Before we had feelings

 The most banal question asked by sports reporters on television goes something like this: “Jim, you have just scored the winning goal in the Cup Final/won the Olympic marathon gold medal/come first in the Tour de France, how do you feel?” This is lazy journalism, but it also illustrates a wider trend: a belief that what matters most is the sportsman’s immediate emotional response, rather than any reflection on the tactics they used to secure victory, the mistakes they made, or  the significance of the victory for their team. A similar primacy is given to ‘feelings’ in some news programmes, particularly those in which the newsreaders sit on sofas rather than behind desks. Great events are presented in terms of the emotions of those that have experienced them, rather than an analysis of why these events occurred and what their occurrence means for the future.

This emphasis on ‘feelings’ is something that has occurred in my lifetime, dating from the early 1970s. I remember a time when no-one was asked how they felt, and the resulting confusion some people experienced when they were first asked this question. Trying to explain this increasing dominance of ‘feelings’ over analysis is difficult, but one factor may be change in the nature of work and our relationship to the material world. When I was young, most people’s work was with material goods, doing things like welding, assembling products, digging coal, cooking or laundering clothes. In work of this kind, success or failure, competence or incompetence, was usually evident immediately. Most workplaces were dominated by men, and had the kind of boisterous and critical banter characteristic of much of male society.

But work with things has been increasingly replaced by a more abstract kind of work, in which groups of people collaborate to provide services to other members of the public, or design and market goods which are produced far away. There are many more women in the workplace, and female society seems to be characterised by mutual support and a particular concern (at most times) to avoid hurtful remarks. In workplaces of this kind, success or failure is less easy to observe, and it becomes harder for people to understand how the organisation as a whole functions and generates its outputs. In such circumstances, people are judged by the what they say and how they respond emotionally, rather than by what they achieve.

I remember this transition happening in my own life. After several short-term manual jobs while a student, I eventually became a social worker. Most of my colleagues were women, although men were usually in charge. I realised that I had moved into a very different workplace culture, in which there seemed to me to be acute sensitivity to almost anything anyone said. There were few words of criticism, but that meant that there was little opportunity to learn what mistakes were being made and what could be done better. But more important was the absence of analysis. Social work existed in a world without evidence or even data. We had no statistics on the types of problems experienced by our clients, no results from research about the most appropriate ways of responding to them, and no data about whether our efforts were successful or not. Almost all our interviews with clients were conducted individually and in private, so there was no opportunity to observe how others performed in their work. In the absence of relevant information, analysis would have been pointless because there was nothing to analyse, except the emotional reactions of individual clients. We worked in a world of feelings without meaning.

How I wrecked several marriages in West Lothian

After I qualified as a social worker in 1975, I went to work with the West Lothian division of Lothian Regional Social Work Department. I was based in a team located in a crowded primary healthcare centre in the small town of Blackburn. Besides the town itself, the team covered a string of unappealing villages originally built for mineworkers but subsequently used to rehouse what we then called ‘problem families’. Blackburn itself was not short of problems. The town had expanded rapidly with Glasgow ‘overspill’, many of whom lived in poor-quality maisonettes with all-electric heating. The oil crisis had led to substantial increases in electricity prices, with a resulting spate of disconnections. Tenants in such circumstances bought cheap paraffin heaters, which in turn made their houses almost uninhabitable because of dampness. There was also the usual undercurrents of poverty, alcoholism, crime and domestic violence.

The social work team was as a result under considerable pressure. The team comprised a senior social worker, an occupational therapist, and four or five social workers, almost all of whom were recent graduates with limited experience of the kinds of lives lived by their clients. Some, including myself, had completed social work education, and were designated as ‘qualified’. But, at least in those days, our courses provided us with knowledge rather than skills. We were taught a mixture of social policy, human development and psychotherapy (called ‘casework’), and learnt about the problems of the different groups of clients we were due to encounter. In real life, we had little time to practice casework skills, and mainly acted as intermediaries between members of the public and the various official agencies with which they struggled to cope. I found this work suited my particular skills and was puzzled to find that some of my colleagues did not understand how social security was calculated or the rules regarding disconnection or eviction.  

The team, like most other social work organisations at the time, struggled to allocate scarce staff resources between clients with long-term difficulties and the daily influx of people who called at the office. The latter were termed ‘self-referrals’, and were dealt with by whichever  social worker was on ‘duty’ that day. My duty day was usually Monday, which meant that I had to deal with the consequences of the preceding weekend. One frequent consequence was a request for help from women who had been assaulted by their husbands. Violence was in all cases not a sudden or solitary act, but something sustained over several years, dating in some cases even before marriage (in those days it was normal for couples to marry before they lived together). Violence from husbands generally occurred at weekends and was associated with alcohol. Women’s expectations of their husbands were not always very high. One told me: “You don’t mind your husband knocking you about a bit, but it’s a bit much when he breaks your arm”.

There was an unspoken assumption in social work at that time that married couples should be helped to remain together. This was a bit like another social work assumption that young unmarried women could not cope with raising children and should be encouraged to place them for adoption. But this all coincided with the break-up of my own first marriage. When I realised what a blessed relief it was to free of wedded misery, I saw no point in helping others keep together and face daily violence. This view was supported by the determination of the women themselves: none asked for help in repairing their marriage. So I developed a set of measures to help battered wives split from their husbands. Almost all lived in council houses, so I advised them how to change the tenancy into their own name. I told them how to contact Social Security and the legal action they should take to confirm the custody of their children. None of the women I met needed to find a place in a refuge, although many years later I met several women who had fled to refuges when I did my research on homeless families.

I do not know what long-term effect my advice had on the women I met. None returned to the office or told me that they had returned to their abusive husbands. But I suspect that there were many more women in Blackburn who continued suffering from abuse that never managed to escape.
 

Coronavirus, utlitarianism and Emmanuel Kant

 The dispute between the UK and the European Union over vaccination against coronavirus is more than just a squabble about contracts: it shows profound differences between countries in how they make policy and the priority they give to the rights of individual citizens. This is shown by the history of the Oxford Astra Zeneca (OAZ) vaccination and the bans on its use in several EU countries. The first of these involved suspending the vaccine for the older age-groups on the grounds that insufficient numbers of the elderly had been included in the Phase 3 clinical trials. Only two months later, the same countries allowed the vaccine to be administered to the elderly but now banned its use for people under the age of 50 years because a very small number of younger people had developed abnormal blood-clots after injection. Denmark has now even banned the OAZ vaccine for people of all ages, even though the risk of blood clots is many times less than that found among women taking contraceptive medication (which of course has not been banned).

There were few such doubts in the UK, which initially placed no limitation on the use of the OAZ vaccine. However, on 7th April 2021, the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation (JCVI) reported that it:
    “has weighed the relative balance of benefits and risks and advise that the benefits of prompt vaccination with the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine far outweigh the risk of adverse events for individuals 30 years of age and over and those who have underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease. JCVI currently advises that it is preferable for adults aged <30 years without underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease, to be offered an alternative COVID-19 vaccine, if available. People may make an informed choice to receive the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to receive earlier protection”.

In other words, UK policy was to balance the risks from adverse reactions with the number of lives potentially saved by vaccination, but to ultimately leave the decision to the informed choice of the recipient. This approach shows the influence of two themes in British philosophy, as translated into government policy. The first is classical liberalism, in which individual citizens are regarded as ultimately responsible for their own lives, to make their own ‘informed choice’. The second theme is utilitarianism, which proposes that public policy should be based on the balance for the community as a whole between benefits (the number of lives saved) and losses (the number of people dying because of adverse reactions). It is easy to see why utilitarianism should have appealed to one of the first nations in the world to have a capitalist economy, and British governments have continued to apply the same ruthless principles in determining public policy. In the case of coronavirus, this involved spending vast sums on buying very large stocks of vaccines before their approval by the regulators, indemnifying their producers and funding drug companies to build the factories which produce the vaccines. Priority was given to delivering vaccines to those most at risk of death, and administration of the vaccine on a large scale began immediately after regulatory approval.

Neither classical liberalism nor utilitarianism has commanded much support in continental Europe, where thinkers from Emmanuel Kant onwards emphasised the valuation of each individual human life rather than regarding human lives as a means to an end (or a balance between benefits and losses). Kant lived in the German Kingdom of Prussia at a time when this was ruled by an absolutist king. Kant saw no contradiction between a respect for human rights and the lack of political rights for individual citizens. Instead, he believed that the best state of affairs was one in which the king should rule according to laws which protected the individual rights of the citizens. By this means, Kant could argue that authoritarian government is compatible with the protection of human rights, and thereby deny the principles of both classical liberalism and utilitarianism.  

Most EU governments followed Kantian principles in denying their citizens the right to choose the OAZ vaccine and in proposing that the vaccine be banned because of its possible (albeit very rare) negative impact on the health of individual recipients. In other words, the rights of each such individual were more important than the balance of benefits and losses that would result from the widespread use of the vaccine. Other, less enlightened, factors may also have played a part in their decision-making. These include a desire for revenge against Astra Zeneca because of the company’s failure to meet the agreed rate of deliveries of vaccines to the EU (and revenge against the UK for leaving the EU). Another factor may have been the desire by President Macron of France to undermine trust in a competitor to the much-delayed French Sanofi vaccine.

This all had the effect in the EU of undermining public trust in the OAZ vaccine, which has produced a widespread ‘nocebo effect’. This is the opposite of the placebo effect, in which patients claim they have benefited from a pill or treatment which has no clinical content. The nocebo effect occurs when a truly beneficial treatment is regarded with suspicion by its recipients, who then report a range of ailments they ascribe to the treatment. This has certainly been the case with the OAZ vaccine, which has been accused of causing a range of ailments in addition to the small number of blood clots with which it genuinely seem to be associated. Many of these reports can be explained by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This Latin phrase translates as ‘after this, therefore because of this’, which in this case means that any ailment which occurs after receiving a vaccination is blamed on the vaccination. Priority for vaccination is usually given to the elderly and those with major health problems - groups prone to experience symptoms in a given period of time whether or not they have been vaccinated.

Suspending vaccination, the nocebo effect and delays in beginning the vaccination programme caused by the desire of the European Commission to prioritise price-bargaining over the quick delivery of vaccine has greatly reduced the rate of administration in EU countries compared with the UK. The result has been deadly. At the time of writing, the UK has 30 deaths/day from coronavirus, compared with 300 deaths/day in France, 380 deaths/day in Italy and about 250 deaths/day in Germany. It appears that there is some point in utilitarianism when applied to public health. After all, what human rights do you have when you are dead?

PS. There is a fascinating example of British policy ruthlessness in the slaughter of 750,000 pets at the start of the Second World War, as a way of reducing the demand for imported food. See British Pet Massacre on Wikipedia.

Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer. 

Public transport by air

When you hear the phrase ‘public transport’, what comes to mind? Probably a bus or train, often crowded, with time spent waiting on a platform or at a bus stop before you can board. Few people seem to regard air travel as ‘public transport’. But travel in modern scheduled airlines is often the most uncomfortable and sustained form of public transport most of us ever endure. We sit for hours in cramped seats, in close proximity with other passengers, whose airborne diseases are circulated round the cabin and shared among us. There may be a two-hour waiting-time before we can board, being patted down by security staff, as well as (in some cases) a walk over a windy and wet tarmac to and from a crowded shuttle bus.

Why then do many people exclude air travel from the concept of ‘public transport’? One reason may be snobbery. I remember a colleague at work turning her nose up when travel by bus was mentioned. “I don’t use public transport”, she said. This was just after she had returned from a distant conference travelling in economy class by air. Snobbery is a kind of social museum of things that once signified status. Once, air travel was confined to the wealthy, and airliners carried only a small number of passengers, each in the kind of spacious seats now only enjoyed in first class. The first jet liner, the de Havilland Comet carried only 36 passengers. I remember watching the film From Russia with Love in 1963, seeing James Bond flying to Istanbul in a Boeing 707. At that time, I had never travelled by air, and both James Bond’s destination and his means of travel seemed unimaginably out of reach for me.

But the Boeing 707, which could carry 189 passengers, really began mass public transport by air. In 1965, the first of over 10,000 Boeing 737 planes entered service, followed in 1970 by the Boeing 747, carrying over 400 passengers. Mass-produced planes with more fuel-efficient engines greatly reduced the cost of air travel, so that cheap pre-paid ‘package holidays’ in Spain became popular for people in Britain from the mid-1960s., followed by a massive growth of independent tourism to the furthest destinations. My experience is common in the UK: my wife, two children and I have, between us, been to over 40 countries, almost always by air. Air travel has become mass transit: astonishingly cheap but often crowded and unpleasant. Nevertheless, the snobbery lingers - almost as if we were still all James Bonds travelling in luxury.

A countryside murder in Worcestershire

 

Coronavirus means that we all spend much more time indoors watching television than ever before. What we need in times of misery and fear is escapism. Hollywood understood this well in the 1930s, and produced a wonderful series of musicals and comedies to entertain a depressed nation. UK television has responded by multiplying the number of travelogue programmes and game shows. But a large proportion of viewing hours is taken up by murder. The most entertaining of these are a sort of game show, in the sense of presenting a puzzle for the viewer to solve. They are often also travelogues: Death in Paradise in Guadeloupe; the Mallorca Files; and Midsomer Murders (and many others) which take place in beautiful English rural villages.

Needless to say, murder in the English countryside occurs much less frequently than in the fictional County of Midsomer, in which every village seems to harbour a serial killer. But we have recently had a real murder of a well-known figure from the next parish. On the night of the 12th to 13th of December 2020, West Mercia Police were called to a car on fire in a lay-by on the Ankerdine Road, about a mile from the birthplace of Edward Elgar in Broadheath. The car contained a body, identified as that of Neil Parkinson (66) from Clifton-upon-Teme. Three people were soon arrested. Mark Chilman (51) from Bromyard was charged with murder and also with stalking Juliet Adcock. A 30-year old man from Wichenford and a 28-year old man from Worcester were charged with conspiracy to murder. Chilman has pleaded not guilty, and the trial will take place in the Crown Court on the 2nd of August. Until then, as is usual with the English legal system, we shall learn little about the circumstances of the crime.

Ankerdine Road, Clifton-upon-Teme and Wichenford are pleasant places, though not as picturesque as the villages in Midsomer Murders. But the death of Mr Parkinson is much more real. A life cut short so suddenly and unjustly brings pain and suffering to family and friends that can persist for a lifetime. Murder is not entertaining at all.

Coronavirus: the winners

The main winner of the coronavirus pandemic is of course the virus itself, which has multiplied throughout the world at speed, helped by rapid and plentiful international transport. Countries which have avoided large numbers of deaths are those which, like the cities and ports of old, erected effective quarantine barriers to prevent infected people from arriving. This option was available to Britain and Ireland, but was not taken. Instead of keeping out sick people, these (and most other countries) have instructed non-infected people to quarantine themselves in their own homes.

The two main human winners in the pandemic are firms which deliver food and goods to people’s homes and the pharmaceutical industry. The latter, allied with universities and research laboratories, have produced anti-viral vaccines with extraordinary despatch, and have reminded us of how vaccinations have prolonged lives over the last century.

In a medical emergency, governments turn to medical science, and thereby sideline the false prophets of the management consultancy industry. But there have been opportunities for outsourcing firms. In the UK, Deloitte’s and Serco received a Government contract of over ten billion pounds to run a service to test people for the virus and then trace their contacts. After months of confusion and delay, this now tests very large numbers of people, although only 40% of tests are confirmed within 24 hours, while the tracing element has probably had limited impact on the course of the pandemic.

Much more successful has been the vaccination programme in the UK, which has been run by the NHS. This is now vaccinating almost half a million people each weekday, and has built up rapidly from a start in December. From the point of view of the outsourcing companies, vaccination has been a lost opportunity. They could have been paid a further ten billion pounds to run a less effective operation (no doubt supported by a failed computer system provided by Fujitsu), followed by further management consultancy contracts to solve the mess when failure became embarrassing to Government.

There have also been wins in our knowledge of public affairs. Apart from the gains made by medical science, we have learnt that many universities in Britain are venal institutions, run for profit and caring little for their students (except as a source of income). In September 2020, universities encouraged their students to register and fill up the halls of residence, and then locked them in when infection rates rose. Some universities even ordered their academic staff to be on campus to provide the ‘vibrant atmosphere’ promised in every university prospectus. They could have instead encouraged students to work online from home where possible, leaving attendance on campus for the smaller (and hence safer) number who need to study in laboratories or on placement.

Finally, there have been winners in language. Apart from the word ‘pandemic’ and associated public health terminology, we have become familiar with the imported word ‘furlough’. This was used by the British Government for its scheme to pay people laid off work because of the lockdowns from March 2020 onwards. ‘Lockdown’ is itself a new arrival from the same time, as well as the phrase ‘social distancing’. The recommended gap for social distancing in the UK is two metres and not six feet, signifying the triumph of the metric system. The winning dreary cliché of the pandemic is ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’. This is used in almost every press briefing to offer the hope that mass vaccination will eventually end our current nightmare. The real hope should be that when this pandemic is finally past, we learn how to better manage the ones that will succeed it.