Tag Archives: politics

How to predict a policy failure

Posted on by
Reply

As soon as the Coalition Government started cutting the flood defence budget in 2010, it was as predictable as the water cycle what would happen next: within no more than a few years and probably within the lifetime of the government which made the cuts, there would be heavy rainfall, resulting in massive floods, and a backtrack on the cuts – emergency spending if not a change to the planned budget – either way, a tacit admission of failure.

This sort of thing seems crashingly inevitable to me. There’s an obvious trajectory, of reduced budgets, reduced regulation or reduced oversight, followed by conspicuous calamity, followed by attempts to mop up the mess which generally involve reimplementing whatever system had originally been in place to prevent the calamity.

I’m not here to congratulate myself on uselessly predicting the flooding crisis (also, because I never went on record predicting it, so there’s no proof I ever did). I want to teach you how to predict similar balls-ups in the future, because the depressing thing is, it’s not that difficult.

Continue reading →

When is a science GCSE not a science GCSE?

Posted on by
6

When it’s from a faith school, and the exam boards have redacted all questions about evolution from the exams, in order to respect religious sensitivities.

Unfortunately, it’s not a joke.

Here’s the article from the Sunday Times (paywall) which broke the story about exam board OCR removing questions about evolution from the science GCSE papers at Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School, a Jewish faith school in Hackney. And here’s a freely available summary of the story from the BBC.

Continue reading →

Eve teasing, or, as we call it in the civilised world, sexual assault

Posted on by
Reply

In Pushkar, on the 9th November 2013, a group of Indian film students interviewed me for a documentary about “Eve teasing”. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I think it was roughly along the following lines.

Every single one of the girls here has suffered either sexual harassment or sexual assault in India. The girls who’ve been living and working here for a long time get it constantly. The one who are just visiting have been assaulted already in the short time they’ve been here. At best, they put up with non-stop staring and lecherous comments. At worst, they’ve been groped and violated on public transport, in crowds, anywhere that they can’t stop men getting close to them. This problem is endemic; it happens everywhere, all the time. This is a country which is not safe for any women, but for Western girls especially, it’s simply not possible to come here without receiving harassment or assault from Indian men.

The fact that you have ‘ladies only’ sections on buses, and ‘ladies only’ carriages on metros, provides a short term fix, but it’s not a long term solution. Think about about the implication. By having these carriages, by needing to have these carriages, what you’re saying is that Indian men cannot be in close proximity to women without sexually violating them. And it seems that it’s true. This should be a source of deep shame to your entire country. It’s not surprising that India is famous worldwide for being a dangerous place for women, that it’s known as the global capital of rape.

Obviously, rape and sexual assault still happens in the UK and other European countries too, and we’ve still got work to do on improving reporting and conviction rates. But at least it’s recognised as a serious crime by the vast majority of people. We don’t need ladies carriages on public transport, and women are safe using it at any time of day or night, because our men don’t try to molest them at every opportunity they get. On the rare occasions a woman is assaulted on our metro, the police investigate, and if they can catch the perpetrator, he’ll be charged, tried, and hopefully convicted and imprisoned. We don’t tolerate it as a society, and neither should you.

Notice that I haven’t called it by the name you use, “Eve teasing”. You need to stop using this term as well. Firstly because it refers to the Biblical story of Eve, it implies that these attacks are the fault of the woman, because she provides the temptation. An assault is never the fault of the victim. But secondly, it makes it sound like it’s just a game, harmless fun. It’s not harmless fun. The government, the police, the media – including you – say they want to stop this problem, but they’re still all using this term which pretends it’s not serious. So the first thing you need to do is stop calling it “Eve teasing”. It’s not “Eve teasing”, it’s sexual harassment, it’s sexual assault.

You’re not going to solve this problem – the problem that your men are so poorly trained in basic social rules that they treat casual sexual assault as part of their daily routine – until you start treating it like the serious crime that it is.

TL;DR – I gave a summary of this argument to an autorickshaw driver and tourist guide who was complaining that there are a lot fewer foreign tourists visiting India this year:

It’s because you rape too many of them.

The lie at the heart of “loyalty” cards

Posted on by
2

I’ve always been opposed to brand “loyalty” card schemes, like Nectar and Tesco’s Clubcard, and I’ve never signed up for any. We all know that they’re used to track customer shopping behaviour, and I don’t want to be tracked in that way. But it was only recently that I was struck by the fundamental dishonesty involved.

The story promoted by companies running the schemes is something like this: each time you shop with us, we’ll give you a tiny discount, but it’s only redeemable in discreet chunks, and we think this will give you an incentive to continue shopping with us instead of our competitors. In other words: we’ll trade you a non-binding increase in the probability that you’ll choose us for future shopping, which we think is worth two or three pence in every pound, in exchange for rewards equivalent to, say, one pence per pound.

The flaw in this story is that carrying a “loyalty” card doesn’t increase a customer’s chance of using the same shop on any future occasion. As far as I can tell, there are two types of people: those who don’t use any “loyalty” schemes (like me), and those who use every “loyalty” scheme going, and carry around a purse stuffed with cards so that they can get points and discounts wherever they happen to shop.

Continue reading →

Child marriage, GDP and sharia law

Posted on by
6

Today’s Richard Dawkins-centred Twitter row is about child marriage and Islam. It was sparked by his circulation of a Huffington Post article on the tragic case of an 8 year old girl in Yemen who died of internal injuries caused by the wedding night sex with her new 40 year old husband. A 2009 law to set the minimum age of marriage in Yemen at 17 was repealed by conservatives as “un-Islamic”.

Many of the religious apologist responses pointed out that poverty, not Islam (or any other religion), is the key factor in the prevalence of child marriages. Indeed a recent report by World Vision UK, linked from the Huffington Post article circulated by Dawkins, identifies the girls most at risk of child marriage as tending to be “poor, under-educated and … rural” and living in areas with high death rates, civil conflict and “lower overall levels of development including schooling and healthcare”. “Poverty, weak legislative frameworks and enforcement, harmful traditional practices, gender discrimination and lack of alternative opportunities for girls (especially education) are all major drivers of early marriage,” the report summarises.

Continue reading →

Chris McGovern and the Campaign for Real Education on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme

Posted on by
3

The Campaign for Real Education is a pressure group which aims to raise standards in state education in the UK. It is not politically affiliated, although its proposed changes to education policy – grammar schools, a return to a ‘traditional’ teaching philosophy and increased parental choice – are more typical of right wing or conservative agendas.

The chair of the CRE is Chris McGovern. The organisation’s bio notes list his experience as including 35 years as a state school history teacher, independent school headmaster and Ofsted inspector.

McGovern appeared on BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme this morning, to discuss an academic paper published in the Economic Journal. The study analysed primary school performance data to show that, contrary to what some might expect, having a high proportion of pupils from non-English-speaking backgrounds in a school class does not reduce its performance.

I’m not going to discuss the paper, nor the CRE’s policies. I would just like to quote some of McGovern’s responses to the paper, and leave open the question of his credibility as an educational advocate.

Continue reading →

What I hate most about opponents of equal marriage

Posted on by
Reply

What I hate most about the opponents of equal marriage – aside from their closeted homophobia and blocking of decent egalitarian legislation, obviously – is when they claim to object to “changing the meaning of the word ‘marriage'”.

Last week it was reported in the press that the Oxford English Dictionary had updated its entry for the word ‘literally’, including a second definition, “informal, used for emphasis while not being literally true”, thereby legitimizing its longstanding misuse.

Now, obviously this enrages me to the point of bloodlust. However, I don’t see any of those people who suddenly appeared from nowhere, claiming to be linguistic purists when ‘marriage’ was at stake, protesting over this.

Continue reading →

Pub bans soldiers to appease Muslims? – Exposing a neo-Nazi lie

Posted on by
2

A story is currently doing the rounds that the Globe, a pub in Leicester, has banned all British soldiers out of respect for the local Islamic community.

I first saw it shared on Facebook via a post [no link, I don’t want to support it] on a blog called the Daily Bale.

That the story is completely spurious should be obvious with half a second’s thought: how many teetotal Muslim customers is the Globe likely to have, causing tensions with others?

It takes less than 10 seconds of investigation to confirm that it’s complete rubbish, via an announcement on the Globe’s Twitter feed.

Continue reading →

The evils of social networks?

Posted on by
6

One of the events contributing to the current media and political fury over the evils of social networks and internet trolls has been the death of Hannah Smith, a Leicester teenager who committed suicide after apparently being bullied on Ask.fm.

However, it has subsequently turned out that 98% of the anonymous bullying messages Hannah received may have been posted by herself using other accounts.

If true, this backs up my point in a previous article that blaming these phenomena on the social networks themselves is dangerously missing the point.

Continue reading →

Why is healthy food expensive?

Posted on by
4

A friend of mine was complaining today about how healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food, and implied that we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic if things were the other way around. The suggestion is that people choose to eat unhealthy food because it’s the cheaper option; they would eat more healthily if that were cheaper instead.

That may be true to an extent, but it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario: a major reason that unhealthy food is cheap, is that it’s so popular. It’s a huge market, so producers, suppliers and retailers compete fiercely on price to get a portion of it. Also, because the market is so large, they can achieve economies of scale in the production of bad food.

Continue reading →