Let us hope proposals to harmonise toilet flushing across the EU are not bog standard, writes Dick Skellington.

A few years back, in order to conserve water, I placed a house brick in my cistern. This ensured I needed less water to flush. Now I find the EU want to adopt something similar across the Continent.

The EU hopes to standardise flushing with the intention of producing manufactured plumbing systems which deliver one-litre flushes for urinals and five-litre flushes for toilets – three litres will be permitted for half a flush. UKIP politicians predictably condemned this 'preposterous waste of money' (only £72,000) spent on 'latrine etiquette'. Indeed their spokesman went further, according to the Daily Mail. 'Surely what goes on behind the bathroom door should be left to the people who are behind it. It is money down the pan'.

The revelations were a gift to newspaper hacks. The Times welcomed the news with the phrase 'Britons are gripping their seat in fear', because new British cisterns are still being manufactured to contain six litres of water. Older properties' cisterns can contain up to 10 litres of water.

I recently had a new bathroom suite installed with one of the six-litre cisterns, the kind you can buy quite economically at places like B&Q. It has a short and a long flush. As a result I no longer need my house brick.

Britain tends to have cisterns which use more water than in other European countries. A European Commission study has looked into the toilet habits of Europeans. The outcome is expected to be an announcement before Christmas of a new 'Eco-label' for toilets.

The move is bound to bring the EU into further disrepute, especially among Eurosceptics. As one newspaper buff declared: 'Britain likes to pull the chain, but Brussels uses the most paper.' Ha ha!

But it is not just the Eurocrats who are advising us on our toilet habits. Academics from Utah have got in on the act. Men should stand as close as is possible over a urinal and aim downwards. I know, I hear you, there they go again stating the obvious. I might have aimed once upwards in a moment of high prank, but the researchers are sincere in their quest to limit what they call 'splashback' and its unhygienic effects. Splashback occurs when you aim at the urinal or toilet at a 90 degree angle. So please be careful, boys. But once you have done it properly, remember the flush may not confirm to EU scoping guidelines at the moment.

Britain, the EU reveals, has the fourth highest number of private and public lavatories in Europe, at 45.3 million, well behind Germany's 77 million, Spain's 49 million, and Italy's 46.5 million (Italy has the highest number of urinals in Europe at 8.2 million).

The EU remains unabashed. 'The user behaviour analysis carried out showed how the average water consumption differs among EU member states. Also the consumption between citizens of countries may vary significantly.' It seems Britain comes out top of the resulting flushing table with 1,125 million cubic metres of water used by domestic toilets in 2010, followed by Italy with 1,074 and Germany with 1,021 cubic metres. How they managed to separate out this water usage from other uses is anyone's guess. In the UK over 30 per cent of domestic water use is used for toilet flushing, compared to a European average of 25 per cent. Only Luxembourg uses more, at 33 per cent. I do not know how the Finns managed to use only 14 per cent of their water for toilet flushing – maybe their diet is significantly different, or perhaps they use their woods more.

So toilet lovers of the UK be prepared. The plan is for individual countries to award Eco-Label criteria to toilet and urinal manufacture. Our toilets look set to go green. One day soon, if the Eurocrats have their way, wherever you go in Europe, all flushes might be very similar.

Perhaps it might have been simpler just to give every household a free brick.

Why not download the EU report and read it in the toilet at your leisure? You can find it here.
Dick Skellington 27 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 Catherine Pain

Record numbers have priced themselves back into jobs – shifting political concern from loss of work to the cost of living, writes Alan Shipman.

The trouble is, if employment growth keeps pace with output, it means there’s little or no gain in labour productivity, or output per employee. Sure enough, UK labour productivity in mid-2013 was still lower than it was at the start of 2012. The country appears to be missing out on the strong rises in productivity achieved by other EU countries, and the US, since the downturn of 2008. 

Why does a lack of productivity growth matter? Mainly because the amount people can be paid is limited by the amount they can produce. So if jobs are created faster than new output, real wages (rates of pay adjusted for inflation) are likely to fall. It’s not just the new recruits who’ll be paid less, but existing employees as well, because less-productive new arrivals drag the average productivity down. That’s also confirmed by recent data, which show that average weekly earnings rose just 0.8% year-on-year in the June-August period, while consumer prices rose 2.7%. Record numbers of working people (over 5 million) now receive less than they can realistically live on.

Low pay perils
The government says this isn’t a serious problem, or one that will last for very long. Once people are back in work, they can brush up their skills, while employers can invest in new equipment and training, raising everyone’s productivity. Output will soon start to grow much faster, allowing wages to rise in real terms. So the increase in employment will be followed by even stronger GDP growth, and should be read as a sign that much better times are on the way.

But there’s a more disturbing possibility: that people are being pushed into lower-paid work by the absence of alternatives, and the withdrawal of social benefits for those not working outside the home. And that employers, treating the low-pay culture as permanent, now view muscles as a chap substitute for machines.  While other industrial countries raise the quality of their work, and tax the resultant high earnings to support those who can’t find it, the UK may be going down the route of squeezing everyone into jobs that don’t produce or pay enough.  

This would upset government plans because lower pay doesn’t just anger people, but also pushes more of them into poverty whose costs fall back onto the state. Poverty used to be associated with unemployment. Now it’s largely the result of working for low pay. One reason the budget deficit hasn’t fallen as fast as the Chancellor hoped is that the Treasury is having to give more (through benefits and tax credits) to households whose income doesn’t match their essential expenses – even when all adult members are in work. 

Shifting the subsidy
So the UK may be moving back towards a situation of full employment, but one where the ‘welfare state’ becomes a subsidy system for low-paying employers. That’s given the opposition party a significant new idea. It can promise higher pay, lower unemployment and lower government borrowing if it can cut some of those employer subsidies, by forcing firms to pay more. This might be possible, without provoking those firms to move abroad or stage an investment-strike, because Britain is still an attractive place to do business. Corporate profitability bounced back quickly from recession to rates that have always been high compared to the UK’s main competitors. And the UK has long been Europe’s biggest attractor of inward investment, even at times when capital and top salaries were taxed at much higher rates.

That’s why the opposition have come up with a plan to subsidise employers who pay the ‘living wage.’ This is the hourly rate required to meet basic living costs, without needing to claim benefits. Labour’s plan promises to be revenue-neutral – avoiding any rise in the budget deficit – because when firms pay more to people on the lowest wage, the government pays less to top-up their income (and collects more in tax). 

There were similar offsetting benefits when the minimum wage was introduced in 1999, ensuring it didn’t cause the avalanche of job losses that critics predicted. Because it would affect millions of workers,  the living wage (currently 21% above the adult minimum wage, and almost 40% above it in London) would also boost the amount of spending in the economy, helping firms finance extra pay through extra sales.

Hot properties
At present there is no assurance that the rise in UK employment will be followed by a rise in productivity, because employers are recruiting more without investing more. And while it could address this by switching its employer subsidies towards business investment, the Coalition’s strategy has gone in a different direction. Recovery plans are now focused on boosting property investment– with schemes to help households buy new houses when their low incomes don’t allow them to pay large initial deposits. 

Property investment has often boosted economic recovery. But it usually works by promoting the building of houses, which also reduces accommodation cost so that households can spend more on other essentials. Promoting the buying of houses, with the Treasury taking on the credit risk, delivers its main boost by raising house prices, so that existing owners can join those helped-to-buy in borrowing and spending more.  

Ironically, rising prices drove the rise in housing benefit claims which are one of the main reasons that welfare costs haven’t fallen as people go back to work. If it can’t quickly close the looming productivity gap, or get firms to sacrifice a little bit of profit in order to pay more, the government may find it has bankrolled the recovery as well as the recession – creating jobs for all without the rise in tax receipts and fall in social spending that’s needed to pay down all the extra public debt. 
Alan Shipman 2 December 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

The Autumn Statement will neither introduce a temporary tax of the wealthy not provide long term tax reform, but the ideas should be taken seriously, writes Kenneth Rogoff.

Should advanced countries implement wealth taxes as a means of stabilising and reducing public debt over the medium term? The normally conservative International Monetary Fund has given the idea surprisingly emphatic support. The IMF calculates that a one-time 10% wealth levy, if introduced quickly and unexpectedly, could return many European countries to pre-crisis public debt/GDP ratios. It is an intriguing idea.

The moral case for a wealth tax is more compelling than usual today, with unemployment still at recession levels, and with deep economic inequality straining social norms. And, if it were really possible to ensure that the wealth levy would be temporary, such a tax would, in principle, be much less distortionary than imposing higher marginal tax rates on income. Unfortunately, while a wealth tax may be a sound way to help a country dig out of a deep fiscal pit, it is hardly a panacea.

For starters, the revenue gains from temporary wealth taxes can be very elusive. The economist Barry Eichengreen once explored the imposition of capital levies in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars. He found that, owing to capital flight and political pressure for delay, the results were often disappointing. 

The distortionary effects of a wealth levy would also be exacerbated by concerns that the "temporary" levy would not be a one-off tax. After all, most temporary taxes come for lunch and stay for dinner. Fears of future wealth taxes could discourage entrepreneurship and lower the saving rate.

In addition, the administrative difficulties of instituting a comprehensive wealth tax are formidable, raising questions about fairness. For example, it would be extremely difficult to place market values on the family-owned businesses that pervade Mediterranean countries.

Wealth taxes that target land and structures are arguably insulated from some of these concerns, and property taxes are relatively underused outside the Anglo-Saxon countries. In theory, taxing immobile assets is less distortionary, though taxes on structures obviously can discourage both maintenance and new construction.

So what else can eurozone governments do to raise revenue as their economies recover? Most economists favour finding ways to broaden the tax base – for example, by eliminating special deductions and privileges – in order to keep marginal tax rates low. Broadening the income-tax base is a central element of the highly regarded Simpson/Bowles proposals for tax reform in the United States.

In Europe, efficiency would be enhanced by a unified VAT rate, instead of creating distortions by charging different rates for different goods. In principle, low-income individuals and families could be compensated through lump-sum transfer programmes.

Another idea is to try to raise more revenue from carbon permits or taxes. Raising funds by taxing negative externalities reduces distortions rather than creating them. Though such taxes are spectacularly unpopular – perhaps because individuals refuse to admit that the externalities they themselves create are significant – I regard them as an important direction for future policy.

Unfortunately, advanced countries have implemented very little fundamental tax reform so far. Many governments are giving in to higher marginal tax rates rather than overhauling and simplifying the system.

In Europe, officials are also turning to stealth taxes, particularly financial repression, to resolve high public-debt overhangs. Through regulation and administrative directives, banks, insurance companies, and pension funds are being forced to hold much higher shares of government debt than they might voluntarily choose to do. But this approach is hardly progressive, as the final holders of pensions, insurance contracts, and bank deposits are typically the beleaguered middle class and the elderly.

There is also the unresolved question of how much the periphery countries really should be asked to pay on their debilitating debt burdens, whatever the tax instrument. Although the IMF seems particularly enthusiastic about using wealth taxes to resolve debt overhangs in Spain and Italy, some burden sharing with the north seems reasonable. As the economists Maurice Obstfeld and Galina Hale recently noted, German and French banks earned large profits intermediating flows between Asian savers and Europe's periphery. Unfortunately, arguing over burden sharing creates more scope for delay, potentially undermining the efficacy of any wealth tax that might finally be instituted.

Still, the IMF is right – on grounds of both fairness and efficiency – to raise the idea of temporary wealth taxes in advanced countries to relieve fiscal distress. However, the revenues will almost certainly be lower, and the costs higher, than calculations used to promote them would imply. Temporary wealth taxes may well be a part of the answer for countries in fiscal trouble today, and the idea should be taken seriously. But they are no substitute for fundamental long-term reform to make tax systems simpler, fairer, and more efficient.
Kenneth Rogoff
Posted 4 December 2013

Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University. The article first appeared in The Guardian on 6 November 2013. It is republished here with kind permission.
 

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

We are celebrating the life of anti-apartheid champion Nelson Mandela at a time when migrants and "foreigners" are increasingly exposed to savage and inhumane attitudes and legisation. Author and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reminds us that without workers trained overseas, the NHS would come to a halt.

Let’s start with a news roundup on migration, an issue that keeps millions tossing and turning in their beds. Then look at the lies, hypocrisies, cruelties and relentless hate-mongering. Also, at the unwavering generosity of some Britons towards incomers. We would be utterly defeated and broken, might have jumped off the cliffs of Dover, but for these friends and allies.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has ended the Go Home van stunt, widely condemned as racist and a blow to social cohesion. They were meant to scare away illegal migrants, only 11 of whom did oblige and leave. The slow-moving, menacing vehicles spoke to them, as well as to all of us who came from elsewhere. We suddenly understood how fragile are our rights and the sense of security we’ve built through many decades. Baroness Warsi, daughter of migrants, opposed the policy, but only because the vans made “good migrants” fearful. The stupidity of these remarks is almost worse than their divisiveness.

Now May, the pin-up of the nasty side of her party – which she once deplored – has also dumped another brazenly racist plan to charge visitors from “high-risk” countries a £3,000 bond to enter the country, repayable on departure. It seems that Nick Clegg opposed the idea, for which thank you. The named nations, all with dark-skinned citizens, were ex-British colonies which made this country extraordinarily prosperous. The domination ended only between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s, so please don’t tell me all that was a long time ago. That would be like saying the world wars were a long time ago and should no longer be remembered.

So two bad ideas have been buried, but the most savage and inhumane legislation against new and old migrants is still promised and will not be opposed by the other parties, though it will be by human rights activists and concerned professionals and individuals. Landlords, clinics and hospitals will have to check the passports of all who come to their doors. So will banks, driving test centres and schools, I imagine. So what happens with essential services? Will someone in a car crash be left to die without the right papers? What about the homeless, pregnant African woman I met in Barons Court, London? Does she just give birth on the street, like a stray bitch?

Next time you have to use the NHS count the 'foreign' individuals you deal with. More than one in three NHS workers was trained overseas. Without them, there would be no service. Now they want to keep out patients who are deemed health “scroungers” or “undesirables”. This happened to black people in the southern states of the US and under apartheid in South Africa. They died because they could not be admitted legally to certain hospitals. The same is coming to our country, a nation that, during the Olympics, was praising the glories of diversity. For the first time ever, when I went for some X-rays and scans last week, I was anxiously asked if I was, in fact, British. They would never, I am sure, ask my English husband the same question. This is how it happens, engineered segregation between the people who are entitled and those who are always suspect. Are you listening, Lady Warsi?

Even when our nation is moved by the plight of the dispossessed, it cannot do the right thing. The Home Office is rejecting asylum applications from almost all rape victims of war. Many from the Congo, the “rape capital of the world”, sought sanctuary here, possibly because our leaders strut about the world bigging up our values and condemning violations of human rights. I suspect William Hague really is sickened by rape as a weapon of war. Yet his government will not accept the victims. Their compassion stops in Calais.

Think of the men, women and children who died of thirst in the Sahara desert. They were economic refugees, fleeing destitution. Millions of us cried to read their story. What if some had made it to Britain? They would no longer deserve any sympathy, but be cast as thieves after nice council houses and fat benefits. Just as well they died, left us feeling virtuous without costing us a penny. After being refused visas and asylum, women and men who have fled failed states are held in detention centres run by private companies, misery profiteers. Eventually, they will be deported and some will die. We know because some returnees already have. In the centres, there have been allegations of racial abuse, maltreatment, and even sexual misconduct by male staff. Last week, at the detention centre at Yarl’s Wood, the only witness in an alleged case of sexual transgressions was told she was being deported. The order came before she had given evidence to the police. I have met children who have become mentally ill, some wetting beds in their teens or gone mute while in detention. Mums, too, who self-harmed to keep up the will to live. One, who has since obtained leave to remain, said to me: “I bite my arms till they bleed. When they bleed and hurt, I know I don’t want to die. But maybe death would be better. They worry about battery chickens but not battery people.”

Amnesty has called for a fundamental reform of our asylum and removal services. In the recent past, their investigations found G4S staff using threats, excessive force on inmates and sometimes truly foul techniques. One was called “carpet karaoke”. They push people's faces on to carpets and enjoy the sounds emitted.

I find writing columns on migrant rights, draining; they leave me feeling hopeless. I go on because I know how many Britons still hold on to their commitment to the displaced and hope that more would join them if perhaps they knew better. Dishearteningly, anti-immigrant feelings are now so whipped up, that it gets harder to protect or speak for the wretched. Those seeking sanctuary or life chances should wear a paper yellow star to remind Britain of what happens when nations turn on “outsiders”. It could become as potent a symbol as the poppy of “never again”.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown
Posted 8 December 2013

Yasmin Alibhai Brown is a columnist for The Independent. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Independent on 4 November 2013 and is included here with her permission.

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 British Isles are dotted with places seemingly named to amuse or irritate their inhabitants, writes Dick Skellington.

The history of the British Isles is full of places with amusing and sometimes embarrassing names. A place with an unfortunate name, like a person, can change it.  But surely it is preferable to celebrate it, as the population of Dull have done. It is the British way. Last spring Dull decided to twin with the American town of Boring. 

As regular blog readers will know, I have a curiosity about names. So I was particularly amused this autumn to read that worried residents of the Welsh village of Varteg (nothing embarrassing there I hear you say) wanted to change its name to Y Farteg. It seemed that campaigners wanted the new name because there is no 'V' in Welsh.  The campaign caused quite a a stink around Pontypool.

The Irish it seems are not immune. An inhabitant of the village of Muff set up a scuba diving club. Today, according to the club's website, the Muff Diving Club is "one of the oldest and most successful diving clubs on the island of Ireland". Names matter. 

I am totally behind the preservation of our British heritage. I rejoice that Three Cocks in Powys is still called Three Cocks, that Penistone is called Penistone, Scratchy Bottom, Scratchy Bottom, and that Thong, Grope Lane, and Ugley have had the courage of their convictions and have kept their names for posterity.

And lest you think this is just a British and an Irish thing, visit Europe. In France you could delight in a town famous for Armagnac production called Condom. The French for condom is a préservatif or capote anglaise (English bonnet?) – strange since we used to call them 'French letters'. There are plans to open a village shop specialising in 'luxury' condoms and one German entrepreneur wants to market Armagnac-scented condoms. The local newsagent tobacconist says her best selling postcard to English-speaking visitors is one which depicts the church steeple covered in latex.
Dick Skellington 13 December 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

A new book reveals the inventive world of the hilarious examination answer, writes Dick Skellington.

The book reflects five years of intensive research into school examinations. Here are my pick of the best answers. Seriously, you could not make them up (but that is what Michael Gove is doing, so why not?). My favourite is: 

Q Deserts can be hot or cold. Name a hot desert and a cold desert.
A Hot desert - apple crumble with custard
Cold desert - jelly and ice cream 

See what I mean? These are excellent answers to a stupid question (and rather a testimony to the amount of useless knowledge we cram into our kids). But please, pick your own best answer from these gems! 

Q   What are fossil fuels used for?
A   Powering dinosaurs. 

Q   Write the longest sentence you can, using appropriate punctuation.
A   50 years to life.

Q If a coastal arch collapses, what word would describe the remaining rock?
A Lonely.

Q Name three benefits of regular training.
A      1)   It's cheaper than driving;  2)  You can read on the train; 3)  They have a snack trolley 

Q Why did the infamous 1605 Gunpowder Plot fail?
A Someone forgot to bring the matches. 

Q What does Antonym mean?
A I don't know what he means but you've spelt his name wrong, miss.

Q Define capital punishment.
A When you get in trouble for not putting a capital letter at the start of a sentence. 

Really, the dunces who set these kind of questions should have seen that one coming. Mind you few can top this one for sheer brilliance.

Q Name an expanse of salty water that's smaller than an ocean.
A A tear 

Brilliant answer! Was it Oscar Wilde who advised not to tamper with natural ignorance? If he read the next answer he would be laughing in his grave.

Q How does your humerous differ from your fibula?
A One's funny and the other lies a lot.

Q What's the difference between red blood cells and white blood cells?
A Some are red, others are white. 

Q How can you tell where a river is on an Ordnance Survey map?
A It's the bit that is wet. 

Obviously. Just like this pearl.

Q What is a thermal conductor?
A A man who leads an orchestra in long johns.

And last, and marvellously, not least.

Q When Queen Elizabeth the First came to the throne, what was the first thing she did?
A Sit down.

Now, I am sure Her Royal Highness would agree, that kid had a point.
Dick Skellington, 18 December 2013

F in School, by Richard Benson, was published in November by Summersdale.

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

Cartoons: Catherine Pain; Gary Edwards

Alan Shipman invites you to pick your best from his seasonal celebration of the best responsibility-dodging excuses in 2013.

Long ago, before King Wenceslas went on the St Stephen’s Diet and yule logs were sustainably sourced, leaders took the blame and quit when things went badly wrong. Since then, amazing new techniques have been discovered for claiming it was unavoidable, not a mistake and/or someone else’s fault. Here’s a seasonal celebration of the best responsibility-dodging reasons of 2013.

'I should have been given more Continuing Professional Development. So if I lacked competence, my bosses were at fault for not providing me with it'. Star practitioner: Paul Flowers, who chaired the Co-Op bank after an uncompleted 4-year traineeship. 

'I am a master of decentralisation and delegation. So my underlings blundered, and I knew nothing about it.' Star practitioner: Captain Francesco Schettino, who blamed his Greek deputy for steering the Costa Concordia onto Italian rocks. Right-Honourable mention: David Cameron, whose Breadmaker is responsible for his not knowing the price of a loaf.

'We have to make deliberate mistakes sometimes, to show we’re on a level with ordinary people. So getting stuck on zipwires, or confused about where to out cycle lanes, is my way of making the less-clever feel better'. Star practitioner: Boris Johnson, whose day-job as a newspaper columnist can sometimes make him a night-mayor. Right-Honourable mention: Ed Miliband, for being so immune to gender bias, he just can’t distinguish men from women.

'A "Black Swan" blocked the flight path: so my masterful plan was derailed by extremely improbable events that no-one could have foreseen'. Star practitioners: Everyone running a bank, or a financial regulation agency, in 2008. Right-Honourable mention: Nick Clegg, for suggesting that Nigella divorcing Charles Saatchi was as unlikely as Edwina romancing John Major.

'I did an honourable thing which my critics have wilfully misinterpreted. And a scheme that tackles poverty brings you influence and power, enemies will always attack its less attractive features – like the sky-high interest rates'. Star practitioner: Prof Muhammad Yunus, whose pioneering of micro-credit won him millions of satisfied customers and a Nobel Peace Prize, but made him as popular as a pay-day lender in his home country. 

'Someone sabotaged the results. So I was doing the right thing, and you should have gone after the real felon'. Star practitioner: Brian Clough, whose Nottingham Forest team really did lose their 1984 Euro semi-final because the other side had bribed the referee.

'It depends what you mean by "miscalculate". By my reckoning, it’s an extraordinary success'. Star practitioner:  George W Bush, who declared that peace and freedom had returned to Iraq in 2003. 

'No-one could see what was happening, it was ‘the fog of war’. So if anyone’s to blame, it’s those BBC Weather people for not warning us about the fog'.  Star Practitioner: Since the Chilcot Enquiry has yet to give its verdict on the Iraq campaign, we posthumously salute Lady Thatcher, who pointed out to the Franks Enquiry that the fog around the Falklands was also 6,000 miles away.

'I was exceedingly drunk at the time. So drunk, it’s surprising I didn’t do worse, so you ought to praise my good judgement'. Star practitioner: Rob Ford, the irremovable/incorrigible/irreplaceable Mayor of Toronto.

'It’s terrible – but people voted for it. And democracy must prevail, even if half the voters complain they couldn’t get through'. Star practitioner: Simon Cowell, whose year-ending, ear-rending talent shows evoke ever-fonder memories of when Morecambe and Wise were the Christmas Show of choice.

All should be forgiven – it’s the Season of Goodwill. And mistakes are not the end of the world. In fact, buried in the maths behind the Higgs Boson – whose prizewinning discoverer admits he’d never get an academic job these days – there’s probably a sub-atomic twist that says mistakes were the beginning of the world. 
Alan Shipman 23 December 2013

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all from cartoonist Catherine Pain and the rest of the Society Matters team.

It looks as if more and more of us will have had Christmas and New Year on Wonga, with 9 million in serious debt, and Britain's debt mountain over £1.4 trillion, writes Dick Skellington.

I have looked hard this year but find I am not able to offer my usual traditional 'reasons to be cheerful' message, and New Year greet. Last year has seen my usual 'glass half full' philosophy turn to a 'glass half empty' one. In the past 12 months we have become a meaner nation, and one in which politicians and media compete to persuade us to turn our backs on the weak and the vulnerable.

It seems more evident than ever that the combination of economic stagnation and government austerity have had an acutely severe impact on our nation's poorest people while at the same time, turning us more isolationist, with an escalation of scapegoating minorities and migrants. We may be turning the corner, but the damage done has been so rooted that many will never recover.

We live in an increasingly divided society which witnessed a steep increase in avoidable deaths last winter. I know we had a very cold winter, but 31,000 excess deaths, a rise of 29 per cent on the previous year, is surely something we should be concerned about, particularly at a time when energy firms are making £53 profit from every customer while happily increasing their tariffs by five times the rate of inflation. Pre-Christmas announcements from the Big Six energy monopolies, following Coalition passing on green tariffs to the taxpayer, fail to redress the escalation in fuel bills since 2010. Freezing bills until 2015, as at least one of the Big Six has done, seems to be a case of slightly opening the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Add to this the Coalition promising to change the Energy Bill to manipulate official definitions of fuel poverty to bring it down, and you can’t help but think we live in increasingly cynical times. Families fall into fuel poverty currently if they spend more than 10% of income on fuel ‘to maintain an adequate level of warmth’. But the new indicator would mean they were in hardship only if they have ‘above average fuel costs’ that would leave them with a residual income below the official poverty line. 

But moving the goalposts matters little when you struggle to find the net. The elderly, and poorer families, are growing more and more vulnerable in our so-called 'caring' society. They might be able to afford to heat one room but when they go to bed, some will sleep in cold rooms where they will become increasingly vulnerable to heart disease, strokes and respiratory illness. In some urban areas, such as Stoke on Trent, over two-thirds of the households live in fuel poverty.

This is the same Britain where we are seeing an acceleration in malnutrition. In November, government figures released by Health Minister Norman Lamb in response to a parliamentary question (note how bad news always has to be forced out of ministers), revealed that primary and secondary diagnoses of malnutrition increased from 3,161 in 2008-9 to 5,499 in 2012, with the prospect of even greater escalation in 2013. 

The number of people fed by food banks in Britain has also risen – by 170 per cent in the past 12 months. We are witnessing a huge spike in the demand for charity food hand-outs at a time when our top bosses earn 14 per cent annual pay rises – an increase 20 times the average worker's pay rise of 0.7 per cent. Income inequality is at its highest level since the 1930s.

Each year Christmas and New Year grow more commercial than ever and the pressures to buy beyond our means become more and more intense. I learned that the average child's wish list of Christmas presents has reached a staggering £880, compared to the expected average spend of £207 a child. And New Year indulgences lengthen the debt for some.

Christmas and New Year is always a difficult time financially, and despite George Osborne's bluster in seeking to tax the likes of payday loan companies like Wonga, loan banks are surely the only winners as Britain's personal debt mountain tops £1.43 trillion for the first time and is scheduled to get worse. The Centre for Social Justice warned that two of the policies implemented this year by the Department of Work and Pensions, the bedroom tax and universal credit, will force more of us into debt into the next two years.

For some, then, prospects for 2014 look bleak. At the end of November the Government-backed Money Advisory Service (MAS) estimated that 9 million people in England were in 'serious debt', that the problem was most acute in English cities, and that 40 per cent of these people are struggling to pay back what they owe. MAS found that 7 million people were unhappy because of their debt concerns, but that very few sought financial advice. The five cities with the most acute debt levels were the new City of Culture Hull, Nottingham, Manchester, Knowsley and Liverpool.  MAS defined serious debt if people felt that their debt amounted to a ‘heavy burden’, or else they had to have missed out on repayments in three of the last six months.

In these locations charity may be harder to find as seasonal costs spiral. A traditional Christmas lunch would have cost you 17 per cent more than in 2012. Christmas puddings have almost doubled in price, potatoes are up by 30 per cent, stuffing by 22 per cent, gravy by 17 per cent, bacon by 13 per cent, turkeys by 8 per cent. The only cheery news is that the cost of Christmas crackers fell by 10 per cent, while mince pies dropped by 14 per cent. Those who may want to drown the bad news in alcohol should note this has risen too, by 12 per cent on average. Even chocolate has risen, by 20 per cent (for smaller bars and portions of course). So if you have not already done so, be prepared to trade up, and ignore the multi-million advertising promotions you see on television. If you are one of the one in ten of us who are still paying for Christmas 2012, you have my sympathy.

Nearly 4 million British families do not have enough savings to cover their rent or mortgage for more than a month. Thousands are being made homeless every year because they are unable to meet their payments. Unsecured consumer debt has almost tripled in the last 20 years, reaching nearly £160 billion. Essential bills have increased by 25 per cent since 2007, with one in six payday loans now used to pay for outstanding household bills. The figures are frightening, especially at a time when our banks continue to act irresponsibly. 

Note the Government's zealous approach to failing hospitals and schools, compared with how it has tackled the banking crisis – suggesting we imprison failing doctors, while leaving bankers with their assets and bonuses relatively intact.  After a litany of colossal misdemeanours including Libor and suspected Forex rigging, money-laundering on behalf of pariah states and drug cartels, and repeated miss-selling on an industrial scale, still no-one has been struck off, disqualified or jailed. And just to add insult to injury the Parliamentary Watchdog Ipsa promises MPs an 11 per cent pay rise in the forlorn hope that this will stop the recruitment of the privileged and widen Parliamentary access to more humble politicians. Mind you Ipsa have decided to end the Parliamentarian habit of claiming for tea and biscuits, something anyone on welfare breadline payments might find rather stomach-churning. But you never know, some MPs might give their pay rise to charities helping the poor. It's just a thought.

So I do hope you have enjoyed your Christmas in this debt-stricken land and that the New Year festivities were spent in optimistic circumstances. I do hope you thought of others less fortunate than yourselves. Were you transformed like Scrooge? I believe it is better to give than to receive, and reverse the national drift towards heartlessness. And if you can afford to take the kids to a pantomime be prepared for the jokes about bankers being behind you, a chorus of payday loan companies lurking in the gods, the Big Six Energy companies being ridiculed as never before, and the scapegoating of politicians too remote from everyday life by the trappings of wealth, too thick-skinned to care, or too eager to get their 'selfie' taken with people far more interesting than themselves.
Dick Skellington 2 January 2014

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

Worst-case scenarios invoked by the right ignore a bigger disaster: the impact on Britain if we no longer attract migrants, argues The Guardian's Hugh Muir.

In 1887, Captain JCR Colomb, the very Conservative MP for Bow and Bromley in east London, asked a question of fellow countrymen: "What states of the world, other than Great Britain, permit the immigration of destitute aliens without restriction?" Colomb was very much a man of that age – but born into ours, he might have vented his spleen below the line on Mail Online or the Telegraph's website. Can it be, he asked, that "Her Majesty's Government is prevented by any treaty obligations from making such regulations as shall put a stop to the free importation of destitute aliens into the United Kingdom?

The captain was on to something. There followed letters to the Times condemning the foreigners "replacing English workers and driving to despair men, women and children of our blood". Foreigners, Jewish migrants in this case, were blamed for taking jobs and driving up rents, and a society formed: the Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens. MigrationWatch looms like a heavy raincloud now. But it was not the first of its kind.

And the moral is that none of what we have heard, of what we will hear this week – when full rights of EU movement are granted to Romanians and Bulgarians – is new. It is like The Mousetrap: the actors change, some grow old and die, but the show goes on and the script is much the same.

These new rights of movement for Romanians and Bulgarians will dominate the immigration discourse, for at least the first quarter of 2014. Right now, these freedoms are just hours old. No one can say with confidence what is going to happen. But that won't prevent the Colombites of our time evoking the worst-case scenario, and with an election next year, expect discussion on two levels. Statisticians, academics, virtuous researchers and economists will apply what they know to produce sober analysis. And the Colombites, playing to the cheap seats, will ignore them.

Much more sensible, but consequently of less use to those whipping up the storm, was Mark Harper. He is the immigration minister in the coalition government that has pledged to crack down on immigration, and he said claims of a mass influx were almost certainly overblown. There will be new arrivals. There will undoubtedly be new pressures. But not Armageddon.

"There is a big difference with 2004, when we were the only major country not to have transitional controls and all the other big countries did," said Harper last November. "Anybody who wanted to work here legally came to the UK. There are now a range of other European countries in the eurozone, including Germany, which is an economic powerhouse that is generating jobs and creating economic growth." The minister pointed out that other countries, such as Italy and Spain, already have significant populations of Romanians and Bulgarians, and are thus more likely to attract more arrivals. His sobriety displeased the Colombites, for they countenance neither dispute or interference. MigrationWatch has warned of hordes abandoning other European countries to come to Britain. Pity Harper as he appeals for calm; derided by the Express as the "minister without a clue".

He may not last, for level-headedness and immigration policy sit uneasily. His boss, the home secretary, Theresa May, has pledged to cut the numbers of migrants entering Britain and to make life more difficult for those who reach our shores. A Home Office report leaked to the Sunday Times revealed plans to restrict the number of EU migrants to 75,000 a year. It also suggested preventing them from claiming benefits or tax credits for their first five years here.

An immigration bill due to reach the statute book in the spring will oblige private landlords to grill tenants about their immigration status. The appeals process in immigration cases will also be speeded up. As for any migrants judged to have broken the law, the rule will be deport first, hear the appeal later. 
There will be, as some analysts describe it, "phantom solutions to phantom problems". Just two weeks ago the prime minister announced tough measures to stop Romanians and Bulgarians and fellow travellers claiming out-of-work benefits for the first three months. It sends a message, he said. But it is already the case. The government has figures showing how many migrants claim out-of-work benefits but seems reluctant to release them for analysis. Could that be because the figures don't support the government's brand of politicking?

At issue are people's lives, but inevitably we discuss immigration in abstract statistics. Net migration – the difference between those coming and leaving – rose to 182,000 in the year to June, up from 167,000 in the previous 12 months, and therein lies the challenge for David Cameron this new year. He has pledged to reduce that figure to 100,000 in time for next year's election. In 2012/13, the UK Border Agency, in its last year as a standalone entity, decided 2.6m visa applications and 800,000 applications from people seeking to remain in the UK. They come from all over: India, Poland, the US and Australia. We focus on migrants from eastern Europe and the former Commonwealth countries. In fact most new immigrants to the UK come from China.

The Colombites rage, but increasingly they're estranged from the wishes of those who drive the economy, create jobs and the wealth characteristic of a capitalist market system. They are out of sync with the universities and colleges; urging them on the one hand to maximise income and then hampering their efforts to recruit sufficient foreign students to do that. The number of foreign students has apparently dropped 70,000 in two years. They are out of step with countries with whom they might trade; one minute declaring Britain open for business, the next projecting their anxieties on foreign businessfolk seeking entry through our ports and airports.

It's a given that our approach to immigration will continue to be blighted by inconsistencies. It has been for centuries. Some migrants we like: think of the young Spaniards, Italians and Greeks who have come – without public uproar – to escape austerity in their own countries. Some we do not, usually because – numbers aside – their social and cultural differences require accommodation. And some we will like in time as they become part of the fabric. As part of that cycle, many of them will be just as critical of the next wave of migrants.

The real crisis would be a Britain that migrants do not aspire to, but our drivers of immigration policy will not change: part pragmatism, part altruism, part prejudice and heavily shaped by the populist demands of boisterous democratic politics. As it was in Colomb's day, so it will be in 2014.
Hugh Muir Posted 6 January 2014

Hugh Muir is the Guardian's diary editor. He has also written extensively about race, social policy, policing and London government. This is an edited version of an article which appeared in The Guardian on January 2 2014 in a series looking at the year ahead.

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

Associate lecturer Steve Woods explores the Posh and Becks world of Mumsnet.

Mumsnet marked its tenth anniversary with a celebration at Google HQ in March 2010, and today is a force to be reckoned with. The numbers speak for themselves with 1.24 million unique users a month and 25 million page impressions.

The site is especially important in the way it examines risk. Risks to, say, health take the form of advice dispensed in user friendly ways and this is seen to trump official guidance in terms of popularity simply because it is written in language that means something to users and has the name of a real person attached. Through the blurring of public, political and personal, the unlocking and demystifying of risks is achieved democratically. Mumsnet appeals to lots of smart women who know the little intrigues of everything. Further evidence of the democracy Mumsnet claims comes from the decision not to edit posts and not to allow members to edit their own posts retrospectively. The rule is to stand by what you have said. Profanity or personal attacks are removed and their posters banned from the site.  

Mumsnet is a phenomenon of our age. It seems to be delivering expert knowledge delivered in lay terms. Yet on another level Mumsnet fulfils a neutralising function. How its users interpret, reinterpret, and crucially reframe expert knowledge, and how it dilutes and offsets risks according to its users own personal values, is vital. Around half of Mumsnet members have an income of over £50,000; two-thirds are in full or part-time employment. 

The key problem here for many is Mumsnet’s highly refined and indeed rarefied cultural base. The posh yummy mummies will decide what is risky. Participation in the Mumsnet forums heavily depends on crucially whether you’re one of what Janet Street-Porter called the “Mumsnet mafia”. Mumsnet appears to represent a very narrow group of women, middle-class and conservative in taste, with brands such as Boden and Cath Kidston appearing frequently as visual shorthand for cultural markers. Street-Porter said:

“The daily discussions are usually pretty childish, and there's a fair amount of bullying. There seems to be a received way of thinking, and woe betides anyone who disagrees. Which is ironic, when the whole point of the internet is freedom to express widely differing opinions?”

What we are seeing here is a rather narrow and dangerous knowledge base. Instead of merely reflecting risk, Mumsnet can be seen to be directing risk, actually offering benefits only to those ‘belonging’ to a narrow community. So in effect the use of Mumsnet proves risky for some and undemocratic for others, and is far removed from the ideals envisaged. What we have is what some would describe as an old-fashioned posh mother’s circle, advice oh yes... so long as you’re one of us.

Modern society is continually faced with the consequences of our obsession with modern developments – GM foods, nuclear power – and their associated set of risks. While we have always faced natural risks like flood and famine, current risks we have never previously experienced become problematic. Sociologist Ulrich Beck argues we are living in a world with global risks but we have few answers to them, apart from the old familiar remedies. 

This strikes a chord with the increased numbers of websites and formats like Mumsnet, Netmums, and iVillage as a form of delivering information and knowledge of risk.  

One of Beck’s main arguments is the importance of the role of experts. They perform a crucial role in defining the risks we face. The trouble is this expert advice causes anxiety. This leaves many of us out in the cold. So what do we do? We turn to new mediums, such as online forums like Mumsnet and others. 

In reality, only a few of us are really going to face risk from whatever it is that threatens us. Whether we change behaviours or not, most of us have to remember that to get access to sites like Mumsnet's rich source of advice, we have to first get past rather posh gatekeepers!

Steve Woods 8 January 2013

Steve Woods is an AL teaching Sociology on DD101 in RO5, and is also Senior Lecturer in Health Studies at the University of Northampton.

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

Football is not the bigoted blinkered world we think, writes the Independent's Sam Wallace.

Before the game Rogers walked around the perimeter of the pitch at Elland Road, that bastion of a lost era of English football, of dirty Leeds, of teak-tough 1970s players and even tougher supporters – the original Damned United. Yet those who encountered Rogers had nothing but kind words for the young man who had originally decided to retire from the game when he first came out but has since resumed his playing career.

A television crew filmed the footage of Leeds fans shaking Rogers' hand and saying how much they admired his decision to come out. Of course, one should expect nothing less – but this is English football, where we have always been told that the people who pay to watch games every week are such an intolerant bunch that life would be hell for any player who did not announce himself as heterosexual.

As Thomas Hitzlsperger becomes the latest – and only the fourth – professional footballer to announce himself as gay, it is my personal view that the people who watch English football week in, week out are not as bigoted as some would have you believe. Those tens of thousands of people who traverse the country every week, whom I bump into in the course of their endless pilgrimages through motorway service stations and stadium concourses, are not all homophobes.

Those who do not watch football regularly fail to recognise that simply because the average fan does not fit the template of a member of the tolerant metropolitan class, they would turn on a gay footballer. What football fans never fail to recognise is the best qualities of an individual, as a person and a player, and what he gives to the club that they are wedded to for life.

They share in the weekly triumphs and despairs of their club's players. There is no hiding one's personality or one's limitations on a football pitch where the emotions are forever writ large. Fans judge players on how they perform, to the best of their varied ability. They talk about their club's players as if they know them personally, and in many respects they do. They can be their harshest critics, although, from personal experience, they tend not to tolerate the same criticism from a journalist.

Football fans know courage when they see it and they would recognise better than anyone what it would take to be the first top-level active footballer to come out. It is my personal view that reaction to a high-profile gay footballer who, unlike Hitzlsperger, was still playing the game would, even in the unruly, unchecked atmosphere of a matchday stadium, be largely supportive and positive.

There will always be those supporters who hold unacceptable views, just as you expect to find in any group as large as a football crowd. It is said that attitudes in football contributed to the suicide of Justin Fashanu, the first openly gay footballer, eight years after he came out. While it may have contributed there were other major factors, such as the disapproval of members of his family at the time including his brother, John.

For all the sadness of the end of Fashanu's life, he still played after coming out in 1990 and was briefly the assistant manager at Torquay United. That was in an era when attitudes across British society as a whole were much less enlightened. Yet football did not shun him then and 24 years on from his announcement, a leading gay footballer could expect a much more sophisticated outlook.

Rogers initially retired on coming out but is now back in the game. The story of Anton Hysen, also openly gay, is a difficult one to judge given that unlike his father Glenn, a former international and Liverpool player, he has never played outside the Swedish lower leagues.

In an ideal world, there would be no prejudice at all. The reality is that in the modern Premier League dressing room, diversity is taken for granted. The only thing that connects the modern first team player in the English top flight, just as likely to have come from Europe, Africa, or South America as Britain, is that all of them are millionaires.

Perhaps the biggest bulwark to acceptance of a gay footballer in the dressing room is likely to be from footballers who have been brought up in the more zealous aspects of whatever religion they happen to follow. The old-school English macho culture of first-team initiation ceremonies and drinking bottles of beer in the communal bath – a culture that might once have militated against a gay footballer – is all but gone.

Football led the way in British society when it came to offering a meritocracy for the sons of the Caribbean immigrants of the 1950s. While we can never pretend it was easy for those black pioneers, who had to endure some unforgivable abuse, the first big-name gay footballer, when he one day announces himself, will find himself in a much more tolerant world.
Sam Wallace
Posted 13 January 2014

Sam Wallace is the Chief Football Correspondent of The Independent. This article first appeared in the Independent on January 9, and is published here with kind permission.

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

The world is probably in better shape than you think, writes Dick Skellington.

PG Tips first began using an anthropomorphic chimp family in its adverts in 1956, where they were voiced by stars including Bob Monkhouse and Peter Sellers. As well as Bond, they made appearances as removal men, housewives and even Tour de France cyclists. I particularly enjoyed the infamous episode when as removal men, they tried to get a piano down the stairs. Louis played the bowler hat-wearing Mr Shifter and the advert's punchline went: "Dad, do you know the piano's on my foot?" "You hum it, son, I'll play it!", quipped the resourceful Louis.

Not only did these wonderful creatures convey a range of fascinating emotions on screen, just to sell tea, we empathised with their haphazard circumstance and felt their pain and joy. Now we learn Louis and his mates were much cleverer than perhaps we thought. Indeed cleverer than we humans: research published just before Christmas indicates that we may know less about the world than Louis and Chopper! 

With the population of the world at seven billion and rising, many fear a shortage of resources as well as a shortage of space. Swedish professor Hans Rosling, however, says it's time for a reality check. When pollsters got 1,000 British people to take Rosling's "ignorance survey" last year, the results suggested they knew "less about the world than chimpanzees".

Questions were devised to test knowledge about the world we live in, such as: How does our global population break down?  How have the numbers of people living in extreme poverty changed? And what is the average number of babies born per woman? 

"For each question I wrote each of the possible alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, and by picking the right bananas, they'd just pick answers at random.  But the Brits did even worse," explained Rosling.

To be fair, so did the Swedes, the only other nation to have been polled so far. Rosling points out that he also put the questions to some fellow professors, and they were on a par with chimpanzees, too. 

The fact that humans do worse than chimps shows the problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the result of having preconceived ideas, Rosling says – ideas that are years, or sometimes decades out of date. It seems that more of us are ignorant about the world we live in than we think, even those who profess to understand it. The problem isn’t so much that we Brits lack knowledge, but that what we think about the state of the world is often years or even decades out of date. Strangely, university graduates tend to do even worse at Rosling’s test than everyone else.

As it happens, the world is in much better shape than we think, which is a relief. Population growth is slowing down, the divide between the developed and developing worlds is shrinking, and our health is dramatically improving. So don’t listen to all the doom and gloom you always hear on the news, or read in this blog, because things might be looking up. The world isn’t going to end from overpopulation leading to starvation, it’s going to end because of the inevitable monkey revolution. They’re smarter than we are, science says so. Prepare yourselves.

I am not sure what score the PG Tips chimpanzees would have achieved on the test but I am sure it would have been higher than my miserly 4 out of 9!

Why not take a version of the test in this quiz?  Then compare your results with the British respondents and read Rosling's explanations of why the world is in a better shape than we think. Please have a go!
Dick Skellington 17 January 2014

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

Predicting which nations will take off in the 21st century can be a random process. Alan Shipman explains.

Jim O’Neill is a more successful economist than I’ll ever be. He rose to the top of the pre-eminent investment bank, Goldman Sachs, and is known around the world as the discoverer of the BRIC (an acronym that refers to the countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are all deemed to be at a similar stage of newly advanced economic development). So influential was his identification of these four countries as the emerging economies of the future, they now hold an annual  BRIC Summit, while other economists routinely reference O’Neill’s catchy acronym. Not since John Kenneth Galbraith (who counted ‘conventional wisdom’ and ‘affluent society’ among his viral neologisms) has a practitioner of the ‘dismal science’ so effectively reshaped popular thinking, and language. 

Unsurprisingly, O’Neill’s follow-up discovery – the MINT economies  – have been getting equally favourable coverage. He’s already spent a week on the BBC touring Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, as the next dynamic economic quartet. 

An expert this well-recognised can begin to turbocharge the trends they comment on. But before we channel our hard-earned savings towards the MINTs, it’s worth reflecting on the fate of the BRICs, and what they say about this form of prediction.

Emerging and Converging 
There are various ways to measure a country’s economic progress, but the one most usually adopted is growth of national output, adjusted for inflation – real GDP (gross domestic product) growth. The table below shows real GDP growth for BRIC countries in the ten years before O’Neill announced their arrival, and in the ten years since. It actually uses real GDP per person, or per capita. That’s to be fair to Russia – whose population was falling during this time while the others’ rose, making it harder to match their GDP growth rates. The USA is thrown in to give a comparison with the ‘developed’ world. 

This record makes it unsurprising why Jim O’Neill’s views are so respected – and why the ‘next BRICs’ are so eagerly sought. Brazil and India had already grown strongly in the decade before O’Neill picked them out – but in the decade that followed, they doubled their average growth rate in real terms.  China had already grown so impressively in the decade to 2001 (more than doubling its per-capita GDP ) that many doubted that it could keep up its 10% annual expansion. O’Neill correctly anticipated it would do even better, generating 2.5 times its 2001 per-capita GDP by 2012. 

And on Russia, going by this indicator, he was even more far-sighted – correctly predicting that a dismal decline in national income for the first ten years after the Soviet Union’s collapse would give way to a rise (coinciding with Putin’s) of more than 50%. As a result, all the BRICs did spectacularly better than the US, which rarely grew at 3% or more even in its better years, and saw its real GDP fall after the financial crisis of 2008.  

BRIC through the window?
Given the BRICs’ obvious fulfilment of expectation, why would anyone doubt that the MINTs are the next big thing? One problem arises for the business and financial investors at whom these forecasts are especially aimed. A fast-growing economy with a large and rising population (one of the main criteria for selecting the BRICs) does not guarantee that a country will reward those who try to do business there. Russia has been a particular problem in this regard, with a number of prominent investors – including BP-Amoco and the prominent fund manager Bill Browder – being robbed of substantial assets through inadequate shareholder protection, with suspicions of state-linked organised crime. 

Russia’s growth since 2001 has also been heavily dependent on oil and other raw-material exports, so it actually fell into recession when the 2008 crisis hit its main western customers. Commodity-based wealth also makes for a very unequal income distribution (keeping down the size of consumer markets, and risking social instability), and is associated with corruption which can make business substantially more expensive. Reliance on raw-material exports is a key reason why Russia and Brazil are unlikely to repeat their recent success in the next ten years. And corruption is a problem across all the BRICs – which rank (respectively) 72^nd, 127^th, 94^th and 80^th in the latest Transparency International perceptions index, while the US stays at a more respectable 19^th.

MINT conditions
So what are we to make of the MINTs? They will certainly be taken more seriously because of Jim O’Neill’s accolade. All have potential to repeat the BRICs’ sustained success. But to be fair, his radio programmes probed both sides of their breakthrough stories, and this is no one-sided selling-job. Mexico suffers from a grossly unequal income distribution and the aftermath of a costly war with drug cartels; Indonesia and Nigeria are still dependent on commodity exports, highly corruption-ridden and fighting increasingly costly battles against terrorist movements; and Turkey’s rapidly growing banks could mean a financial wobble to follow its recent political turbulence. All are vulnerable to a general capital outflow from emerging markets – straining their foreign debt finance – as US interest rates start to rise in the next 2-3 years.

And there’s the peril of the sequel, which sometimes transcends the first version but can equally often fall flat. Several studies have found that fund managers who outperform the financial markets in one period generally underperform them in the next – suggesting that success may actually be random. Others have been harsher on O’Neill’s first analysis than I’ve been. Not being a chef-economist, let alone a chief-economist, I’d just advise you to take every MINT with a pinch of salt. 
Alan Shipman 21 January 2014

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

How inept does a financier have to be to forfeit their massive payout? asks Independent columnist Mark Steel.

If you make a speech at the AGM, in which you accidentally summon the Prince of Darkness to consume Norfolk in a ball of evil, leading to a catastrophic collapse in the supply of mustard, does the bonus get delayed half an hour as punishment?

If you lose £50m by granting 125 per cent mortgages to caterpillars, or lose £60m by lending someone the money to set up a Jimmy Savile theme park (which incurs unexpectedly low profits in its first quarter), is your bonus docked to £999,980 instead of the full million?

This might even be a step in a rational direction after Royal Bank of Scotland announced multimillion-pound, 200 per cent bonuses in a year when the bank was done for deliberately bankrupting its clients by refusing them loans at critical moments, so that it could swipe its assets.

But this, apparently, is why the bonuses need to be so high, as an incentive to maximise the bank’s profits, which will benefit all of us. So we should give them even bigger bonuses, then they’ll have the incentive to bankrupt all of us, until we’re sold as galley slaves on ships owned by RBS. Then we’ll all have played our part in reviving the economy, contentedly rowing while singing the old galley slave ditty: “Mister Goodwin wouldn’t loan us, 50 quid out of his bonus, so now his mates all own us, tooralo-ra-lo-ra-ay.”

Many of the RBS new year bonuses amount to double the banker’s annual salary, so if they’re paid a million a year, then the bonus is two million. I suppose this reflects the fact that January is an expensive time. First there’s the extra heating; then, with the dark nights, the kids get bored and want a panda or a hovercraft; and with the football transfer window open you can’t resist buying a central midfielder (with pace who can hold the ball up) as someone to help sweep the leaves. These costs all add up.

Ed Miliband is suggesting these bonuses should be restricted to the total annual salary, saying “one million is enough”. But that was enough to get the Conservatives howling that he’s anti-business and against ambition. Iain Duncan Smith could announce:

“As from next year, it will be legal for business to entertain clients by using the poor as fireworks. This will not only attract vital international investment, but provide an invaluable sense of self-worth for those on long-term benefits who are lit at one end and spun round as a Catherine Wheel.” And if Miliband said he would place a 12-month ban on using people on housing benefit as sparklers, David Cameron would yell: “This shows he is as socialist as ever, ANTI-business, and ANTI-what’s good for Britain.”

A cap on bonuses, the Conservatives’ supporters said, would “encourage more risky banking”. And that could be damaging, because over the past few years the one thing we can be grateful for is there’s been no risky banking. If anything, at times they’ve seemed too cautious. Take away their right to swipe two million a year for no discernible reason and they could be forced to act in a dicey fashion, possibly leading to an economic difficulty of some sort, if you could imagine a bank ever causing such a problem in any way.

The argument against caps on bonuses has usually been that banks are private companies, so they can’t be dictated to. But RBS is publicly owned. So these bankers are taking public money for their bonuses, with the only defence left that if the bankers aren’t given these sums they’ll take their talents elsewhere, and bankrupt people in another country.
Before long we’d be begging them: “Please come back. We’ve gone months without anyone being deliberately bankrupted. We’re dying of solvency here. We’ve got piles of two million quid and don’t know where to put them. Come back please.”

Presumably, the Government will now use the same methods to deal with people on benefits. People without work will receive a basic allowance, but if they can prove that, instead of lying about, they’ve tried to ruin someone’s business, they’ll get three times as much for making an effort.

And if the bankers do find it disturbing that some people feel disgruntled about their bonuses, they should be comforted by the fact there’s certain to be a television show made about their plight soon, called Bonus Street. It will be a real-life – at times harrowing – portrayal of the antics of those who take millions in public money, often with no shame at all. We’ll see characters such as Bob Diamond and Fred Goodwin yelling: “Why haven’t you sorted that (beep)ing merger, you (beep)ing (beep), that’s (beep)ing 20 (beep)ing million we could have had away.”

It’s possible that there could be a backlash, with members of the public driving past calling them thieving scum, but hopefully the bankers will shout back: “Oh yeah, I’d like to see any of you get by on a million quid bonus.”
Mark Steel
Posted 24 January 2014

Mark Steel is a stand-up comic and regular columnist at the Independent newspaper. This article was published in The Independent and the I on Friday 17th January. It is reproduced here with kind permission.

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

Recent accusations by the Shadow Transport Minister that Thomas the Tank Engine is sexist almost made Dick Skellington blow his safety valves.

Every now and again a politician says something which really strikes you as blatantly inappropriate, even when the politician is seeking to highlight an issue of significant social concern. This occurred to me recently when I read about the Shadow Transport Minister’s deep anxiety over the impact of sexism on the employment of train drivers.

Mary Creagh (no, I’d never heard of her either) declared that one of my favourite children’s toys, Thomas the Tank Engine, was culpable in ensuring that there were very few female railway train drivers on our public transport system.  My God, I thought, the Rev W.V Awdry would be turning in his grave.

Mary pointed the figure of blame at poor Thomas the Tank Engine because it encouraged only boys to grow up to become train drivers. This flies in the face of my experience with three granddaughters who are all Thomas fans. I think there must be more to this than meets the eye.

In the High Street of my home town, Stony Stratford, there is a little toy shop that in its show window has a tiny Thomas the Tank Engine going around a track. Every 30 seconds it appears from behind a range of other toys and comes out into view, and my granddaughters, and dozens of others, stop and stare at the blue stumpy funnel. They love it. Girls and boys alike.

Hits Entertainment, the firm which owns the rights for the television programme Thomas and Friends, is introducing more and more female engines to the railway shed. Female engines are not ‘the annoyance’, Mary Creagh claimed, but engines of equal stature. Mary even went as far as to suggest that the female engines in Thomas presented ‘a danger to the functioning of the railway’. Evidently their very presence distracted the male engines from their tasks. If that is not a sexist statement I do not know what is. I do wish Mary would lighten up. 

Try telling the sexist thesis to Emily who first appeared in 1984, and Annie, Belle, Caroline, Caitlin, Daisy, Clarabel, Elizabeth, Flora, Henrietta, Kelly, Mavis, Lady Hatt, Lady, and Rosie (among many others). In fact my examination of the proportion of female engines in the railway shed (see Thomas and Friends website) revealed that female engines are far more likely to be found there than female drivers on our national networks. Cleary, Mary failed to do her research when her brain went into first gear.  

I felt the same way when in 2009 academics attacked Thomas the Tank Engine claiming it portrayed a world blighted by a conservative political ideology’ and operated ‘a rigid class system’ that stifled self-expression.

This research highlighted the class divide which sees the downtrodden workers in the form of Thomas and his friends at the bottom of the social ladder and the wealthy Fat Controller, Sir Topham Hatt, at the top. Any attempt to break out of this controlled hierarchy to gain individual power, show initiative or dissent was, the research concluded, met with punishment, usually because it goes wrong. They also objected to the way the show portrays Thomas, Percy and James slaving away for wealthy bosses like the Fat Controller. 

I can imagine what the Rev W.V. Awdry would say if he was around to read such perverse analyses of a charming children’s storyline. Maybe, like me, he would recommend that Mary, the MP for Coventry, should be sent there for a period of reflection, where perhaps she may rediscover the joys of childhood, a sense of perspective, and to try and engage with what really causes sexism and class discrimination in Britain.
Dick Skellington 28 January 2014 

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

Next year sees the centenary of the Armenian genocide. Armenia has crucial links to the development of British and world civilisation as Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian explains. 

Until Darwin’s regime-change in the mid-nineteenth century, when Western beliefs began the move from faith in the Bible to mass atheism, most of the Western world believed in the Noah’s Flood story. Mankind was saved and moved down the mountains of Ararat, in the heartland of ancient Armenia.  Our civilisation has its roots in old Armenia, and it is wise to remember it.

In 1915, Armenians witnessed the forgotten holocaust. The Ottoman Young Turks massacred 1.5 million Armenians on state-organized death marches to Der-Zor in the Syrian Desert. There, the saintly journalist Robert Fisk has discovered skulls and bones in numberless caves as recently as the spring of 1993. It was Adolf Hitler who once famously said "who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?". 

It is important to remember, and to log, the important connections between us and our Armenian forebears. Most European nations, precisely for the same reason, stretch their ancestry back to Noah’s Ark stopping on the Mountains of Ararat.  Closer to home, according to Herodotus the Celts originated from Armenia. In all the world, two places alone carry the same name suggestive of origin and national identity: a city in the present day Armenia is named CYMRY, pronounced exactly as the Welsh name of Wales!   

Few Englishmen (and women) would know that two of the manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles – the oldest historical records of England from the 9th century AD – begin with the matter-of-fact statement “the first inhabitants of these British lands, they come from Armenia”.  According to Herodotus, the Celts originated from Armenia (which supports the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. 

In today’s independent Armenia (which was one of the Soviet Republics) over 150 political parties were created, officially registered by the Government bureaucracy. A criminal phenomenon like Nazism (or its mother Fascism) can never arise in Armenia, because Armenians, as probably the oldest people of this planet, are intensely and immensely individualized, lacking any group mentality and/or psychology, even frequently to the detriment of their national interest in modern times – especially during the rise of Nationalism in nineteenth century Europe.  If you can get three Armenians together to form a political party, they will produce a dozen – three each (= nine), and another three for insurance purposes. 

Hegel argued that history marches towards individuation and total freedom. Armenians seem to have achieved that kind of individual freedom already, which explains their appearance lurking about in history, pioneering most innovative, radical and revolutionary processes arousing the genocidal envy of other nations. There are numerous examples of the debt we owe to the Armenians.

There is now very little doubt that farming arose in ancient Anatolian Armenia around possibly 7,000 BC. The historical reality of the Promethean myth (the Titan-Robber-God of Fire punished on the mountains of Caucasian Armenia) suggests that the discovery of Fire as a great cultural advance occurred there. 

As early as 301 AD, the Armenians converted to Christianity with King and country as the very first in history, which was yet another huge step forward for mankind drowned in a sea of pagan polytheism.  The Armenians thus invented the first national church, which Henry VIII could not manage in the 16th century. 

The Poet Lord Byron was suddenly gripped by his acquaintance with the historical sufferings of the Armenians. He got to know the Mekhitarist Monks on a tiny island named St. Lazar, off Venice. He even wrote an Armenian grammar (to teach the Brits Armenian), forcing his London publisher John Murray to publish it. His eventual later attachment to the Greek national cause was inspired by his acquaintance with the Armenian sufferings. 

The Armenians played a pioneering role in the downfall of Communism in Soviet Russia. The virtual Radio Yerevan was the cradle of the socio-political humour which attacked the system; and here is a most glorious, sharp and quick-witted example of it. Lady-teacher asks an infant – what is the difference between Capitalism and Communism? The child answers – capitalism is the exploitation of Man by Man, and Communism is its exact reverse!

A democratic election in the Armenian enclave of Karabagh (donated to Azerbaijan by Stalin) was the first to declare a wish to exit the Soviet Federation of Republics.  The pioneering majority Armenian vote also sounded the knell of the destruction of the Union itself, simultaneously provoking the enmity and warmongering of Azerbaijan, still even today threatening Armenia with a fresh genocidal war.

In global culture, the Armenian, Rouben Mamoulian, the Hollywood film-director created the iconic Garbo-image, and produced the very first feature-length Technicolor film in 1935 (Becky Sharp). The creator of the Soviet computer, Serguey Merkelian, was a young mathematical genius from Soviet Armenia. Gary Kasparov, the Soviet Armenian world Chess Champion, was also the first to be invited to play against the most powerful US computers, and defeated them each time for several years, until he was finally defeated by the latest developments in technology.  

What the future shall bring to the Armenians as country and people only God knows of course.  Who knows, if climate change destroys the globe through money-greed and idiocy, it is likely that mankind shall once again descend from the same mountain of Ararat. If we forget the Armenians we forget our history and imperil our future.
Hovhanness I. Pilikian
4 February 2014

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

Now there is a headline you don't read too often. Dick Skellington explains.

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

If the left could get a few more "normal" people on side, perhaps it wouldn’t be left to the reactionary right to shake up the political establishment, writes James Bloodworth.

And yet despite this, the party attracts widespread working class support. The average Kipper is more likely to have finished education at 16 or under than voters of the three main parties and is less likely to be university-educated or have an income over £40,000. In explaining the UKIP phenomenon, the media enjoys waxing lyrical about disillusioned right-wing Tory voters, but far more interesting is the class background of many of the UKIP’s prospective voters: these are conservatives but with very little to be conservative about.  

In part this is the result of a clash between the London-based liberal left and the working class on whose behalf the former supposedly speak. Labour leader Ed Miliband is regularly chastised for betrayal by metropolitan types if he breathes so much as a word about immigration or welfare, yet the working class has fewer scruples. A majority of Labour voters believe benefits cuts are essential to make people stand on their own two feet, while economically insecure groups are "dramatically more hostile" to immigration than the middle classes, according to the 2012 British Social Attitudes Survey.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to find that those with most to lose from a party which harks back to the days of corporal punishment and tripe shops are attracted to UKIP through fear of immigrants and "scroungers". Anxiety is, after all, a fairly effective tool when deployed against the economically marginalised.

But I suspect something else is at work. In recent decades, not only have the two main political parties increasingly converged in terms of policy, but the pool which parliamentary talent is drawn from has become appreciably smaller, especially so for Labour. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, 40 per cent of Labour MPs had done some kind of manual or clerical work before they entered parliament. By 2010, that figure had dropped to just nine per cent. Changes in the labour market undoubtedly account for some of this shift, but the extent to which parliament is rapidly (once again) becoming the talking shop of the upper middle classes is evident in other data too. An astonishing 91 per cent of the 2010 intake of MPs were university graduates and 35 per cent were privately educated. This is a rise on previous elections and, in the case of the latter, compares to just seven per cent of the school-age population as a whole.

To some extent, politics has always been the preserve of the comfortable, but for a time there was a degree of travel in the opposite direction which reflected wider societal efforts to reduce inequality. During the 20th century, the social democratic settlement enabled a reduction in the gap between the highest and lowest earners and, as a consequence, a corresponding increase in social mobility. It also saw an unprecedented number of parliamentarians from modest backgrounds, such as Aneurin Bevan, Ernest Bevin and Edward Heath, to name just a few. However, in the last 30 years the direction of travel has been very much in the opposite direction, with it becoming increasingly certain that a person born to a poor home will die in a poor home. The unprecedented degree to which the playing field has been skewed in favour of the well-off is, unsurprisingly, reflected in politics.

The gradual disappearance of the working class from mainstream political life has created fertile ground for the type of anti-politics espoused by Farage. Recent polling by Lord Ashcroft found that a majority of UKIP voters were motivated, not by fondness for any particular UKIP policy, but by a more visceral feeling that UKIP is "on the side of people like me" and that "UKIP’s heart is in the right place".

Many commentators will attribute this to the mysterious "Farage effect" and the UKIP leader’s uncanny ability to connect with "ordinary voters". It is certainly a demagogic strand of populism which Farage is versed in, but I suspect the so-called Farage effect is at least in part no more than the UKIP leader’s ability to talk and act like a normal human being, rather than a weird automaton who’s been groomed for office since stepping out of short trousers.

I don’t wish to patronise people by claiming that the working classes need to be talked down to (I’m from a single-parent working class family, before I’m told to check my privilege), but even if his policies are bonkers, Nigel Farage comes across well with us "ordinary people" because he gives a very passable impression of being more than a little like us. Despite his less than horny-handed background, Farage behaves like someone who has at least some experience of life outside the upper middle class political and journalistic hivemind. At a time when the vast majority of the political class sound about as detached from reality as a Brezhnev apparatchik (and about as inspiring), being normal goes a long way.
As well as being a moral imperative, if the left could get a few more "normal"–  see working class – people into politics, then perhaps it wouldn’t be left to a Little Englander of the reactionary right to shake up the political establishment.
James Bloodworth
12 February 2014

James Bloodworth is a political journalist and editor of Left Foot Forward. This article is reproduced with kind permissions from the New Statesman.

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

Bram Gieben, Social Science Staff Tutor in Scotland, reflects on what it was like to work with the great Stuart Hall (pictured), who died on 10 February. 

Newspapers and airwaves are full of obituaries for Stuart Hall, the celebrated public intellectual, and former Professor of Sociology at the Open University who died this week. Stuart’s intellectual range was phenomenal. His reputation world-wide.