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