Fireworks in Vancouver

There are moments in your life when your senses are especially acute and which always remain in your memory. One such moment for me was sitting on a beach in the dark in West Vancouver in 2000. That summer, I attended an international academic conference in Seattle. I brought my wife and children with me to expand the conference into a family holiday. We found cheap flights to Vancouver, hired a car, and explored the Vancouver area before driving South of the border to stay in the University District of Seattle. After the conference, we returned North via a ferry to Sidney on Vancouver Island, travelled up the Island and then returned via the Sunshine Coast to Vancouver. This was followed by a circular tour around a small part of the Lower Mainland.

But the first part of the holiday coincided with the Celebration of Light - an international firework competition held every year in Vancouver. We watched from one of the beaches (Dundarave Park or Millennium Point?) on the North Shore. In the dark, we could just see other spectators, all quietly sitting and watching the fireworks on the other side of the dark waters of English Bay. While we watched, we heard a vast freight train, half a mile long, slowly rumbling out on the railway line behind us. We then saw it in the flashes of the fireworks. The train was heading from the City’s docks, going West so that it could go East. After passing West Vancouver, it would have headed North past the Coast Range, past Whistler, and by daylight would have reached the rail junction at Prince George. From there, it might have headed on Canadian National tracks East to Winnipeg and Chicago, carrying the good of the Orient across the continent.

Doomism and the doomists

The greatest change in politics in my lifetime has been the replacement of hope and fear by gloom and despair. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was fear of imminent nuclear war. But set against that was a hope that a better society could be created, with a comfortable life for all people, free from the fear of poverty and free from the cruelty and humiliation suffered by many. This idea that people could hope for a better world was a creation of the 19th Century. Before then (and still in some parts of the world today), the lives of most people were short and hungry, at the mercy of the powerful, and with the probability of watching half your children die. Not surprisingly, most people believed that their only hope for a better existence would be after their death.

Yet despite living in an appalling century of war and mass murder, many people in Europe in the middle of the 20th Century voted for political parties that held out hope. This was true of the right as well as the left. The left held out the promise of personal security against illness and poverty through the creation of a welfare state, government action to maintain full employment, and restraining the economic power of the wealthy. The right promised to achieve more or less the same aims by facilitating home ownership and rewarding economic enterprise. One side emphasised social solidarity: the other personal responsibility.

Both these routes to a better world now seem blocked. It is proving increasingly difficult to fund the welfare state because of population change. Most people now join the labour-force five or six years later than was the case in the 1960s, while greater life-expectancy has produced an increasing proportion of elderly in the population. As a result, there are fewer people in work to fund a comfortable retirement for the elderly, whether this be through public provision (taxation or social insurance) or private means (personal savings or annuities). The right-wing promise of a property-owning society is also threatened. Rapid rises in house prices make purchase out of the reach of most people, particularly since many young people are also paying off student loans.

This has led to two typical responses. One is to abandon politics altogether and resort to fantasy. The fantasy is that wealth and happiness will be achieved by winning the lottery, being recognised as a new singing star on the X Factor, or having a son talented enough at football to be signed for the Premier League. An alternative fantasy is that the purchase of some new consumer good will transform your personality and very identity. This is exploited by advertisers, who now offer mystical experiences or at the very least utter bliss as the result of buying a new car. Driving a BMW or an AUDI has now become the modern equivalent of attending mass.

The second typical response is ‘doomism’. This is the belief that our current way of life will end catastrophically within our lifetimes, and that only a few will find shelter in some distant retreat. There have, of course, always been people who predicted the imminent end of the world based on their reading of the Bible, with survival in paradise available only to the select few who joined their particular version of Christianity. While awaiting the apocalypse, believers often gathered in Godly communities here on earth, perhaps so that they could be easily identified when the end came. They attempted to make their Godly communities very models of the just society or heaven. Some became cruel habitations of conformity. But others, like Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, became tolerant and progressive societies.

Belief in an imminent apocalypse is still strong in parts of the USA, but in Europe it has been supplanted by a new secular doomism, based on the belief that the natural life of the planet is fatally imperilled by over-population, pollution or, alternatively, by the excessive consumption of natural resources. Doomists attribute these problems either to capitalism (now labelled as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’), or just to the innate greed and stupidity of human beings. For this kind of doomist, shelter is found in small self-sufficient communities away in the hills. And so they gather to await eco-doom in towns like Totnes, Stroud, and Machynlleth. Like the earlier religious doomists, they try and implement their ideas, in this case with local currencies, community gardens, recycling exchanges and cycleways. In the process, they turn their shelters into some of our most desirable and innovative communities.

Tadeo Cumella: the great all-father

Doing family history when you have an unusual surname should be a bit of a doddle. There have never been many people called ‘Cumella’ living in the UK, and all of them, as far as I can tell, are descendants of one man, Tadeo Cumella. Tadeo was a native of Barcelona and ‘Cumella’ is a Catalonian name, although it is also found in Western Sicily. This probably results from migration during the centuries in which Sicily and Catalonia were united under the Kingdom of Aragon. Most people called ‘Cumella’ in the Americas seem to be descendants of migration from Sicily.

The name ‘Tadeo Cumella’ is a shortened version of the rather more splendid ‘Tadeo Joseph Torebso Cumella y Alsina’. The ‘y Alsina’ suffix, in common with the usual Spanish custom, adds the maiden surname of his mother. If our family had followed this practice, I would be called by the less splendid name of ‘Stuart John Cumella and Smith’.

There is the usual information about Tadeo from censuses and other public records, but one unusual source is his application in 1874 to be naturalised as a British subject. This is now kept in the National Archives in Kew, and includes a summary of his life to that date, together with testimonials from various ‘natural-born British subjects’, and a statement from the Chief Constable of Liverpool that during his time in this country Tadeo “has borne a good character and moved in a respectable position in life”.

The biographical details on the application reveal that Tadeo was born in Barcelona on 16th April 1836, and worked from 1861 as a storekeeper to the engine room on a Spanish ship called the ‘Tajo’, which plied between Spain and England. He was married in June 1863 and in February 1865 finally settled in Liverpool. The application does not give the name of his wife, but other records identify her as Matilda Jane Davenport. The application notes that his wife was English and that they were married in St Brides Church in Liverpool. A marriage in the Church of England suggests that Tadeo had dropped any allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church by this time. This is in line with what I know of my family, who are not noted for their spirituality. By the time of the application, Tadeo and Matilda had five children: Tadeo Robert Hugh; John William; Ezra; Daniel; and Matilda Jane.

Tadeo’s first job on land was as a shipsmith with Caleb Smith & Co. But in November 1868, he went into partnership with a Basque living in Liverpool named ‘Juan Bautista Marcelino De Abaitua’. Their firm was known as ‘Abaitua and Cumella’, described as ‘shipwrights’. 1874 was an eventful year for Tadeo. After the naturalisation process was completed, the partnership was dissolved and Tadeo set up in business independently as a ships’ chandler. His wife and his son John William both died, but a new daughter, Ruth Davenport was born. It is possible that his wife died in childbirth, but I will need to get copies of death certificates to confirm whether this was the case. Tadeo married again, to Hannah Roberts, in 1877. They had one child, John Cumella, who was my paternal grandfather. Tadeo died on the 21st May 1900, and Hannah in 1904.

Beyond these records, I have little information about the Cumella family. My father was born after both his paternal grandparents had died, and I was born several years after the death of John Cumella. There was therefore no opportunity for the fruitful discussions across the generations that can take place between grandparents and grandchildren. I must therefore rely on any other records I will find in future.

I would like to thank the compiler of the de Abaitua family history on Ancestry.com for the photograph of Tadeo Cumella. I would also like to thank my son Andrew for gathering material at Kew and finding the de Abaitua website.

See also: Antoni Cumella: the greatest Cumella of them all

Planning in Wonderland

Last week I went to a seminar on neighbourhood planning organised by our local Conservative MP, Harriet Baldwin. Like her previous seminar on rural broadband, it aimed to promote the achievements of the Government, but also revealed a great deal about how decisions are really made in our country.

The first speaker was John Howell, the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames and the man who had developed his party’s proposals for neighbourhood planning and ‘localism’. He told us that, thanks to the Localism Act, the top-down planning associated with the previous Labour government had been abolished. Thousands of pages of detailed planning guidance had been replaced by the 60 pages or so of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Districts councils were no longer bound by the targets for new house building in each district set out in the Regional Spatial Strategies drawn up by civil servants. Instead, each district council can now specify the numbers of houses it needs, based on its own estimate of population growth. These are then written into the district council’s local development plan. Any neighbourhood plans within the district have to conform to the strategic objectives set out in the district’s plan, but can vary the details. They can, for instance, change the recommended locations for new housebuilding.

After a few more speakers enthusiastically promoted neighbourhood planning, the seminar ended with Councillor Paul Swinburn, also a Conservative and the Deputy Leader of Malvern Hills District Council. I suspect Paul has never been a fire-breathing radical, but he spoke with a polite sort of anger about the real world of planning as experienced in our district. Our version of the district development plan has been developed in co-operation with two other district councils and is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP). After an elaborate series of consultation meetings, it has been forwarded to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for an assessment by a planning inspector. A planning inspector is a civil servant acting in a ‘quasi-judicial capacity’ (ie he pretends to be an independent arbiter). The planning inspector will oversee an even more elaborate consultation process, until the SWDP is finally approved in about a year’s time. Paul said that while this process is underway, Malvern Hills and the other two district councils are receiving numerous planning applications from developers who propose to build houses on sites not specified in the SWDP. When the district councils turn down these applications, they are approved on appeal by a planning inspector on the grounds that the district council has failed to identify an adequate ‘five year land supply’.

The NPPF requires each district council to identify a ‘five year land supply’ (ie sites which have been approved for housing development sufficient to meet the estimated need for new houses over the next five years). But who decides the number of houses needed for the next five years? The planning inspectors could use the detailed estimates in the SWDP which, although not finally approved, has been agreed by the elected representatives of over 286,000 people in South Worcestershire. But the decisions of our elected representatives count for little with planning inspectors, who are continuing to use the higher figures from the old Regional Spatial Strategy, even though these have (allegedly) been abandoned by the Government.

Clearly, there are two worlds of local planning: there is reality, as experienced by the residents of South Worcestershire, in which housebuilding corporations can build what they like where they like; and there is the Wonderland of triumphant localism inhabited by some members of Parliament.

See also: How green was my village
Confessions of a parish councillor

Dampened spirits

Last Saturday, I helped man the Parish Council stall at the Village Fete (called the ‘Horticultural Show’ in our village). Both the day before and the day after were warm and sunny, but on Saturday there was a cold wind and a hint of rain. Our stall comprised a collapsible gazebo with a banner tied to it. The banner acted as a mainsail, and the gazebo was soon blown over. Large tent pegs and lines were then used to hold it in place. A gazebo, unlike a tent, has no side panels and so gave us little protection against the weather. We sat at our table, hunched against the wind, trying to stop our paperwork blowing across the field. The gazebo, bought for the occasion, began to tear and buckle. One metal rod snapped after a particularly fierce gust.

Elsewhere on the field, there were stalls organised by the Women’s Institute (cakes), the Horticultural Society (plants), the Geological Society (rocks), the local history society (old photographs), as well as horse-riding, community games, old vehicles, a car boot sale, a dog handling show, music, a barbecue, second-hand books, hand-made jewellery, and a little tourist train. Inside the village hall, there was tea and sandwiches. The whole event was a sign of the remarkable ability of people in English villages to organise themselves, and their determination to carry on in adverse weather. Nevertheless, we all agreed that attendance was lower than last year, and that the predominant mood was one of endurance rather than enjoyment.

It was therefore irritating to read in the local paper that “Despite gloomy weather on Saturday, spirits were not dampened in Martley, near Worcester, when villagers turned out in their hordes to enjoy this year’s village show”. The ‘spirits not dampened’ cliché was used over and over again in the dreadful BBC commentary on the Royal Jubilee procession along the Thames last year. It was an insult to our intelligence then and it remains so now. Of course our ‘spirits’ were ‘dampened’, but we carried on stoically and made the best we could of the experience. In my case, this included several interesting discussions with the people who visited our gazebo, and eating a really good cake from the Women’s Institute.

Persecuting the irritating victim

My career as a social worker began in Birmingham Social Services Department, just after the department had been formed in the early 1970s. I was then an ‘unqualified social worker’, and eventually left after only a year to train for my qualification. But that one year gave me a bookshelf of memories of how some of the more bizarre members of society behave, of the distress and suffering caused by misfortune, disability and mental illness, and of how organisations of well-meaning people can add to this suffering.

The most skilled social workers in the Area 8 team of Birmingham Social Services Department had been inherited from the former Children’s Department of the local authority. They were involved in two sorts of work: fostering and adoption; and child protection. The social workers took great care in assessing the suitability of prospective foster parents and adoptive parents, and placing children with the most appropriate family. Adoption in those days usually meant placing newborn babies with married couples who wanted children but were unable to have them. Where did the babies come from? As far as I could work out, a constant supply of babies for adoption were produced by unmarried teenage girls. Even in the early 1970s, there was a general assumption that teenage girls would be unable to support illegitimate children. They were therefore encouraged to spend time in a ‘mother and baby home’, from which they emerged having given birth but without their baby. Television programmes like ‘Long Lost Families’ show the long-term distress suffered by many of these women, now in their sixties.

Older children in the care of the local authority were usually placed with foster parents, in children’s homes, or, if they had committed offences, in residential ‘approved schools’. Many Roman Catholic children went to the nearby Father Hudson’s children’s home in Coleshill, a large orphanage-type building, where they were sexually and physically abused by a team of priests and nuns. The social workers in my team regarded the home as strict, but would have been outraged to learn of the abuse inflicted on the children in its care. The department at that time was in the process of moving residential care for children into smaller homes and making greater use of fostercare. Father Hudson’s home eventually closed in 1988 and the building was destroyed by an arsonist in June 2013.

Services for disabled people in the Area 8 team were mainly provided by occupational therapists and unqualified social workers. They faced the usual problem of front-line staff in public services - insufficient funds to provide the services to which people are supposed to be entitled. The most important of these services were the aids and adaptations for people with physical disabilities. These were rationed by waiting-list, modified for some clients who were regarded as having priority need. In a few cases,  modification could work in the opposite direction. One client I remember was of working age but had suffered an industrial injury which had damaged his back. He was intelligent and assertive, and put forward a series of requests for adaptations that were more comprehensive and expensive than the department was used to paying for. This caused great resentment, particularly for my senior social worker, who began to block his requests and even argued that he was demonstrating an obsessional behaviour that endangered the welfare of his child.

The social work team, for all its faults, did try hard to match their response to their perception of their client’s needs. They were ‘person-centred’ in the grotesque phrase now used in public services. But this was not true of all public agencies. One of the worst was the artificial limb and appliance centre (ALAC), which was at that time part of central government. I was allocated a case of an elderly couple in which the husband needed to use a wheelchair, in which his wife pushed him to the shops. She was finding this increasingly difficult, and so I applied to the ALAC to supply one of their new powered wheelchairs designed to make pushing easier. However, this turned out to be faulty and could only move at running pace. The ALAC were unwilling to modify the wheelchair, or even admit that it was faulty. At the time I left the social services department, they had approached my senior social worker to determine how to get the wife categorised as mentally-incapable of operating the wheelchair.

These two clients were examples of ‘irritating victims’, or people who, wilfully or unwittingly, fail to conform to the expected behaviour of the clients of a government or local government department and thereby become subject to retaliation. I do not know how their story ended, but some irritating victims of government departments can endure years of persecution. One example is Omar Mahmoud Othman, a Palestinian who was granted asylum with his family by the Home Office in 1994 on the grounds of religious persecution. The Home Office may have regarded him as a potential line of communication to extreme jidhadist groups, but this changed after the events of 11 September 2001. Governments in the USA, the UK and elsewhere then fell into a great fear, stripping away the legal protections of citizens and identifying all Muslims as potential terrorists. On the basis of hearsay, the British government decided Omar was a ‘terrorist mastermind’. There was no evidence against him that would survive a criminal prosecution, and so in 2002 the Home Office imprisoned him without trial and began proceedings to have him deported. However, Omar gained the support of various human rights lawyers who exploited the incompetence of the Home Office, and the original deportation was dragged through endless courts before it finally succeeded in 2013.

Throughout this period, no evidence was ever presented in court about Omar’s alleged involvement in terrorism. This is probably because his real offence was to have deeply irritated the Home Office and thereby became the subject of prolonged persecution. Another factor, however, was that Omar looked the part of a terrorist, as envisaged by the media pantomime. He had lost a hand and instead had a rather menacing hook. His wife wore the conventional head to toe black clothes of the ultra-orthodox Muslim woman. Omar is of course usually known now as ‘Abu Qatada’. He has been demonised. Time will tell who the real demons are.

See also The curse of the generic

How green was my village

England is the most crowded country on the mainland of Europe, with an average of 395 people/square kilometre. Yet there are still places in England where you can look around and see only hills, woods and fields, and where you can travel down narrow country lanes to small villages clustered round an ancient church. I live in one such village in West Worcestershire, where the flood plain of the River Severn meets the long ridge of wooded hills which reach North from the Malverns. Our village is not picture-perfect: there is no village green or duckpond, the village pub is closed, and we have a small industrial estate, a primary school and a high school. But the village is in a verdant setting of hills, woods and fields that is dear to all who live here.

So much of rural England survives because laws were passed in the 1940s to prevent destructive development. National parks, green belts, conservation areas and local planning authorities all date from this period. Development has of course taken place, but country villages have usually been preserved rather than replaced by speculative housing. All this is changing, and developers can now essentially build what they like where they like. In my village, the district council has approved an estate of 51 new houses on good quality land that has been farmed for over a thousand years. This was strongly opposed in the village, which would have preferred smaller infill developments to meet local housing need. I spoke on behalf of the Parish Council in the public session of the district council meeting to oppose the development. But it was nevertheless approved, largely because the district council has no alternative.

There is no alternative because the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in 2012 specifies ‘a presumption in favour of sustainable development’, and requires each district council to identify sites for housing in its local plan sufficient to meet the ‘housing need’ of its population for the next five years. But all the local plans that existed before the NPPF have now been superseded and none of their successors have yet been approved by the Secretary of State. District councils which have refused to give planning permission for unsuitable developments have found that planning inspectors have almost always overturned their decision, and that the building has gone ahead. In such cases, the district council is penalised financially by having to meet the costs of the applicant and by losing access to the funds usually paid by applicants to meet the additional expenditure (roads, schools, village halls etc) incurred by the local authority as a result of the new development. In such a climate, district councils can do little but try and negotiate the best deal they can with the developer and then approve the application.

We therefore have a parody of local democracy followed by a parody of a judicial process, which all works to enrich the corporations that build houses and supermarkets. An essential role for governments is to rationalise all this with hooray words like ‘sustainable’. The development in my village was deemed ‘sustainable’ because it will be built in a village with a reasonable range of local services. Never mind the loss of farming land to build 51 oil-fired houses, or the increase in the number of people who will need to commute by car to Worcester and more distant cities. ‘Sustainable’ has thus joined words like ‘modernisation’, ‘liberation’, and ‘choice’ which serve to cloak the darker designs of our politicians and their masters.

See also: Confessions of a parish councillor
Going local

A self-educated Shakespeare

Behind every event in history, behind every human achievement, there lurks a conspiracy theory. There are those who propose that the twin towers in New York were destroyed by a vast conspiracy of the CIA, Israel and/or George Bush, that John Kennedy was assassinated by another vast conspiracy comprising Lyndon Johnson, the Mafia and the Cuban Government, that all the Apollo moon landings were faked, and that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him by those who knew him well.

Bill Bryson has reviewed the Shakespeare conspiracy theories in his excellent book Shakespeare: the World as a Stage. He notes that no-one ever dreamt of suggesting an alternative author until the middle of the 19th Century, when an American writer proposed that the Shakespeare’s plays and poems had really been written by Sir Francis Bacon (later Viscount St Albans). Candidates put forward by later conspiracy theorists have included The 17th Earl of Oxford (who died several years before many of the plays were first performed) and the 3rd Earl of Southampton. No direct evidence has ever been proposed to support these bizarre theories, but they usually rest on two assumptions, which say rather more about the conspiracy theorists than about Shakespeare himself.

The first assumption is that Shakespeare could not have been the author because he was not an aristocrat (and therefore could not have been clever enough). However, it is rather hard to think of any of members of the English aristocracy, now or in the past, who have written a decent play or poem. In Shakespeare’s time, members of the aristocracy certainly supported, funded and protected artists, but they would no more have thought of writing plays than of polishing their own brasses or mucking out their own stables. Writing plays at that time was an artisan activity, comparable to writing modern television soap operas. I have speculated in an earlier blog that Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to order as a financial transaction. The idea that only an aristocrat could possibly have written such superb works of imagination tells us that the proponents of this conspiracy theory are appalling snobs.

The second assumption is that Shakespeare could not have written his works because he did not go to university, and therefore could not learnt about the classics. However, he almost certainly did go to Stratford Grammar School where (in common with other such schools of that time), ‘grammar’ meant Latin grammar. Pupils studied the classics in Latin from dawn to dusk in at atmosphere of compulsory and relentless learning backed by harsh punishment. Although these educational methods are no longer in favour, they were probably effective in inculcating knowledge. Shakespeare may have emerged with a better grasp of the classic dramas and poetry than all but a few present-day university graduates specialising in these subjects.

But of course, formal education is only a part of learning. People with active minds go on learning throughout their lives. They learn new skills and improve existing ones, travel to new places, and accumulate knowledge about new areas of interest. Such people, whatever they have learnt in formal schooling, are essentially self-educated. Self-education not only means that people develop new skills and knowledge, but it helps them maintain what they have already learnt. For knowledge is not like a sheaf of papers put in a filing cabinet, available to a person when required. Rather, it is like a channel, which will silt up unless water constantly flows through it.

People who do not have active minds can only absorb what they have been taught in schools or universities, and learn nothing subsequently. They therefore find it incomprehensible that a person can become educated through his or her own efforts - that a glover’s son from a small market town could learn the skills to become an actor, playwright and poet, or possess the imagination to describe the dramas of people in distant lands and far-off times.




See also: Yet another theory about Shakespeare's sonnets

My holiday home in Ruritania

I went earlier this month with my wife to see Coppélia, performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet. This was a great experience, and reminded me so much of our beloved holiday home in Ruritania. As I am sure you know, Ruritania is located in the heart of Mitteleuropa. We do not have a coastline, but there is a varied landscape of lakes, mountains, fields of golden wheat, and dark mysterious forests. Our holiday home is in a picturesque village (all the villages in Ruritania are picturesque), full of timber-framed houses with projecting eaves and crooked chimneys. Along the street, there is the village ale-house, outside which many of our jolly peasants sit drinking and laughing. From time to time, they jump up and start dancing enthusiastically. Across the street from the ale-house lives a comical old inventor, who builds lifelike dolls with ingenious clockwork mechanisms to move their arms and legs.

There are few motor vehicles or trains in Ruritania, but many elegant horse-drawn carriages. Nor is Ruritania influenced by modern fashions: all our peasants wear elegant well-cut clothes, brightly-coloured, with cloaks, boots and hats. The local aristocracy are particularly well-dressed: the wife of the local prince is strikingly beautiful and is said to be violently jealous of any woman who is deemed more lovely.

Life in Ruritania is not all feasting and dancing, however. Few venture out into the forests at night. It is rumoured that young men who have been unfaithful and thereby caused the death of their lovers are haunted by their ghosts and forced to dance until they expire from exhaustion. Some say that at night the swans in the lake near our village turn into beautiful young women. Children who walk alone through the forests seem particularly at risk, and there are disturbing tales of them being chased by wolves or lured by evil old women promising gingerbread - a local delicacy.

When in Ruritania, my wife and I usually visit one or more of the local castles. One near our holiday home was abandoned about 20 years ago and is now completely overgrown with giant brambles. A more interesting castle just up the valley is the home of ancient line of counts, though these are rarely seen around the place during daytime. We have also visited the capital city Strelsau, which is of course the home of Ruritania’s royal family. Some people say the king looks a bit like me, but it would be a work of utter fiction if the two of us were ever confused.

Not staying focussed

Every person who is successful in whatever walk of life now claims that the secret of their success is their capacity to ‘stay focussed’. ‘Staying focussed’ has become a sort of magical mental state, recommended by advisors to the great majority of us who only lead lives of middling achievement. Like all clichés, ‘staying focussed’ is popular because it conveys certainty without any precise meaning. At its most mundane, it could mean that a person should concentrate on the task in hand or on some immediate ambition. In a broader sense it could it could mean that a person is advised to pursue self-advancement irrespective of effects on their health, their personal morality, their responsibility for others, the happiness of their family life, or the mental health of their children.

Of course, it is essential that for any great task to be completed a person or team of people must concentrate on understanding the problems they must overcome and work together to achieve success. But there are two problems with advising people to ‘stay focussed’. The first is that their greatest ambition in life can or should not be achieved. It is amusing to watch programmes like The X-Factor and see contestants who utterly lack both talent and insight. Their rejection by the panel evokes bewilderment, anger and a renewed determination to succeed at becoming stars - even though ‘success’ will probably in their case mean little more than a wasted lifetime of singing out-of-tune to diminishing audiences. All of us, but especially the most focussed, need to learn what we are not good at. That is not to say that we should avoid activities in which we do not excel. We may of course gain great pleasure from singing, dancing, stamp-collecting or whatever: we should persist in such activities even if we recognise that we will never be world-class. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing even if we do it badly.

The second problem with being ‘focussed’ is that people who concentrate on the task in hand lose sight of the broader picture: they do not see the system. We have all met junior members of staff who rigidly apply the rules of their job even where this undermines the purpose of their employer. But this becomes truly damaging in senior management and politics. Alistair Darling’s memoirs of his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Back from the Brink) looks at the events leading up to the collapse of the banking system. He notes that the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) were used to assessing the financial stability of individual banks: they did not take into account the massive extent to which banks borrowed from each other, such that the collapse of one bank would topple all the others. The staff at the Bank of England and the FSA were so focussed that they could not see the whole system. Nor indeed were there any senior civil servants in the Treasury with an understanding of the whole system.

A similar failure has occurred recently with the crisis in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals. The Government has made substantial cuts in funding to local authorities. These have responded by reducing the support the provide for the elderly, the disabled and the mentally-ill. As a result, vulnerable people are discharged from hospital, are unable to care for themselves and are rapidly re-admitted. Governments have persistently failed to see that health and social care services are essentially a single system: cutting expenditure on social services results in expensive hospital beds becoming blocked by people who could remain in their own home (or in a care home) at a better quality of life and less public expense.

Why is system-thinking so rare? The main reason is that it is difficult and becoming more so. System-thinking requires a breadth of knowledge of how many different sorts of institutions operate and the ability to analyse their inter-connectedness. But as society becomes more complicated, people must work ever harder to understand their own small part of it. It is often said that academics advance by knowing more and more about less and less. But the same is true of many other occupations. As a result, people specialise and become experts in their own narrow field or organisation and see the rest of the world as their ‘environment’, either predictable or the origin of unexpected and incomprehensible demands.

Perhaps we need a new set of clichés. Instead of encouraging people to ‘stay focussed’, we should advise them to ‘always see the broader picture’ or ‘look at how it all works together’, or even ‘try not to be too focussed on one small piece of the jigsaw’.

The ancient of day's marking

During my career as an academic member of staff at the University of Birmingham, I probably marked thousands of essays, from both undergraduates and postgraduates. The most miserable experience was marking hundreds of medical student examination papers at a time. As with most markers, I became a sort of machine. I would devise a checklist of suitable responses to each question and tick the number of times each student used one. I could thereby mark each mini-essay in two or three minutes. Much more enjoyable were the essays written by undergraduate medical students for their elective project on learning disability and health, which I still teach and mark. Students choose their own topic within this field and always produce long essays that are stimulating and, in some cases, worthy of publication.

A further problem with marking is not just the number of scripts to mark, but also the requirement to assign a numerical score to a long essay. It was different when I worked with my colleague Dr Beryl Smith when we set up our postgraduate masters course in intellectual (‘learning’) disabilities in 1992. Students completed eight assignments (each of which would be answered by long essays of between 1500 and 3000 words) and a dissertation of 15,000 words. Students were encouraged to write about their area of special clinical interest (such as challenging behaviour, epilepsy and so on). We decided that only four grades were required to mark each assignment to an acceptable standard of reliability. We gave a B if the student met the specified requirement for the assignment, a C if they answered the question but did not argue their case well or failed to draw on sufficient evidence. We gave an A where the answer was a high standard and would be publishable in a professional journal. Finally, the failed D grade was given where the student did not meet the requirements of the essay assignment. To make this scheme work, we needed to make sure the requirements of the assignment were stated clearly, and we included details of our marking-scheme. This system was reliable because there were only three grade boundaries (A/B, B/C and C/D) to decide. We double-marked all assignments and usually came to rapid agreement on the grading for each essay.

All this of course would look like mollycoddling to the sort of academic who believes that the only aims of examinations are to catch students out and identify a would-be elite. Beryl and I took a different approach: we believed that the purpose of our course and hence the marking of assignments was to help students learn to become more reflective and effective practitioners. This would, indirectly, be our contribution to improving the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. The purpose of the assignments was not just to decide whether each student’s work was of an acceptable standard, but also to help us measure their progress, and see what areas required some individual attention. As important as the grade, therefore, were the detailed comments we completed on each essay, identifying how the student could improve what they had written, areas of strength they could develop, and areas of weakness they could concentrate on improving.

Beryl eventually retired and the University introduced new regulations that stipulated that all marking should be numerical. Instead of our four grades with clear descriptions and marked to a high degree of reliability, we had to use percentages. What nobody could tell me was what they were a percentage of. If students are set a large number of questions to answer (for instance in a maths exam), then it is possible to calculate the percentage they answered correctly. This only has any meaning of course if each question is deemed to be of equal difficulty and all questions can be marked as either ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. But to give a ‘percentage’ for an essay suggests that this is the degree to which it approximates to some perfect essay. No such perfect essay exists. Indeed, it seems rare in universities for any essay, however good, to be given more than 85 ‘percent’. At the lowest end of the scale, I have once or twice given a mark of 35 ‘percent’, but I think that almost all marks for essays fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Since it is not possible to define what marks are a percentage of, the marks are not actually percentages at all: they are ‘pseudo-percentages’. They are an example of the belief that scores and numbers are preferable to description, even when they are used to supposedly measure things that are inherently non-numerical. Academic psychologists are probably the most prone to this disorder, ‘measuring’ such diverse concepts as intelligence, affection, extroversion and so on with numerical scales calculated by summing answers to sets of questions or assigning weights to responses to various ingenious types of numeric scales. Sooner or later, people come to believe that because it is possible to assign a numerical score, then there must be a thing corresponding to it. So  many believe there is an entity called ‘intelligence’ which you can either have a lot of or a little of. This is despite the common-sense observation that people often have a very uneven pattern of mental skills, being, for instance, brilliant at thinking through maths problems but incompetent at remembering times and dates.

The urge to assign scores to people also says something about the people assigning the scores. No competent clinical psychologist would believe that an individual patient could be summarised by a few numerical test scores. Instead, each patient is seen as unique, perhaps having some familiar categories of problems, but still assessed and treated as an individual. A clinical psychologist and academics like myself and Beryl can afford to treat people as individuals because we are assessing so few of them. Once organisations become involved in processing large numbers of people, they see people as numbers. This has happened to many universities. There may be hundreds of students in a single year of an undergraduate course, knowing little of the academics who teach it and having few chances to exchange ideas with them. Indeed, some universities try hard to prevent any such exchange, placing their academic staff in research centres and laboratory blocks behind locked doors, inaccessible to mere undergraduate students. They have become people-processing institutions which, like business corporations, are judged not by how they improve the lives of ordinary citizens but by how much income they generate. Cash has thus become the supreme number which measures all. It is the Modern of Days, replacing the Ancient of Days in William Blake’s painting.

See also

Rural superfast broadband coming very slowly

I have worked as an academic and for a few years before that as a practitioner in the wonderful world of health and social care. I have therefore got used to the usual shambles, in which people with severe and complex needs can fail to get the help they need, or go through several repeated assessments and get passed between different agencies, each of which applies its own criteria for who it does and does not help. I had assumed in my innocence that this problem was unique to the welfare state, but it is not. Earlier this month, I went to a conference on rural broadband. This was called by our local MP Harriet Baldwin, and included a presentation by another Conservative MP Rory Stewart. Both are people who have achieved much in their lives before becoming members of Parliament. Both seemed helpless before the problem of bringing high-speed broadband to rural areas.

The problem is not technical. The fastest and most effective means of transmitting voice and data is optical fibre. In urban areas, this is usually connected directly to people’s homes or at least to the local ‘cabinet’ (ie the small unmanned station from which lines are distributed to individual premises). Where there is no optical fibre, signals are transmitted by the older system of copper wiring. This is much slower than optical fibre, can carry less data and, worse of all, signal speeds deteriorate the further down the copper wire it goes. In most rural areas, there are copper wires to the cabinet and from it. Download speeds are therefore as low as 2Mbits/second if you are lucky, and a lot less in scattered settlements in the countryside. This inhibits the development of rural employment, which include farms, small trading estates, small office parks next to farms, and enterprises run from people’s homes. There is general agreement that the best and most economical technical solution is an optical fibre connection to each cabinet, with a wireless transmitter from the cabinet to premises in line of sight, backed up by satellite connections for isolated locations.

What prevents this happening? It is not a lack of optic fibres in the countryside: there are plenty - connecting schools and along main roads and railway lines. There are also ‘dark fibre’ which exist in the ground but which is not used to transmit data. The real reason for failure is that optic fibre lines outside the cities are almost all owned by a BT, a giant corporation which was once a publicly-owned monopoly, but is now a private monopoly. And BT knows how to use its monopoly power. The government has stated a target for expanding superfast broadband to rural areas. BT supports this provided the government gives it with several billion pounds of public subsidy. The rationale for this is the supposed high cost of connecting cabinets to optic fibre lines and the limited additional income this would generate for BT in rural areas.

National and local governments do not have the level of funding required to pay BT to meet the target for rural broadband, and would in any case not be allowed by EU competition rules to subsidise a private corporation. So they have resorted to setting up an ‘arms-length’  agency called BDUK to work with competing providers. The competing providers were initially BT and Fujitsu. Both have had appalling records of wasting vast sums of public money in the failed NHS IT strategy. But never mind - the main activity of governments nowadays is to funnel cash to favoured private corporations, irrespective of the quality of service they eventually provide. Since BT owns the existing fibre optic lines, Fujitsu never had a realistic chance of bidding for rural broadband, but they did give an impression that there was some competition. However, this came to an end in March 2013, when Fujitsu withdrew. The system that now operates is that BDUK draws up detailed contracts for each local authority and then tenders them to the sole single provider (BT). All of these contracts involve the diversion of millions of pounds to the usual gang of management consultants, accountants and lawyers who are the real beneficiaries of the privatisation of public services. The other problem with public contracting also occurs: that the key information on costs is held by the provider. A recent report in the Daily Telegraph suggested that BT has inflated the cost of connecting rural cabinets to optic fibre. But these are the costs that have been written into the contracts.

How does this affect life in my village? We are lucky in already having  a network of wireless transmitters to enable people in outlying areas to access broadband (Martley Web Mesh). This existed well before any government ever considered rural broadband, and is a product of the sort of local enterprise that is by-passed in an over-centralised state like England. Unfortunately, the main transmitter for Martley Web Mesh is not linked to the optic fibre network, so Internet download speeds are about the same as the broadband received through telephone lines. But there are optic fibres in the village. In fact, BT owns a line to the local high school, which passes both the local cabinet and the main transmitter for Martley Web Mesh. But BT has no plans to connect optic fibre to the cabinet. 

Nevertheless, the existence of Martley Web Mesh (as well as several local trading estates near the village) should have made the parish a priority in the county’s strategy for rural broadband. Not so. Rather than prioritise places of employment or even places where an optic fibre connection to a cabinet would make the greatest difference, the county council has organised a competition. Each parish is supposed to sign up as many people as possible and the winner gets funding for high-speed broadband. The winner inevitably is a compact parish (Little Witley) in which it is an easy task to sign up a high proportion of residents. Little Witley has just over 250 residents and few local employers. 

In Rory Stewart’s constituency, by contrast, their county council seems to have adopted the Maoist slogan of ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. Individual villages have taken direct action, including digging their own trenches and installing their own fibre optic cable and installing their own wireless transmitters. It is all to no avail. Once the homemade fibre optic network is installed, BT usually finds it impossible for ‘technical’ reasons to connect to the rest of its network. In the meantime, the months tick by, millions of pounds of public money are donated to a large private monopoly, management consultants etc, and rural broadband remains slow.

The answer to this shambles is a national strategy of the kind proposed by the House of Lords Committee, with a national optic fibre network with guaranteed open access. Our chance of getting this at present seem rather slim.

Links:    Martley Web Mesh
              House of Lords report Broadband for All

See also: Fire my Light

An encounter with Liverpool FC

Every so often, you encounter a strange event. I use that term to designate some meeting or ritual that is inexplicable or at least discordant. One such encounter took place in 1997 when I was a member of a team working for the NHS Health Advisory Service. The HAS at that time produced a series of policy reports on mental health care for different groups of people. I made contributions to reports on child and adolescent psychiatry, people with eating disorders, elderly people with mental disorders, and people with psychiatric disorders associated with Huntington’s Disease, acquired brain injury and early-onset dementia. Each report was produced by a team assembled and led by Professor Richard Williams. The team would spend several days visiting various services which had a reputation for delivering a high quality of treatment and care for the particular group of patients who were the subjects of the report. For each visit, team-members would be based at the same hotel, visit services during the day and spend any spare time discussing what they had found. At the end of the stay, Richard Williams would hand round laptops and tell each member of the team to prepare a draft of a particular part of the report before they checked out.

This production method was very successful. The HAS reports were well-written and edited (lacking the sort of vacuous pomposity of so many official reports), and had a high quality of design and layout. They set an agenda for how services should develop that continues to shape many areas of mental health. This success inevitably made the HAS unpopular with the senior officials of the Department of Health, and it was closed down at the turn of the millennium.

For the report on psychiatric disorders associated with Huntington’s Disease, acquired brain injury and early-onset dementia, the team visited services in Leicester, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Liverpool. In Liverpool, we stayed in a grand city centre hotel and scheduled our evening meeting in a room in the basement. While we were gathering in the foyer, there was an event in the ballroom next door. It was a warm evening and the doors were open. So we could see the footballers and directors of Liverpool Football Club making speeches in tribute to their departing team-mate Jan Mølby. The chairman of the event seemed to be Derek Hatton, former deputy leader of the City Council, once a leading figure in the Marxist Militant Tendency, and by that time some sort of businessman.

Sharing the foyer with us were several girls of about 11 or 12 years of age, dressed in the short skirts and uniforms of majorettes. They looked bored, and had, it seems, waited for some time to go into the ballroom and parade and dance for the footballers. Our meeting started before we could see them perform, and when we had finished the ballroom was empty. I can not imagine how the majorettes fitted into the farewell party, or why footballers would find pleasure in seeing young girls march up and down in uniform. But many organisations have their rituals, particularly when people leave. Some arrange for a strippogram or some other form of humiliation for the departing member of their team.

There were neither majorettes nor strippograms when my work with the HAS came to an end. Nor indeed, did anything of note happen when I left any the various jobs that comprised my working life. Just a short speech of thanks (of varying degrees of sincerity) from my boss, a card signed by my colleagues, and a present. Perhaps I should have been a footballer.

Margaret Thatcher: still in power?

Margaret Thatcher’s death has revived the controversy, rhetoric and hysteria of her time as prime minister. Her supporters claim  she ‘saved Britain’ from economic decline or even from a Marxist revolution; that she ended the Cold War, and that she was a beacon of liberty for much of the World. Her opponents make equally extreme claims: that she undermined the sense of mutual-responsibility in our society; that she destroyed British industry; and that by selling council houses, privatising public services and deregulating financial services (the ‘big bang’), she was responsible for the extreme inequality in this country. All of these policies have been designated by her opponents as ‘Thatcherism’, which is portrayed as an unstoppable political force, responsible for all our current ills.

Blaming Thatcher in this way is bizarre: she resigned as Prime Minister 23 years ago. She was succeeded by seven years of John Major, who had a far more conciliatory style of leadership, and then 13 years of New Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The two latter prime ministers, with substantial majorities in the House of Commons and leading a different political party could surely have reversed many aspects of ‘Thatcherism’ had they chose. The New Labour government did indeed begin with about two years of mild left-wing policies. Low income workers were helped by the introduction of the minimum wage and a 10p starting rate of income tax. There were some long-delayed constitutional reforms including the Human Rights Act, devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, and the exclusion of most hereditary peers from the House of Lords. There were also some sensible administrative reforms in the NHS.

After this, however, the New Labour government changed direction. There were substantial increases in expenditure on health, but an increasing proportion of this was allocated to fund independent providers. The NHS in England was substantially re-organised to facilitate competition between providers, and favourable contracts were given to private corporations to provide medicine and surgery.  From 2000, New Labour  expanded the programme of ‘city technology colleges’ (CTCs) set up by Margaret Thatcher’s government. These were renamed ‘academy’ schools, and, like the CTCs,  were ‘sponsored’ and de facto controlled by businessmen.

New Labour also retreated from its initial concern for low-paid workers. The 10p starting rate of income tax was abolished in the 2007 Budget, and loose immigration restrictions kept down wages. Benefits for disabled people were converted into Employment and Support Allowances in 2008, and the work of assessment contracted out to the French corporation ATOS Healthcare. Many people with severe disabilities or terminal illnesses have since been assessed as ‘fit for work’ on the basis of poorly-conducted assessments. The combined result of these measures was to maintain but not worsen the extreme inequality introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government. However, measures like Working Tax Credit introduced by New Labour did reduce the proportion of the population in poverty from 22% to 17%. 

The same desire to control public expenditure under the later years of the New Labour government did not apply with financial services. Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced a succession of tax changes benefiting the highest-paid, and created and promoted the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which channelled billions of pounds into banks, the accountancy corporations and other legal and financial services. Annual payments from taxes to the private corporations holding PFI contracts will rise to about £10 billion/year by 2017. ‘Light-touch regulation’ was used for the City of London, thereby  failing to prevent most of the country’s major banks becoming insolvent in 2008.

Until the crash in 2008, the largest financial returns were in property speculation and PFIs, rather than by investing in industry. This, combined with an overvalued pound resulted in a decline in British manufacturing industry to less than 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By comparison, manufacturing fell from 18% to 15% of GDP when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Finally, the New Labour government under Tony Blair began to use war as an instrument of foreign policy. Margaret Thatcher’s government had been involved in only one war, to defend the Falkland Isles from occupation by a murderous dictatorship. From 1997, the UK became involved in wars in Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Serbia and Kossovo, and Sierra Leone. 

With the exception of this greater commitment to military action, the New Labour government therefore continued and extended ‘Thatcherism’. The same policies have largely continued under the present coalition government, albeit in much more constrained financial circumstances and with less apparent desire to engage in war.

If Margaret Thatcher’s government was part of a policy continuum, how can we explain the extreme and rival claims about her influence? I think the reason is her style of politics rather than the specific policies she promoted. Margaret Thatcher was essentially a tribal rather than a national leader. When she spoke passionately of Britain, she did not mean all the inhabitants of this land. Instead, her phrase ‘people like us’ excluded whole categories of individuals and institutions. To her, the miners were the ‘enemy within’. She condemned the 96 dead Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough and exonerated the police. She would never travel on a train as long as the railways were a public enterprise rather than privately-owned.

Tribalism of this kind was characteristic of politics in her time, and was a driving force on much of the left as well as the right. But Margaret Thatcher was unique in British politics  in not even making a pretence of speaking for the whole country. Thismade her intolerable to those who did not see themselves as ‘one of us’. We endured night after night of her hectoring elocution-trained voice on television news, speaking with absolute certainty and without a trace of humour or compassion. I am prepared to believe that in her private life she showed kindness and concern for others. But this was rarely evident in her speeches. Margaret Thatcher’s death thus brought back this memory of misery for many of us. The only other person who had a similar effect, for me at least, was Jimmy Savile. He was a frequent visitor to Chequers when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and counted her as a friend. Perhaps they will be reunited in the afterlife. 

See also:
Meet the new boss - same as the old boss

Laws of Information 4 and 5

A long time ago, I proposed some ‘laws of information’, looking particularly at the kind of information available to manage large public organisation. These are as below:
1. Information is costly
2. Data is always less reliable than you think.
3. data that is collected to measure performance loses reliability
You can click these weblinks to access the relevant text for each law.

Here is another law:
4. There is always more information available than you first thought.
Natural science has advanced through ever-improved measurement techniques, of which the Large Hadron Collider is the most recent and by far the most expensive. Each area of science has its own preferred measurement technique, and great effort is expended in improving its accuracy and reliability. Social science works on very different principles: no single measure remotely approaches the levels of accuracy taken for granted in the natural sciences, and so social scientists draw on multiple sources of data to base their conclusions. This principle is also a good one for managing large public organisations like universities and hospitals, where there is also a mass of different information, sometimes of dubious reliability (for reasons why it is dubious, see Laws of Information 1-3).

Sadly, this principle is not always applied. Managers and politicians often focus on one (unreliable) measurement and ignore the others. In part, this is a consequence of a commitment to the written word. Nothing is truly believed to exist unless it has been written down, preferably on a form. Once written down, it is believed superior to all other forms of information such as observation, informal discussions with staff, or patients’ letters of complaint. The most holy of all written data is quantitative data, especially that emanating from a computer. This tendency is reinforced by the use by governments of simple quantitative targets to measure the complex activities of complex institutions.

As an example, look at the Stafford Hospital case. Analyses of routine data showed that the hospital was an outlier in mortality statistics for some surgical procedures (ie people were much more likely to die). This all explained in an excellent article in the London Review of Books, available here:
Rigging the death rate
If the hospital management had followed the Fourth Law of Information, they would have seen this analysis of mortality statistics as a sign that they should gather data from other sources. They could then have visited the wards and observed daily care, spoken to patients and staff, reviewed casenotes, checked how their staffing levels compared with those of other similar hospitals, or brought in some outside experts to do these things and advise. They don’t seem to have done any of this: instead, they decided to discredit the mortality statistics. Management consultants were brought in to change the diagnostic codes of patients who died in hospital. Researchers at Birmingham University were funded to discredit the use of statistics to assess hospital performance. Their report made the correct conclusion that statistics can be misleading and that one set of them should not be used exclusively to assess performance. But that of course misses the point. Being an outlier should be regarded as a warning sign rather than definitive proof. It should have indicated a need to collect other data. In other words, the truth is found not in one set of data, however tidily it is presented and however quantitative, but in a wide range of information, from which an informed person can make a judgement. This leads to the fifth law of information:
5. Interpreting information requires judgement.

The word ‘judgement’ of course will sound a warning bell to some. How much better to pretend that decisions follow automatically from the data without human intervention or the exercise of personal responsibility. Then all that is needed when things go wrong is for the relevant procedures to be blamed and amended. This defence (“I was only carrying out procedures”) is an effective life strategy in any large organisation, and may be a more reliable path to promotion than anticipating problems and taking the initiative in solving them. Look around, and you will see the consequences.

Memories of memories: the Great War

A few conversations between the old and the young take us back centuries. When I was a teenager, I knew two old men who had fought in the Great War. One I knew when I was a volunteer for the Visiting Service for Old People in Birmingham. He had joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment just after the start of the war in 1914, after lying about his age. He spent most of the war in the trenches of the Western Front, but was later transferred to the Italian Front. He had been wounded, was sent to the field hospital and missed some action. When he returned to his squad, he found that all his friends were dead. The second old man was a next door neighbour in Shirley. He too had been on the Western Front, and after the Armistice had advanced with the Army into Western Germany. He told me that he and his fellow soldiers did not like the French civilians they met, and were amazed when they occupied Germany to find people who seemed far more like themselves. “We’ve been fighting on the wrong side”, the soldiers said. 

These are memories of memories of events almost a hundred years ago. Both these men, when themselves teenagers, also may have talked to old men who in their youth had fought in distant wars: perhaps the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny. Assume a 50 years span of memory for such conversations, and only seven link me with someone who saw Shakespeare perform at the Globe, and the first settlers leave for New England. The past is closer than we think.

Living next to savages

My wife and I still live in the first home we moved into after we married, in Autumn 1983. This is in the village of Martley in Worcestershire, and is the third of four bungalows in a short unadopted road with the bungalows on one side of the road facing woodland on the other. At the end of our road, where it joins one of the main roads through the village, is a small green where children can play. In 1983, our neighbours were an elderly single lady on one side, and a pleasant family with two young sons on the other. The family left within a year and the Savages moved in. Mr and Mrs Savage were an elderly couple who had moved to our village after living in Devon. Devon, they told us, was an awful place. There was an erratic water supply, the roads were full of tourists, and the locals were unfriendly. Martley was much better.

It was not long, however, before this positive opinion began to change. The Savages totally opposed the idea that children could play on the small green at the end of the road. The noise of children playing, they said, made their life unbearable. This became a public campaign which involved shouting at children and demanding people sign a petition against their use of the green. Few, however, signed it. Indeed, their only supporters were their other neighbours, also an elderly couple. The lack of support from the rest of the village was a sign to the Savages that its inhabitants did not meet their own high standards. Mrs Savage told me “This village may be full of three and four-bedroom houses, but they are not three and four-bedroom people”. Another time, she complained that the village was little better than a slum. At the time, I was planting flowers in my front garden, under the dappled sunlight coming through the trees. Eventually, the Savages could bear it no longer and left for another village where, they assured me, people were far nicer and where they would be much happier. I thought this unlikely and suspected that their life followed a repeated cycle of optimism, disappointment, anger and evacuation. I therefore felt sorry for them.

I suspect that every village in England has at least one couple like the Savages: incomers who complain about church bells, the sound of cows mooing and sheep bleating, the noise from tractors in fields, and the happy sounds of children playing. This might be a product of the way country life is depicted on television, as an idyllic escape. In fact, one programme at present is called ‘Escape to the Country’. People who have experienced distress in a city may mistakenly come to believe that a village offers a life of absolute quiet, without the need to deal with other people. However, I think a more probable cause in some cases at least is subclinical paranoia. The person experiences noise as a kind of invasion of their identity, which they are unable to control. Children present particular problems for such people because children are spontaneous and joyful.

From my house, I can hear the children when they have their playtime in the village primary school across the fields. I can also hear the church bells on Sundays, at weddings, and when the bellringers practice on Friday evenings. These are all the happiest sounds I know. How sad are people who can not bear them.

Confessions of a parish councillor

It is now well over a year since I became a parish councillor for my small village in Worcestershire. Like most of my colleagues, I was co-opted to fill a vacancy. Most such vacancies arise, I suspect, because new parish councillors find that this unpaid post demands impossibly large amounts of their time. But another factor may be the complexity of the issues facing parish councils, despite their almost total lack of powers. Planning is the most complex of all, not just because planning laws and regulations are difficult to grasp for non-experts, but because the operation of the planning system utterly contradicts the common sense of local people.

The centre-piece of the planning system is the so-called ‘local plan’, prepared by the planning departments of the district council. I use the term ‘so-called’ because local plans are anything but local. In my part of the country, three district councils have prepared a joint ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ (SWDP). This covers an area of 1274 square kilometres and a population of over 286,000. Local plans must conform with the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework and a plethora of other regulations. But most important of all, they are required by law to meet nationally-determined targets for building new houses. These in turn are estimated by the Office of National Statistics from predicted population trends and rates of ‘household formation’.

So the SWDP begins with statements of aspirations which meet current government policies such as energy saving, better waste disposal, and the mysteriously-vague term ‘sustainability’. This is followed by lists of sites judged suitable for ‘development’. These include sites for employment and retail, but most are for new housing estates to be built by one of the big housebuilding companies. In most cases, they will have already purchased and promoted these sites for development. Finally, the SWDP identifies the implications of proposed developments for employment, roads and other local services.

Parish councils do not have the power to vary these ‘local plans’, but they can comment on them as part of a formal process of consultation. The plan is then forwarded to a planning inspector who holds a quasi-judicial hearing to rule on whether the plan is ‘sound’ (ie internally-consistent and in accord with national policies). Developments on individual sites, even if positively-identified in the local plan, still require planning permission from the district council. Once again, parish councils can comment on these before a decision is made. If the district council refuses planning permission, the applicant can appeal to a planning inspector, who will conduct a hearing and then make the final decision.

This system, at first sight, looks rational and fair. But the discussions at parish councils and with its citizens illustrate a real conflict of culture and belief. Parish councillors are usually people who are longstanding residents of their community and know every road, hedge and ditch and (between them) almost every resident in the parish. Parish councillors’ sense of identity is therefore strongly connected to their parish. They are aware of what makes their community distinctive and different from others. In a country parish, they will therefore try to maintain its familiar local features and its rural character while also striving to improve the services available to its residents.

District planning officers have an outlook that is almost the exact opposite of that of parish councillors. Planning officers are professional local government officers who are responsible for ensuring that the local plans they help formulate are in accord with national policies. Many planning officers are transient: they know that promotion will often depend on moving elsewhere - perhaps to the other end of the country. In a rural district, they are responsible for many dispersed communities, and can not hope to have the kind of expert local knowledge possessed by a parish councillor or a local resident. Lacking a long-term commitment to a particular community, they probably regard parish councillors’ passionate defence of their village against development as a self-interested protection of property values. At worst, we are seen as backward peasants standing in the way of ‘progress’.

By contrast, the building corporations speak the planners’ language. Their planning applications meet the complex requirements of national and local planning policy, and are backed up by various specialist reports on drainage, environmental impact, transport impact and so on. These specialist reports are commissioned by the developers from various consultancy agencies who (I suspect) generally support applications by those who pay their fees.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that local plans end up proposing lots of new housing, and that individual planning applications to build new estates and supermarkets are usually passed by district councils and (should there be an appeal) by the planning inspectors. The planning system, in other words, is part of an great unstoppable engine of government which works to make all parts of the country look the same, to empty our high streets, and to destroy what is special and unique about each town and country in England.

The new modern and heritage motorways

A film critic noted many years ago that French films always seemed to include a scene of family meals around a garden table, while British films generally featured trains pulled by steam engines. The love of steam engines is now obsessional for many people. A thousand or so steam engines in Britain operate on about 150 standard gauge and narrow gauge ‘heritage railways’. All are maintained by amateurs, who spend years of their lives restoring and maintaining machinery that is over 50 years old. They would probably regard it as near-sacrilege to refer to a steam engine as a mere ‘machine’. It is a gleaming, living being, hissing and snorting, fed coal and water, and oiled and polished by its devoted attendants.

It was not always so. I remember as a child my excitement when I travelled on my first diesel-powered train. How much more modern than the dirty black tank engines used by British Railways. The modern world we imagined in the 1950s consisted of fast cars and motorways, concrete and glass skyscrapers, television and jet aircraft. Soon, it seemed, we would be able to fly all over the world and even to other planets. To be modern therefore meant scrapping steam engines, trams, and most of our railways altogether, demolishing smoky Victorian buildings, and clearing land in town centres to widen roads and create urban motorways. People would live in high-rise flats surrounded by parkland, and drive their cars to supermarkets. No town was exempt from this vision of modernity. Birmingham City Council demolished the town square (the Bullring) and replaced it by roads with tunnels underneath for people who persisted in walking rather than driving. Edinburgh commissioned Sir Colin Buchanan to design a would-be urban motorway cutting under Calton Hill, by bridge across to the Royal Mile, thereby cutting in half the most historic street in all Scotland. Edinburgh was lucky: no political party had a majority on the City Council and so there was no dynamic leader to enforce this insanity. Birmingham was less fortunate.

Since the 1960s, modernity has changed. It now means pedestrian-only city centres, efficient urban tram systems, old buildings restored and converted for new uses, and open-air cafes selling good coffee and Mediterranean food. The best new buildings either look like restored old ones or are shaped in strange round forms. Anything in fact, to escape from the square concrete blockhouses inflicted by modernist architects of the 1960s. High-rise blocks of flats are being demolished, usually to the cheers of their former residents. Supermarkets still survive, but may soon begin a long decline as people switch to home delivery. Cities compete for funding to build new urban tramways, often using the same routes as the ones torn up over 50 years earlier. Every country in Europe has, or plans to have, high-speed trains linking its major cities.

How far will this new modernity go? Perhaps motorways will one day seem quaint items of nostalgia. Old driving enthusiasts - possibly an elderly Jeremy Clarkson - will drive their ancient Ferraris up and down short stretches of heritage motorway kept in operation by dedicated preservation movements.

Huddled round the fire

As I type this post, I am sitting at my desk looking through woodland at the parish church. The trees are bare and patches of frost remain despite the low midday sun of the English winter. In the trees there are clumps of mistletoe and, a little further down the woodland, the nests of a large flock of jackdaws. These circle the village at dawn and dusk, and spend the day foraging in the nearby fields.

The most striking thing to me about this scene is that I am warm. Central heating keeps the temperature of the house at about 19° Celsius. Double-glazing and insulation prevent draughts and reduce heating costs. It was not always so in my life. I belong to probably the last generation in England that learnt to light a coal fire as part of my childhood duties. I remember being taught how to screw up paper (but leave it overlapping so it all caught fire), place fire-lighters, lay a cross pattern of sticks on top, and then a small tower of coal from the bucket. After lighting the fire, it was common to ‘draw’ it with a sheet of newspaper held in place by a poker fixed across the front of the fireplace.

Until this procedure had been completed and the fire had begun, the house was cold - often very cold. We lived in a suburban semi-detached house but, like all our neighbours, our house lacked any double-glazing, insulation or draught-proofing. The fire in the living-room (and occasionally in the front room) was the only source of heat. In winter, our chairs were arranged around it, keeping the front of our bodies warm. We would talk and listen to the radio (television only appeared in our house when I was about eight years old). A journey elsewhere in the house at that time of year was an ordeal. Hot water bottles (actually small rubber bags with a stopper at the top) were used to warm our beds. I remember the sound of a kettle being boiled for the hot water bottles as the signal that bedtime was near.

The house I live in now does not have a fire. Instead of gathering as a family around the fire to talk, our chairs now face the television. It produces a constant rattle of quiz shows with strikingly ill-informed contestants, unconvincing dramas, superficial and sometimes misleading news programmes, and documentaries which are high in scenic content and low on information. I admit to nostalgia for the time we would gather around a fire, toast some pikelets, and talk of the day’s events. I am not, however, nostalgic for the damp, the draughts, and the cold.

See also:
February Fill Dyke
Synthetic nostalgia

Costume nostalgia

On Friday January 4th, my wife and I went to a Viennese New Year concert, three days late and in Malvern rather than Vienna. Nevertheless, this was an excellent event. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was in fine form, and played not just the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas but also music by composers inspired by the Strauss family. These included Lehar’s Gold and Silver Waltz, which was composed in 1902 for a grand ball in Vienna organised by Princess von Metternich-Sándor. As the music played, I closed my eyes and imagined that ball. It would have been held in an ornate baroque palace. The women would have worn long flowing gowns in bright colours, with ostrich feathers in their hair. The men would have worn white ties and tails, although some would have been in the dress military uniforms of the Imperial Army, with golden epaulettes and shiny cavalry boots. I opened my eyes and looked around the audience in Malvern: all wearing the usual drab clothes of the English.

When did we stop wearing brightly-coloured clothes? In the 1960s and 70s, we walked around in bright colours. I once had some purple trousers and a red cheesecloth shirt. Now my wardrobe consists entirely on blues, dark browns and blacks, although I do occasionally wear a red tie. The idea of dressing up for special events is also in decline. Many people now turn up at funerals in their ordinary day clothes - the men without even a black tie. There are some exceptions. Weddings remain an occasion for dressing up, and young women will still spend hours getting ready to go out in the evening. But look at any picture of an African market for a different attitude to everyday clothing. The women have headscarfs and dresses printed in the brightest colours. The men might wear jeans, but they will top this with a red, blue or yellow shirt.

If clothes are a form of self-expression, then the clothes we wear in England express misery and tedium. More joyous self-expression is now vicarious, demonstrated in the popularity of the many ‘costume dramas’ on television and film. Watch an episode of Poirot or Downton Abbey, and you see wealthy people in the 1930s dressing up in their most formal clothes even to eat dinner in their own homes. The various adaptations of Jane Austen novels show women in flowing empire-line dresses, and men in stylish clothes that set off their figures.

Many of these costume dramas were not written as such. Jane Austen wrote books about moral dilemmas among her contemporaries. Although the television adaptations of Agatha Christie’s books are set in 1936 (Poirot) or 1952 (Miss Marple), the original texts were published over several decades and were set in the times they were written. But television producers know that the public are fascinated by the costumes and formal behaviour of an earlier time. Viewers are more interested in looking at the suits and dresses than in who exactly murdered who and why.  

It is possible that this vicarious enjoyment of costume on television is itself a cause of the universal drabness of our clothing. The young man who sits for hours in front of his computer watching pornography but is too timid to ask a woman out; or the person who watches television programmes in which cordon bleu cooks prepare wonderful meals but who then warms up a ready meal for his dinner - these are examples of the vicarious eliminating the actual. It is after all striking that the world of drab clothing began at about the same time that colour television began to dominate our waking hours.

See also:
What old men wear
The land of make believe

The end of the university

My local library in Worcester is now housed in a new building called the ‘Hive’. With its irregular shape and exterior of gold-coloured panels, it could be an example of ‘crapitecture’. But this is not the case: the Hive does not blight any neighbouring buildings, has a clearly-marked entrance, and suits its intended purpose. The purpose is revolutionary. The Hive is the only example in the UK of a combined public and university library. The specific needs of students are met by a university-only short loan collection, and the public are only allowed to borrow one copy at a time of books marked with a blue band as ‘high demand university items’. But otherwise, the two libraries have merged, resulting in a massive expansion in the number of book available to the general public, including a wide range of academic texts. The combination of students and the general public in a single building seems to work, although the new library is much noisier than the old Worcester City Library, as groups of students meet at tables, discuss assignments, eat, and socialise.

The Hive is revolutionary because it is a further step in undermining the higher education cartel operated by the traditional universities. Universities began in the Middle Ages, when books were scarce, few people were literate, and very few indeed had read more than one or two books. It made sense to group scholars around a library and give them protected status within the walls of an institution. With the 20th Century expansion of universities into giant research institutions providing mass higher education, there are far more people within the walls: but the walls still stand.

Four key elements have made universities exclusive: access to traditional printed resources such as academic textbooks; the lectures and seminars provided by university staff; access to on-line material, especially academic journals; and the awarding of qualifications. Libraries like the Hive challenge the first of these elements. The next element to be challenged is the university lecture. In the past two years, several universities have begun delivering MOOCs (massive on-line open courses). Each such course comprises a module of academic lectures on a defined topic made available free-of-charge via the Internet. Students (usually in very large numbers) register with the provider and may receive a certificate of completion after passing an on-line test. Providers of MOOCs make money in the same way as Google: by selling their database of subscribers (with associated personal details) to advertisers. They may also charge for completion certificates. Studying on-line is convenient, particularly for those who work and can only study part-time. But on-line lectures do not provide the opportunity to discuss issues in depth with an expert in the small face-to-face groups that take place (although less frequently than in the past) in universities. Nor do MOOCs or the Hive offer free access to the contents of academic journals. And of course, if you want to get a degree, you need to be a registered student at a recognised university.

Can these elements be developed outside universities? There is of course nothing stopping independent academics setting up seminars for students registered for a particular MOOC. They could charge a small fee/attender, and seminars of this kind  already take place in India. Programmes of MOOCs could be assembled into a programme of study equivalent in length and standard to a university degree and then examined by an independent agency (rather like the way independent agencies set papers for GCSE and A-level examinations).

Opening access to research publications, however, is more of a problem. This is because academic research journals are published by a limited number of very profitable corporations. Academics contribute material for free, review each others’ papers for free, and (in most cases) edit journals with minimal remuneration. The corporations then print some copies, but mainly distribute via password-protected sites on the Internet. These sites include archive material from previous editions of each journal. Universities pay very large sums each year for access to the contents of these journals, which have been  produced by university staff in university time, based on research which has often been funded by public institutions. Some research journals (such as the British Medical Journal or Nature) have large circulations, but most are read by a small number of specialists. This bizarre system therefore restricts public access to research, while also providing a massive public subsidy to a select band of private corporations. Governments are aware of this problem, and open access for research publications will eventually take place after much trial and error.

Once these problems have been overcome, there is an opportunity to provide low-cost higher education which would meet the needs of people who work and need to study part-time, who have limited financial resources, or who wish to avoid the massive costs and debts incurred by attendance at a traditional university. This would be a step beyond the ground-breaking Open University (OU) which was set up in the 1970s. But the history of the OU is a warning. Despite being innovative, convenient and low-cost, the OU did not provide the model for university expansion in the 1980s and after. Instead of creating new distance learning institutions, governments in Britain chose to expand the traditional universities with their full-time three-year degree courses designed for school-leavers. The result was to divert resources from training skills to producing degree certificates. Large areas of our cities have been blighted by student accommodation - multi-occupied second homes, used for only six months each year. This has been a major (but little-commented) factor in generating a housing crisis in the last two decades.

Students’ financial security has also been blighted by the decision to expand traditional university courses rather than open learning. Instead of studying while earning, students each now incur debts of £40,000 or so for fees and maintenance loans. Their three-year degrees often fail to provide them with the skills needed in the workplace, while the reduced number of seminars and small-group teaching sessions in many universities limit the intellectual stimulation that is meant to be the defining experience of higher education. So open access may still be impeded by the dead weight of existing institutions. Let us hope that technological change combined with public demand will create a new type of higher education that will be open to all who wish to study and learn.


See alsohttp://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/guide-to-crapitecture.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-teach-skills.html
http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/is-higher-education-rip-off.html