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 But all the local plans that existed before the NPPF have now been superseded and none of their successors have yet been approved by the Secretary of State.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.