individuals, families and localities to stockpile their own bean-tins and fend for themselves.
 
With its stern commentary, chilling soundtracks and warnings of dictatorial force against those who stray from the bunker, Protect and Survive was sometimes depicted as scarier than the blasts it was meant to prepare against. If still around, its production team could well be in demand if the government goes ahead with its planned campaign to make the UK less attractive to would-be migrants. But when they appeared, the films struck others as terrifying in their optimism. They seemed to imply that the average (conveniently nuclear) family could, if not immediately in the missile’s path, expect to emerge safely after a few days under their sand-bagged kitchen table (especially if the fall-out kept up those useful squeaky noises to advertise its presence). Nuclear disarmament campaigners quickly launched their counterblast Protest and Survive, to draw attention to the far greater havoc that the stronger warheads of the 1980s were likely to wreak.
 

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

August 28 marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech. Guardian columnist Gary Younge reveals how it made history (and how it nearly fell flat).

The night before the March on Washington DC for jobs and freedom, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King asked his aides for advice about the next day's speech. "Don't use the lines about 'I have a dream', his adviser Wyatt Walker told him. "It's trite, it's cliche. You've used it too many times already."

King had indeed employed the refrain several times before. It featured in an address just a week earlier at a fundraiser in Chicago, and a few months before that at a huge rally in Detroit. As with most of his speeches, they were well received, but neither had been regarded as momentous.

This speech had to be different. While King was by now a national political figure, relatively few outside the black church and the civil rights movement had heard him give a full address. With all three television networks offering live coverage of the march for jobs and freedom, this would be his oratorical introduction to the nation.

After a range of conflicting suggestions from his staff, King left the lobby at the Willard hotel in DC to put the final touches to a speech he hoped would be received, in his words "like the Gettysburg address". "I am now going upstairs to my room to counsel with my Lord," he told them. "I will see you all tomorrow."

"When it came to my speech drafts," wrote Clarence Jones, who had already penned the first draft, "[King] often acted like an interior designer. I would deliver four strong walls and he would use his God-given abilities to furnish the place so it felt like home."

King finished the outline at about midnight and then wrote a draft in longhand. One of his aides who went to King's suite that night saw words crossed out three or four times. He thought it looked as though King were writing poetry. King went to sleep at about 4am, giving the text to his aides to print and distribute. The "I have a dream" section was not in it.
Political marches in Washington are now commonplace, but in 1963 attempting to stage a march of this size in that place was unprecedented. The movement had high hopes for a large turnout and originally set a goal of 100,000. The first official Freedom Train arrived at Washington's Union station from Pittsburgh at 8.02am. Within a couple of hours, thousands were pouring through the stations every five minutes, while almost two buses a minute rolled into DC from across the country.

About 250,000 people showed up that day. The Washington Mall was awash with Hollywood celebrities, including Charlton Heston, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr, Burt Lancaster, James Garner and Harry Belafonte. Marlon Brando wandered around brandishing an electric cattle prod, a symbol of police brutality. Josephine Baker made it over from France. Paul Newman mingled with the crowd.

It was a hectic morning for King, paying a courtesy visit with other march leaders to politicians at the Capitol, but he still found time to fiddle with the speech. When he eventually walked to the podium, the typed final version was once more full of crossings out and scribbles.

"There was… an air of subtle depression, of wistful apathy which existed in many," wrote Norman Mailer.
Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson had lifted spirits with I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, followed, recalling his time as a rabbi in Berlin under Hitler: "A great people who had created a great civilisation had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality and in the face of mass murder," he said. "America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent."
King was next. The area around the mic was crowded with speakers, dignitaries and their entourages. Wearing a black suit, black tie and white shirt, King edged through the melee towards the podium.

King started slowly, and stuck close to his prepared text. "I thought it was a good speech," recalled John Lewis, the leader of the student wing of the movement, who had addressed the march earlier that day. "But it was not nearly as powerful as many I had heard him make. As he moved towards his final words, it seemed that he, too, could sense that he was falling short. He hadn't locked into that power he so often found."

King was winding up what would have been a well-received but, by his standards, fairly unremarkable oration. "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana," he said. Then, behind him, Mahalia Jackson cried out: "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin." Jackson had a particularly intimate emotional relationship with King, who when he felt down would call her for some "gospel musical therapy"."Go back to the slums and ghettoes of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed," King said. Jackson shouted again: "Tell 'em about the dream." "Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends." Then King grabbed the podium and set his prepared text to his left. "When he was reading from his text, he stood like a lecturer," Jones says. "But from the moment he set that text aside, he took on the stance of a Baptist preacher." Jones turned to the person standing next to him and said: "Those people don't know it, but they're about to go to church."

A smattering of applause filled a pause more pregnant than most.
"So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream."
"Aw, shit," Walker said. "He's using the dream."

For all King's careful preparation, the part of the speech that went on to enter the history books was added extemporaneously while he was standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, speaking in full flight to the crowd. "I know that on the eve of his speech it was not in his mind to revisit the dream," Jones insists.

King had been using the refrain for well over a year. Talking some months later of his decision to include the passage, King said: "I started out reading the speech, and I read it down to a point. The audience response was wonderful that day… And all of a sudden this thing came to me that… I'd used many times before… 'I have a dream.' And I just felt that I wanted to use it here… I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether. I didn't come back to it."
Watching the whole thing on TV in the White House, President John F Kennedy, who had never heard an entire King speech before, remarked: "He's damned good. Damned good." Almost everyone, including even King's enemies, recognised the speech's reach and resonance. William Sullivan, the FBI's assistant director of domestic intelligence, recommended: "We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous negro of the future of this nation."

"It would be like if, right now in the Arab spring, somebody made a speech that was 15 minutes long that summarised what this whole period of social change was all about," one of King's most trusted aides, Andrew Young, told me. "The country was in more turmoil than it had been in since before the second world war. People didn't understand it. And he explained it. It wasn't a black speech. It wasn't just a Christian speech. It was an all-American speech."

Fifty years on, the speech enjoys both national and global acclaim (read the speech in full). A 1999 survey conducted by researchers of 137 scholars of public address at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Texas A&M University named it the greatest speech of the 20th century. 

If, in its immediate aftermath, the speech had any significant political impact, it was not obvious. "At the time of King's death in April 1968 his speech at the March on Washington had nearly vanished from public view," writes Drew Hansen in his book about the speech, The Dream. "There was no reason to believe that King's speech would one day come to be seen as a defining  moment for his career and for the civil rights movement as a whole… King's speech at the march is almost never mentioned during the monumental debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which occupy around 64,000 pages of the Congressional record."

King's speech at the March on Washington offers a positive prognosis on the apparently chronic American ailment of racism. As such, it is a rare thing to find in almost any culture or nation: an optimistic oration about race that acknowledges the desperate circumstances that made it necessary, while still projecting hope, patriotism, humanism and militancy.
In the age of Obama and the Tea Party, there is something in there for everyone. It speaks, in the vernacular of the black church, with clarity and conviction to African Americans' historical plight and looks forward to a time when that plight will be eliminated ("We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating 'for whites only'. No, no, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream").

Its nod to all that is sacred in American political culture, from the founding fathers to the American dream, makes it patriotic ("I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'"). It sets bigotry against colour-blindness while prescribing no route map for how we get from one to the other. ("I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists… little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.")

But the breadth of its appeal is to some extent at the expense of depth. It is in no small part so widely admired because the interpretations of what King was saying vary so widely. Polls show that while African Americans and American whites both agree about the extent to which "the dream has been realised", they profoundly disagree on the state of contemporary race relations. The recent acquittal of George Zimmerman over the shooting of the black teenager Trayvon Martin illustrates the degree to which blacks and whites are less likely to see the same problems, more likely to disagree on the causes of those problems and, therefore, unlikely to agree on a remedy. Hearing the same speech, they understand different things.

The 50th anniversary of "I have a dream" arrives at a time when the president is black, whites are destined to become a minority in the US in little more than a generation, and civil rights-era protections are being dismantled. Segregationists have all but disappeared, even if segregation as a lived experience has not. Racism, however, remains.

Fifty years on, it is clear that in eliminating legal segregation – not racism, but formal, codified discrimination – the civil rights movement delivered the last moral victory in America for which there is still a consensus. While the struggle to defeat it was bitter and divisive, nobody today is seriously campaigning for the return of segregation or openly mourning its demise. The speech's appeal lies in the fact that, whatever the interpretation, it remains the most eloquent, poetic, unapologetic and public articulation of that victory. 
23 August 2013

• Adapted from The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King's Dream, by Gary Younge, published on 22 August by Guardian Books at £6.99. To order a copy for £5.59, including mainland UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

The article is kindly reproduced here with thanks to Gary Younge and The Guardian.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Britain struggles to compare favourably with its European counterparts as maternal and infant mortality rates continue to cause concern.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

Poverty will be entrenched in Europe for a generation if there is no change in the policy of cuts, reports Dick Skellington.

The report A Cautionary Tale: The true cost of austerity and inequality in Europe assessed the likely impact of austerity on poverty levels in the UK, and extrapolated it across the 27 European Union member states. It concluded that relative poverty, defined as the number of people living below 80 per cent of median income, could rise by a minimum of 15 million, and even as high as 25 million, within 10 years.  

The IFS compared the current swathe of austerity impacts across most of Europe to the devastation wrought by the 'structural adjustment' programmes which were imposed on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund twenty-five years ago. Back in the 1980s countries in economic difficulty had to cut public spending in return for loans at high interest, a policy which failed nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and according to Oxfam, 'cured the disease by killing the patient'.

"The European model is under attack from ill-conceived austerity policies sold to the public as the cost of a stable, growing economy, for which all are being asked to pay. Left unchecked, these measures will undermine Europe's social gains, creating divided countries and a divided continent, and entrenching poverty for a generation," says the report.

Oxfam, responding to the shocking findings, urged European financial leaders to adopt a radical agenda of: progressive taxation in order to ensure that the wealthy paid their fair share towards the cost of public services; a greater emphasis on investment stimuli; and protection from spending cuts, especially in health and education provision.

The findings come amid rumours that Greece, which is in a dire economic state and is mired in political unrest, will soon require a new rescue package worth over $10 billion.  

The IFS believes that the solutions to national debt crises ravaging Europe have been too strident. Swingeing public spending cuts, mass privatisation and market reforms, the price for receiving bail-outs from the IMF and their European neighbours, have not resulted in much progress economically. Rather the deals have destablized democracy and impoverished the weak and vulnerable. 

In many countries youth unemployment is producing a lost generation. Oxfam commented: 'the only people benefiting from austerity are the richest 10% who have seen their share of income rise whilst poorest have seen their share fall. The UK, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain – countries that are most aggressively pursuing austerity measures – will soon rank amongst the most unequal in the world if their leaders don't change course."

In a separate report, Child and Working-Age Poverty from 2010 to 2020, the IFS reveals that in the UK the impact of changes to personal tax and benefit policy announced by this coalition government will be to increase relative child poverty by 200,000 in both 2015-16 and 2020-21, and to increase relative poverty for working-age adults by 200,000 in 2015-16 and 400,000 in 2020-21. The changes are also forecast to increase absolute child and working-age adult poverty.

All in all a very bleak picture in Europe unless austerity measures are relaxed.

Dick Skellington 22 October 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Crime correspondent Duncan Campbell asks what crime can tell us about the times we live in.

In 1946 in Kent, the strangled body of a 46-year-old former telephonist known as Dagmar Peters was found by the side of the road.

In the same year, not far along the south coast, in Bournemouth, a hunt was launched for a handsome pilot by the name of Neville Heath, suspected of a foul murder in London. And in Eastbourne, another southern coastal town, Dr John Bodkin Adams, a suspected serial killer, was about to "ease the passing" of another wealthy patient with an injection of morphine.

And in that same year, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune in which he considered just what murder tells us about society. The essay, prompted by a casual killing carried out by an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, and a teenage waitress, Elizabeth Jones, was called "Decline of the English Murder".

Nearly 70 years later, those 1946 cases are being examined in full forensic detail. Are murders a mirror of the society we live in? How much, for instance, can we really learn from the 640 committed in Great Britain last year, and how much do the notorious murders of the past act as a prism through which we can see more clearly the times in which they were committed?  

These questions are prompted by a trio of recent books by well-regarded writers that take specific murder cases and place them under the microscope of history. 

In Murder at Wrotham Hill Diana Souhami examines the long-forgotten case of Dagmar Petrzywalski, known as Peters because her name was so difficult to pronounce. It was her habit to hitchhike to London, spurning offers from private cars but taking lifts from lorry drivers to whom she would offer the equivalent of the bus fare – fourpence – which they would usually refuse. This in itself tells us something of that pinched and rationed postwar time; it is hard to imagine a middle-aged woman in Kent trying to hitch to London today. Her trust was misplaced; it was a lorry driver, Harold Hagger, a bigamist using the name Sidney Sinclair, who would kill her when she resisted his advances.

Both victim and murderer had seen their lives affected, if not defined, by the second world war. Dagmar's lodgings in London had been bombed in 1941, prompting a nervous breakdown and a move to the countryside. Hagger was an army deserter and black marketeer. 

What is remarkable about the murder is the speed with which events moved in those days. The trial was over in two days and less than three weeks passed from a jury delivering the verdict to the hanging.

While the condemned man waited for his end, he was allowed a pint of beer and 10 cigarettes a day. We learn that a strong liberal impetus to end hanging was derailed by the horrors of war; it was felt that hanging was the only way to deal with the Nazi atrocities uncovered and thus it was nearly another 20 years before abolition.

Sean O'Connor's Handsome Brute - The Story of a Ladykiller, tells a much more familiar tale, that of the "war hero, conman and killer" Neville Heath. There have been many books on Heath, including Borstal Boy: The Uncensored Life of Neville Heath by Gerald Byrne in 1946, and, the following year, The Life and Death of Neville Heath, the Man No Woman Could Resist by Sydney Brock. (By chance, Heath was incarcerated with a much better-known borstal boy, Brendan Behan).

O'Connor's analysis of the press of the period is particularly revealing and relevant in our post-Leveson age. We learn that, after the murder of Heath's first victim Margery Gardner, the Daily Mail's Harry Procter was alerted to it by a police friend. Procter headed for Hammersmith mortuary where "he joined a growing crowd of reporters who had all been tipped off that an extraordinary investigation was under way". When Heath appeared in court,  the People noted: "Rarely have women been so strangely fascinated by a murder trial." And the detective who cornered him, Detective Inspector Reg Spooner, wrote to his wife: "The job has done me quite a bit of good and I am getting congratulations from high and low. The press say it is one of the best stories for years."  

From Brixton prison, Heath asked for copies of Tatler, Life, Esquire and the Illustrated London News and wrote to his mother suggesting that she contact the Daily Mail to see if they would buy his story. "I want £500 and legal aid," he instructed her, remaining, as far as she was concerned, her "handsome laughing son", who had only committed the murders when he was "mentally blacked out". In the end, the Sunday Pictorial carried his account over three weekends after the trial.

Class plays a major role in Heath's life and crimes just as class still played such a great part in postwar Britain. A member of the first XV at his suburban grammar school, Rutlish — where subsequent old boys would include John Major and jazzman Tubby Hayes – he later pretended to be an Eton and Oxford man. He was a shameless petty criminal, broke into a friend's house when he knew he was away, impersonated Lord Dudley and created a fantasy persona for himself with which to impress the 300 women in his address book. He was jailed in 1938 for fraud, bouncing cheques and theft. He did act bravely on one occasion during the war, when he helped a comrade escape from a burning plane, but he invented a much more heroic career for himself; his last pseudonym was Group Captain Rupert Brooke. The two murders he committed, of Margery Gardner and Doreen Marshall, were horrific in their callous and sadistic brutality yet he cultivated what he imagined to be the role of the debonair cad of the era. When he was finally arrested, he responded "oh, all right". He tells his lawyer from his condemned cell: "I don't know what time they open where I'm going but I hope the beer is better than it is here."

What effect did the violence of war and our discoveries of the horrors unfolding across Europe have on society? Many servicemen returned to find that their domestic lives had changed. The News Chronicle said of that immediate postwar period: "It would seem from some recent murder trials that the unfaithful wife of a serviceman is an outlaw with no benefit of law whatsoever. She may be murdered with impunity." 

At the same time that Heath was lying his way across London, a doctor from Northern Ireland was sharpening his syringe in Eastbourne, "the sun trap of the south", home to many a wealthy widow. Jane Robins follows his case in her book, The Curious Habits of Doctor Adams. He was left his first legacy in 1935 – over £5,000 by Mrs Matilda Whitton – and seems to have got into his stride in the decade between 1946 and his arrest in 1956. He was acquitted at his trial, thanks to a fine defence lawyer, Sir Frederick Lawrence, and died a rich man in 1983. A deference towards the medical profession helped Dr Adams in perhaps the same way that years later it assisted Harold Shipman, who also escaped the notice of the authorities for many years until he was finally caught, tried and convicted in 2000. 

Three very different types of murderer from one very tiny period of history. But can any one murderer provide more than a glimpse of the world where the crimes took place, filtered inevitably through our own modern preconceptions? People murder for many reasons – jealousy, greed, rage, lust, revenge, psychopathy – so can any single case enlighten us? 

Kate Summerscale's bestseller and genre-setter, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, about the Road Hill House murder, has been described as the 19th-century equivalent of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It told the story of the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent, stolen from his cot in Wiltshire in 1860. Summerscale has said in an interview that it has resonance because "it was a middle-class child murder and it exposed things about the family that were fascinating and horrifying. Newspaper editorials of the time said that no mother in England could sleep easy until this crime had been solved, so it took on an immediate symbolic importance".

The murders carried out by Fred and Rose West from the 1960s to the 80s told us much about the mores of the period in which they were carried out: young women still moved around and hitchhiked freely, doubtless reassured by being given a lift by a couple with children in the back seat, but they could disappear in large numbers without prompting much official reflection. The murders carried out in the 1970s by Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, inform us of a time when, because some of his victims worked as prostitutes, the police did not pursue cases as diligently as they should have. The HOLMES database, which became a vital tool for murder investigations, was set up after it became clear that a tip-off in the Yorkshire Ripper case had been lost in a filing tray in the incident room. The murders carried out by Dennis Nilsen of young gay men in the 1970s and 80s told us, in the same way as the West and Sutcliffe killings, how some parts of society were regarded as marginal, not requiring quite the same effort of investigation. The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 taught us many of the same lessons on race.

Why do we want to know all this about past murders? How many contemporary murders are likely to find authors a century from now investigating their relevance to 21st-century British society? 

Official statistics show that murders in England and Wales rose from around 300 a year in the 1960s to more than 800 a year in the early part of this century but have since dipped to nearer the 500 mark.

Last year, John Flatley, head of crime stats at the Office for National Statistics, noted that two-thirds of murders involved partners or former partners or other forms of familial killing, and it was suggested that a decline in the level of domestic violence is a key factor in the fall. It is no coincidence that in the 1946 murders examined, not to mention the Yorkshire Ripper and West cases, all the victims are women.

Murders can give a snapshot of a country, too, albeit partial and haphazard. In the latest figures compiled by the United Nations and published last year, the murder rate in the United Kingdom was a fairly modest 1.2 per 100,000 population. This compares with a figure of 92 per 100,000 in Honduras, 69 in El Salvador, 57 in the Ivory Coast, 41 in Jamaica, 32 in South Africa, 31 in Colombia, 21 in Brazil, 10 in Russia, 5 in the United States, 1.6 in Canada, 1.1 in France, 0.9 in Italy and 0.8 in Germany. Before the end of this year, another hundred or so people will have been murdered in London or Glasgow or Belfast or Cardiff or Kent. The killers may not warrant a book decades down the line but, if they do, it will be a reminder of a society that still cannot quite take murder for granted.
Duncan Campbell 25 October 2013

Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian for more than 20 years, as crime correspondent. A version of this article first appeared in the Guardian on 15 September.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

For more insights into British murders see the new BBC series A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

The giant pandas are a plus – but China’s main appeal to western leaders is its ability to lead the giant projects their own companies won’t invest in, argues Alan Shipman.

Similar misperceptions took root in Britain, where even the otherwise astute economist Joan Robinson returned from her 1960s trips with an embarrassingly sympathetic view of the already-disastrous Cultural Revolution. Fifty years on, her intellectual successors are up in arms about the treatment of one of Beijing’s own top economists, whose sacking is a reminder that – even with Mao and his Red Guards long gone – the country has little respect for free speech or human rights.

But now an icon of the political right, George Osborne, has returned from China lauding its political and economic progress, and urging the UK to copy it . His motivation – matching the leftist visitors’ of an earlier era – is that China had discovered an economic model that redeems even the sorest political repression. China has gulags, little social security, a lethal lack of environmental safeguards, no limit on wealth-accumulation by those with the right political connections – and has achieved double-figure national income growth for more than two decades.  There isn’t much clear red water between the governments of David Cameron and Xi Jinping. That’s why the prime minister could quickly jettison small irritations like the occupation of Tibet in pursuit of closer trade relations.

Nuclear option
The success of Cameron’s mission means that few in the UK will any longer be worried about China’s dictatorial politics or diminished human rights. Their much more immediate concern will be whether the newly-wooed Chinese enterprise can protect their jobs, or keep their lights on without  blowing up the south coast. 

State-owned Chinese corporations are now to be principal partners in Britain’s new nuclear power plant programme, replacing German and Japanese firms which pulled out in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. China is already the main bringer of new energy and transport infrastructure to most of the emerging world, especially Africa. Now it will bring the next generation of nuclear power to the country that pioneered it. The deal confirms China’s rapid rise as global civil engineer, as well as the UK’s further retreat towards an economy built on financing and consulting to industry, while the industry disappears (see this article by the OU's Doreen Massey). 

It looks like a win-win deal. The UK’s own energy regulator has warned that power cuts are on the horizon unless there’s rapid progress towards replacing the present ageing nuclear plants and ‘greening’ coal-fired stations (another Chinese speciality). China’s engineering groups are uniquely placed to undertake large, long-term projects because of their supplies of cheap capital and freedom from yield-hungry shareholder pressure. The quality of Chinese infrastructure is sometimes called into question, but it can hardly be criticised by a UK nuclear industry which has suffered numerous radioactive blasts and spills in its 56 years of home-made fission.  The Chinese nuclear option enables UK energy giant like Centrica to abandon such investment and pay back money to investors, a move much more in tune with the country’s financial engineering focus. 

Eastern compromise
China is still a low-income nation, its per-capita national output on a level with Botswana and Bulgaria. Its spectacular economic growth could be flattened in the next few years by problems ranging from poisoned atmosphere and lack of innovation to regional conflicts and political currents unleashed by past economic progress.  Typing “China ghost cities” into any respectable search engine quickly reveals why some economists feel the central planners have misdirected their investment, with credit-crunching consequences. But such problems at home would only strengthen Chinese firms’ enthusiasm for expansion abroad, as was the case with Japanese multinationals when a bursting property bubble bombed their home base. 

It is unlikely that George Osborne will look back on his China conversion with the remorse that now surrounds those earlier left-wing infatuations with the dragon. Although safety inspection has been one victim of austerity, the UK is unlikely to have embarked on a reality-TV-remake of The China Syndrome, the 1979 film in which nuclear scientists cover-up a reactor meltdown which eerily anticipated that year’s Three Mile Island accident. The new China syndrome consists in taking inspiration from a foreign country’s dynamic recent past, just as its stored economic and political problems tilt it into a potentially stagnant and violent future. But while going to China’s capital has its hazards, securing an inflow of China’s capital – before it evaporates – may be an astute move for a country quickly losing the capacity for real investment of its own.
Alan Shipman 29 October 2013

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

The 2011 roll call of Great Britain cost £500m. Its supporters claim the information it gathered was invaluable and that plans to abandon the process could cause untold damage. Cahal Milmo, chief reporter of The Independent, explores the future of a UK institution. 

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has begun a three-month public consultation, including a roadshow, to gather the views of interested parties from local government number-crunchers to genealogists, on moves to replace the current census model with a cheaper alternative.

Prior to the last nationwide survey to fill in Britain’s demographic blanks in 2011 the Government announced its desire to scrap the census, which two years ago cost nearly £500m and employed 35,000 people to go door-to-door collecting forms for the mammoth data-collection exercise.

The ONS has said that it wants to change the current model and outlined its two “front-running options” – an internet-based “modernised census”  or a rolling annual survey of four per cent of the population supplemented by “administrative data” such as education or health records.

But the scrapping of two centuries of data-gathering, which has provided a resource capable of finding both obscure forebears and tailoring public policy on subjects from tackling youth disenfranchisement to take-up of cycling, has provoked fears that Britain will lose a vital early warning system for social change.

Statistical experts argue that the vast amount of data gathered by the census provides a gold standard which highlights shortcomings in other public records, including the politically-vexed question of just how many people there are in Britain.

Professor Danny Dorling, of Oxford University, a leading expert on social geography, said: “We should be under no illusions that what is proposed is anything other than the abandoning of the census and that has wide-ranging implications for the way large amounts of policy is decided.

“The census is a benchmark. The 2011 census found there were 500,000 people living here that we didn’t know existed. Similarly, without the census we would not have known that mortality rates for men rose in parts of Glasgow but not elsewhere.

“It is extremely valuable and without it we will not be able to tell whether we are pulling together or dividing as a society. We will not be able to plan for the future.”

Britain differs from many countries, including Denmark and Germany, by still having a once-in-a-decade census to record information from the occupation of every Briton to religion, ethnicity and whether homes have central heating. Scandinavian nations benefit from connected banks of administrative data while others such as Germany can use data from compulsory identity cards. Canada has recently scrapped its census in favour of a voluntary online survey. Supporters of a slimmed-down UK census, including the right-leaning Policy Exchange think-tank, argue that the use of more rapidly updated records such as council tax data would be more efficient and cheaper than the current unwieldy structure.

But opponents claim the census is responsible for highlighting a raft of discrepancies to be addressed by public policy, including the tracking of mortality rates and indicators of housing inequality across Britain’s cities.

The ONS, which will report to the Government next year on its conclusions about the best methods of producing “census-type” data, insisted it had closed off no options for reform, including its two frontrunners. A spokesman said: “There are clear pros and cons to these two approaches in terms of quality, frequency and the nature of outputs and they bring different risks.”

Indeed, there are indications that the department is itself reluctant to be saying farewell to the paper-based door-to-door system that has logged the details of figures from Beatrix Potter to Edward Elgar and Prince Albert, who notwithstanding his wife’s constitutional role, described himself in the 1851 census as “head of family”.

In a document outlining the benefits of the 2011 census, the ONS said: “The business case clearly demonstrated to the Government the unique value of the census, and that the benefits of having the information far outweigh the costs of its collection.”
Cahal Milmo, posted 1 November 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

This article first appeared in The Independent, 4 September 2013. It is reproduced here with kind permission.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

With the UK prison system in crisis Erwin James visits a prison with a reoffending rate of 16 per cent and tries to find the secrets of its success.

In September 2013, Nilsen stepped down after five years in charge, but intends to continue influencing penal philosophy in an international context. Recently, he has been in Romania, where he helped establish therapeutic wings in three large prisons, advising the prison authorities as they establish their own human ecological prison along the lines of Bastoy on a small island in the Danube delta.

"I run this prison like a small society," he says as we sip tea in his cramped but tidy office. "I give respect to the prisoners who come here and they respond by respecting themselves, each other and this community." It is this core philosophy that Nilsen, 62, believes is responsible for the success of Bastoy.

On a previous visit to Bastoy, I spoke to a number of prisoners serving long terms for murder, rape and other violent offences, and was struck by the air of optimism and hope they had of living constructive, contributing lives once their sentences were served. Among guards I noticed a glaring lack of cynicism and a genuine sense of pride in their work.

"It is not just because Bastoy is a nice place, a pretty island to serve prison time, that people change," says Nilsen. "The staff here are very important. They are like social workers as well as prison guards. They believe in their work and know the difference they are making."

I almost tell Nilsen about the British prison officer who, miffed when the governor of a high-security prison in Cambridge gave the prisoners in his care a 36p cream egg one Easter, told the Sun newspaper: "We have to spend time away from our families to look after these vermin." In fairness to him, that officer was only reflecting what he probably regarded as public opinion towards prisoners in this country. When I asked the female guard who drove me from the ferry landing to Nilsen's office about public attitudes to prisons and prisoners in Norway, she said that 90% of the public have no interest, "so long as people come out better".

It is clear to anyone when looking at the results of Nilsen's approach that by achieving its low reoffending rate – thereby reducing the number of future potential victims of released prisoners – Bastoy prison works. Prisoners can come here for the final part of their sentence if they show a commitment to live a crime-free life on release. Bastoy is also one of the cheapest prisons in Norway to run.

But how do you get the man in the street to accept that treating people who have committed terrible crimes with respect and consideration is in his and his family's best interests. How do you explain to victims that this way is best?

"I don't think I will ever be able to do that," says Nilsen. "If someone did very serious harm to one of my daughters or my family ... I would probably want to kill them. That's my reaction. But as a prison governor, or politician, we have to approach this in a different way. We have to respect people's need for revenge, but not use that as a foundation for how we run our prisons. Many people here have done something stupid – they will not do it again. But prisons are also full of people who have all sorts of problems. Should I be in charge of adding more problems to the prisoner on behalf of the state, making you an even worse threat to larger society because I have treated you badly while you are in my care? We know that prison harms people. I look at this place as a place of healing, not just of your social wounds but of the wounds inflicted on you by the state in your four or five years in eight square metres of high security."

Nilsen was brought up on a farm run by his uncle near Trondheim. His father was a fisherman who often spent the spring months away at sea while his mother ran the home and looked after him and his two older siblings. He skied the 5km to school in the dark in the winter and cycled in the summer, and remembers his childhood with fondness. "I grew up in a very loving home. I loved helping on the farm and, in the summer, helping my father on the boat. There was a lot of joy in our house."

When he was 17, he joined the Salvation Army, studying at officer training college – where he met his wife. A 16-year ministry followed, during which he spent a year in the UK working one day a week in Lewes prison. On his return to Oslo, he helped to establish and run an institution called Soldammen, geared specifically to helping young drug addicts. It was a wrench, he says, when, after deep thought, he decided the time had come for him to resign as an officer of the Salvation Army. He went on to work in a church mission establishing a centre to care for people with HIV, before going to Oslo University College to study governmental management. In his own time, he spent four years training as a Gestalt psychotherapist and later applied successfully for the position of chief probation officer in the south-east county, which was his opening into the correctional services.

"I like to have power to influence," he says. "For most of my working life I have held positions of leadership where I have had the power to influence people, I  hope in a good way."

From probation, he went on to work in the ministry of justice where he spent 12 years in various positions, taking charge of designing the content of prison regimes, working for the inspectorate and going on missions abroad, advising the ministries of Latvia, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Russia and Georgia. In Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, he advised on reforms of the police, courts and prison system. It was there that he witnessed prison conditions where there was little room for humanity.

"I saw a cell of about 30 square metres holding more than 90 prisoners. They slept on bunk beds three high with just a hole in the concrete floor, covered with a blanket, for a toilet. They wore only underpants in the 40C heat. The smell was unimaginable. Some had been in there for two years or more ."

He then took a year off to practise psychotherapy full-time, working with the prisoners on Bastoy Island. "One of the most interesting challenges of my career," he says.

When the then governor decided he was going to step down, he suggested Nilsen apply for the post. "It felt like the right time and the right place to continue my work. In Norway, as in the UK and many other countries, we still think quite short-term, wanting to inflict revenge on criminals, wanting them to suffer for what they have done. But in most countries nearly all prisoners are going to be released. So what happens to them when they are in prison is very important."

He believes that politicians carry a huge responsibility for the number of people in prison around Europe and the commensurately high reoffending rates. "They should deal with this by rethinking how they address the public regarding what is most effective in reducing reoffending. Losing liberty is sufficient punishment – once in custody we should focus on reducing the risk that offenders pose to society after they leave prison. For victims, there will never be a prison that is tough, or hard, enough. But they need another type of help – support to deal with the experience, rather than the government simply punishing the offender in a way that the victim rarely understands and that does very little to help heal their wounds. Politicians should be strong enough to be honest about this issue."
Posted 4 November 2013

Erwin James is a Guardian columnist. He served 20 years of a life sentence in prison before his release in August 2004.

The article first appeared in The Guardian on 4 September 2013. It is reproduced here with thanks.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Bills, rather than children and pensioners, should be frozen, writes Dick Skellington.

It has not been a good autumn for energy companies, nor the Government whose only solution to the soaring cost of domestic heating seems to be to try and get customers to switch suppliers in a market place where the differences between tariffs is minimal and where penalties are imposed for doing so. A cartel dominates energy supply.

Amid reports that Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was rather perturbed by smaller energy companies using tax loopholes, could be heard plaintiff cries from the Big Six energy companies that their profits were not large enough to justify a windfall tax.  

Meanwhile, the average household bill is set to soar above £1,400 a year as the Big Six impose another fivefold inflation tax increase on households, many of whom are elderly. Elderly customers have just had their tailored tariffs stopped. It is no comfort for those sitting at home without their heating on to read this week that one  Big Six chief said he might forgo his £3.5 million bonuses this year. The head of Centrica, Sam Laidlaw, also promised to donate part of his remuneration to charity. Maybe he is beginning to feel guilty, or is the company trying, like the boss of Ryanair, to redeem a tarnished image?  Astonishing that, £3.5 million in bonuses – a year!  While Mrs Smith freezes to death in Peckham.

In this environment Labour's promise of a price freeze seems attractive, but it needs this Government in its autumn statement to deliver something to help those surviving in fuel poverty. At the moment it looks most unlikely that George Osborne will deliver an autumn statement that will announce emergency help for fuel poverty sufferers. Instead, so far what we have got is rather nanny state advice on how to heat our homes – oh, and if you are eligible, go and get a flu jab.

A survey last October for Age UK revealed that 28 per cent of pensioners reported their main concern for the coming cold months was how they could keep warm. Being cold, even for a short period of time, can be dangerous, and can lead to hospitalisation (itself expensive), and worse, death.  

The latest figures available for the winter of 2011-12, showed that there were 19,500 excess deaths in the over-75 age group. Each year, around 20,000 more people aged 65 or over in England and Wales die in the winter months than in other months. In some years (e.g. 2008/09), the figure is much higher. In the past ten years the heating allowances Government gives to the elderly have fallen behind the annual prices hikes of the Big Six. Winter payments are worth far less now than they were in 2006.

If you track the price hikes in the last decade, you discover that the amount that households spend on gas and electricity has soared by over three-quarters! According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) heating and lighting now represent 3.1 per cent of average household spending compared with 1.8 per cent a decade ago. The proportion of income spent by pensioners on heating and lighting is far greater than the national average. 

Older people occupy much of the substandard housing in Britain, and the link between ill health and housing is strong. This is particularly important because many older people spend such a lot of time at home.  Respiratory diseases are often caused or made worse by damp and cold conditions at home.  Inefficient heating and insulation are factors driving the high level of winter deaths in Britain: there are 30,000-40,000 more deaths in winter than summer months, and old people make up the vast majority of that excess. 

Age UK predict that over three million elderly people will not be able to afford to stay warm this winter, following the across-the-board 8-10 per cent price hikes announced at the end of summer. MPs are expressing increased disquiet. Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat's Deputy Leader, called on the Chancellor to give the poorest households an energy rebate.

But the focus on elderly deprivation has tended to distract from the growing number of families with children who are falling victim to fuel poverty. Some evidence comes from a Barnardo’s survey in which over 90 per cent of their staff said they worked with families in fuel debt. To pay their energy bills, many families cut back on essentials such as heating and food. 

Studies show that long-term exposure to a cold home can affect weight gain in babies and young children, increase hospital admission rates for children and increase the severity and frequency of asthmatic symptoms. Children in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from breathing problems, and those in damp and mouldy homes are up to three times more likely to suffer from coughing, wheezing and respiratory illness, compared to those with warm, dry homes.

The companies argue that their costs have risen hugely because of wholesale power price increases and "green" levies. Don't take this at face value: companies buy a portfolio of future contracts lasting many years to ensure that their wholesale supplies will meet future retail demand. If they have underestimated their needs, that is their responsibility – and they could choose to absorb that cost. No one knows how much the power companies have bought in advance – and at what price – so independent experts have to take their arguments on trust.

If you want to calculate if you are living in fuel poverty Acting on Fuel Poverty have produced a useful online tool. A person is living in fuel poverty if, to heat their home to a satisfactory standard, they would need to spend more than 10% of their household income on fuel. 

Readers living in Scotland can at least draw some comfort from the Scottish Government's intention of removing people from fuel poverty by 2016. In October 2011, 684,000 Scottish households (28.9 per cent) were in fuel poverty in October 2011. No such commitment is promised for England and Wales.

The heat is clearly on Government and the Big Six to respond with policies and prices which will help people struggling to keep their homes warm this winter. Don't hold your breath.
Dick Skellington 6 November 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Gary Edwards

 At the age of 90 World War Two veteran Harry Leslie Smith has resolved to remember his friends and comrades in private next year, rather than allow his remembrance to be co-opted by politicians for their own ends.

Still, this year I shall wear the poppy as I have done for many years. I wear it because I am from that last generation who remember a war that encompassed the entire world. I wear the poppy because I can recall when Britain was actually threatened with a real invasion and how its citizens stood at the ready to defend her shores. But most importantly, I wear the poppy to commemorate those of my childhood friends and comrades who did not survive the second world war and those who came home physically and emotionally wounded from horrific battles that no poet or journalist could describe.

However, I am afraid it will be the last time that I will bear witness to those soldiers, airmen and sailors who are no more, at my local cenotaph. From now on, I will lament their passing in private because my despair is for those who live in this present world. I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one's right to privacy.

Come 2014 when the government marks the beginning of the First World War with quotes from Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling and other great jingoists from our past empire, I will declare myself a conscientious objector. We must remember that the historical past of this country is not like an episode of Downton Abbey where the rich are portrayed as thoughtful, benevolent masters to poor folk who need the guiding hand of the ruling classes to live a proper life 

I can tell you it didn't happen that way because I was born nine years after the First World War began. I can attest that life for most people was spent in abject poverty where one laboured under brutal working conditions for little pay and lived in houses not fit to kennel a dog today. We must remember that the war was fought by the working classes who comprised 80% of Britain's population in 1913.

This is why I find that the government's intention to spend £50m to dress the slaughter of close to a million British soldiers in the 1914-18 conflict as a fight for freedom and democracy profane. Too many of the dead, from that horrendous war, didn't know real freedom because they were poor and were never truly represented by their members of parliament. 

My uncle and many of my relatives died in that war and they weren't officers or NCOs; they were simple Tommies. They were like the hundreds of thousands of other boys who were sent to their slaughter by a government that didn't care to represent their citizens if they were working poor and under-educated. My family members took the king's shilling because they had little choice, whereas many others from similar economic backgrounds were strong-armed into enlisting by war propaganda or press-ganged into military service by their employers. 

For many of you 1914 probably seems like a long time ago but I'll be 91 next year, so it feels recent. Today, we have allowed monolithic corporate institutions to set our national agenda. We have allowed vitriol to replace earnest debate and we have somehow deluded ourselves into thinking that wealth is wisdom. But by far the worst error we have made as a people is to think ourselves as taxpayers first and citizens second. 

Next year, I won't wear the poppy but I will until my last breath remember the past and the struggles my generation made to build this country into a civilised state for the working and middle classes. If we are to survive as a progressive nation we have to start tending to our living because the wounded: our poor, our underemployed youth, our hard-pressed middle class and our struggling seniors shouldn't be left to die on the battleground of modern life.
Harry Leslie Smith Posted 12 November 2013

Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a Second World War RAF veteran and at 90 an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the Great Depression, the Second World War and postwar austerity. The article is republished here with kind permission from Harry and The Guardian. It first appeared here on Monday, Remembrance Day 2013.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

See also Red poppies for Remembrance Day was not our idea

Cartoon by Catherine Pain

Monkey-gate tells us a good deal about the nature of racial debate in Britain, argues OU sociologist Karim Murji.

As the Conservative Party airbrushes the last decade of speeches from its website, Alan Shipman offers a sneak preview of Gravity 4, the hit space movie’s four-dimensional sequel, in which Sandra Bullock will fall through a time-warp and encounter a terrifying black hole ...

“This is the easiest blockbuster we’ve ever been in, George. It’s all so wonderfully scripted. They said no-one could make a film that just involves two parties, with all the action confined to one small political space. But these are such great lines. Look, here’s Disraeli – he gave us whole novels to quote from. Including one where he splits the whole nation into two, and makes pretty clear that the Duke of Wellington bumped off his political enemies. And Robert Peel – so quotable! 'The distinction of being without an honour is becoming a rare and valuable one, and should not become extinct.' No wonder he wrote such good songlines for The Police. 

“Hold it, Sandra – we just have to pause for a special effect. The Director wants you to shoot from one side of the Westminster Bubble to the other, while falling from the 19th into the 20th Century.” 

“Oh, it gets even better in the 20th Century. Churchill gave his biographers an easy time because he compiled all the notes. 'History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it'– his war records are still in print, and to this day they mine his collected speeches for pithy quotes. And as for Lady Thatcher– she left over a million items in the archive, including the famous handbag."  

“But you gotta bring us up to date. What happens at the start of the 21st Century?” 

“Oh ... George, this is scary. I can’t see anything. Help! The whole political record has gone blank. We’re in a total void. Between the year 2000 and May 2010, there’s no trace of any speeches.”

“Not even from Cosmonaut Cameron?”

“Not a word. Nor from any of his senior colleagues."

 “That’s impossible, How can it be? They had the internet by then. Every Tom, Sir Roderick and cabinet minister was recording his-or-her political opinions, on screen as well as in words. How can that ten-year stretch before the Coalition just vanish without trace?”

“I’ve looked everywhere. But the Conservative website has been emptied of pre-election speeches. The independent internet archivists have been forced to expunge their records. The web-sweeping robots are turned back. Even the British Library records can only be accessed through special terminals, light-years away from where we are in cyberspace.”

“No, it seems they did the deletion themselves. To give people quicker and easier access to current information. And, I guess, to avoid reminding them what they were promised before.”

“Well, it makes them seem more forward-looking – if there’s nothing to look back on. But everyone knows that a statecraft with no retro-rockets is fatally unstable. How do we repair this gaping hole in the space-time continuum? Can we borrow from the port side to patch up this damage to starboard?" 

“Oh, there’s plenty preserved on the left. They don’t like deleting any of their speeches. Most are still quoting Keir Hardie and Nye Bevin half a century later – it spares them the risk of any flatlines. There was a worrying moment in under Blair when the two sides start sounding exactly the same. But Blair’s business empire eventually spawned a record label that sold millions of copies – even of embarrassments like 'stakeholder society' and 'hand of history'– so there’s no danger of his expostulations being expunged. And Kinnock, Smith, Brown, the Two Eds: they left behind more words than anyone could safely listen to.”

 “It’s tempting, but I can’t do it. If we try to replace all that lost Conservative rhetoric with texts from another political ecosystem – however convergent – we risk upsetting the whole cosmic balance.“

“Then there’s only one way out. I’ll have to use a computational algorithm to reconstruct that lost decade of declarations. Inferring what they said, from what they subsequently did.”

“That sounds incredibly dangerous. And it’s never worked in the past. Could you please do a pilot-test first?”

“Okay. But I must warn you – even if we try this out on a small scale, any discrepancy between the reconstructed speech and the real one will cause an instant, catastrophic explosion.”

“It’s our last hope. We’ll just have to trust that these politicians’ deeds stayed true to their words.” 

“The machinery is running. Here’s George Osborne: ‘I intend to keep increasing the public debt, until it’s over 90% of national income’ ).”

(Cue violent rumbling and shaking of the capsule). 

“And the prime minister himself: ‘there is no loss of sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty, so a referendum on the EU isn’t needed until 2017'.

(Cue dizzying somersaults, Bullock jumping over Clooney, as explosions rock the stricken rocket).    

“And Andrew Lansley: 'I shall order the biggest top-down reorganisation of the NHS since it was founded'.”

(The screen splits into a thousand 3D fragments and goes thunderously blank.)

“Er, Alfonso – I think we just deleted any chance of doing Gravity 5.”
Alan Shipman 18 November 2013

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

A new film documentary showing how local action helped save one of Britain's libraries provides a template to fight philistine authoritarianism, says Dick Skellington.

In 2011, I wrote a post for this blog on the crisis in library provision in the small Buckinghamshire town of Stony Stratford where I live. In an attempt to prevent closure by Milton Keynes Council, residents began the 'Wot no books' campaign, and borrowed all the books leaving the shelves empty. The event caused an international storm. 

Suddenly, Stony Stratford, a town more famous for being the home of the Cock and Bull story, and the place from where Richard III seized the princes before incarcerating them in the Tower of London, was making headlines across the world. I promised I would update blog readers .

In 2013 the library was saved. The Town Council decided to purchase the building, taking over responsibility for its maintenance. The deal, struck early this year with Milton Keynes Council, promised continued library provision in the town. The Milton Keynes Council library staff would provide professional library services as long as the Town Council assumed the responsibility for the upkeep of the premises. This autumn the Town Council sought to make improvements to the building, installing new windows and improving disabled access, and broadening the Library's role in the community. FOSSL (Friends of Stony Stratford Library), the support group which led the 'Wot no books' campaign, continues to work hard to ensure our library is the hub of our thriving community.

Last year more than 200 libraries closed in Britain. By 2016 it is expected that a quarter of our libraries will be lost. Over one thousand will be forced to close due to cuts in local authority provision.

Earlier this autumn Lincolnshire County Council announced plans to close 35 of its 45 libraries in the hope of saving £2m. The response from the public has been overwhelming with so far over 30,000 people signing a petition against closure, with protest marches through the centre of Lincoln. Similar public outrage has occurred wherever local authorities have sought to cut libraries, all across the UK. 

Librarian numbers have fallen as branches close, down 8% in the year to March 2012 compared with a 4.3% fall the previous year, while the number of volunteers working in libraries continues to rise – up by 8.9% this year – as councils hand over responsibilities for local branches to residents. In Stony Stratford the Town Council and FOSSL persuaded the MIlton Keynes Council to retain a professional library presence.

Visits to libraries across the UK have also dropped, down 2.4% to 306.6m and down 6.7% compared with five years ago, when there were 328.5m visits. Adults are borrowing less fiction – down 5.4% – and less non-fiction – down 7.3% – with the only growth seen in borrowing of children's fiction, up 0.3%.

But libraries are no longer used merely for borrowing books, and Stony Stratford's library is no different. Over the last 10 years, five main users of libraries have been identified. "Career builders", who use their libraries' resources to write CVs and practise interviews in meeting rooms; "health detectives", who track down information about particular conditions; "little learners", 5-10 year-olds who love reading; "friend finders", who use libraries to meet people in their local communities; and "research sleuths", who track down information about their family or community histories.

With Stony Stratford library now safe for the foreseeable future, the Living Archive, a charity which over 30 years has generated a rich local archive, has produced a stunning documentary Wot no books? Saving Stony Stratford Library. It charts how the town came together and over a few days emptied the library of books. News organisations were alerted, and as the cameras flocked to our town, the rest, as they say, is history.

It is well worth the 25 minutes it takes to watch the video to experience the importance of local action, and how, because the community fought for its prized asset, it was saved. The documentary demonstrates why the people cared and how they overcame the threat. For those hundreds of communities whose own libraries may be threatened, this film gives advice, support and inspiration.
Dick Skellington 20 November 2013

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Links

Wot no books? Saving Stony Stratford Library

Cartoon by Catherine Pain