Republican Primaries

It’s interesting watching the primaries from across the pond. To me and almost everyone else in the UK, it’s like a freakshow of Republican loonies who, thankfully, wouldn’t stand a chance of winning an election here, at least not without pretending to be less ridiculously right wing than they are. There are a number of interesting things about elections in such a huge country. I think I quite like the idea of a caucus like they had in Iowa last week, although it’s not really clear to me what happens with the results of all these votes. They only give one preference so it’s not amazingly democratic, but with a few changes and some clarification it could be good.

The other thing which interests me about American politics is the way in which so many people have been duped into voting for a party which doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Here we are in a recession caused by a lack of regulation and a small state, so that banks can screw people over and not get punished, and people have been convinced that regulation is their enemy and that cutting public spending even further (except for the military of course) is the best way to cut the deficit and get out of the recession. I really don’t understand how people can think that.

And don’t even get me started on campaign finance! Here are these millionnaires with their millionnaire friends running campaigns which cost millions to run, and getting campaign donations from huge corporations who obviously want a return for their money, and political analysts in the press and on TV saying that certain candidates will have to drop out because they don’t have enough money, and not seeming to realise that this is a problem! What happened to the votes counting, not the money?

And now we have this new 20 minute advert attacking Mitt Romney, a thoroughly unpleasant person who, remarkably, is probably one of the more moderate candidates of the pack, which will cost $3.5m to air in South Carolina. Here’s the trailer (yes, a trailer for an advert):

Newt Gingrich in particular has been constantly attacking Romney, questioning his conservative credentials, and saying that his measures aren’t radical enough (which seems like a contradiction to me), and this ad seems to be along those lines. But some of the lines from this film are pure gold:

Capitalism made American great. Free markets, innovation, hard work, the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands, those dreams can become nightmares. Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars. Private equity leaders getting rich at the expense of American workers!

…

Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital the day the company was formed. His mission was to reap massive rewards for himself and his investors.

Well, yeah!? That’s what CEO’s are supposed to do, that’s what capitalism is! In fact companies are legally obliged to try and give the biggest returns possible to their shareholders. What, did you expect the CEO to worry about workers’ rights?  How very un-capitalist of you! Did you expect him to carry on operating these companies when they stopped making a profit? Well that would seem to go against the doctrine of the free market, wouldn’t it? In fact it sounds like you wanted the workers to have some kind of control of the company, so the profits didn’t just go to the ‘greedy investors’ and the companies didn’t close leaving people without employment. It sounds a lot to me like whoever made this video wants to take control of the means of the production. Romney is obviously far too capitalist for them, I wonder what they’ll make of the other candidates. [/facetiousness]

It’s almost as if the thought process goes like this:

1. Free market capitalism leads to happiness.
2. Romney’s actions at Bain Capital did not lead to happiness.
3. Therefore Romney did not act as a free market capitalist.

And that’s just how the Tea Party became so popular. Because idiots don’t know what’s good for them. Anyway, I just wanted a rant.

The should vote for this guy instead, at least he seems to know what’s going on:

Riots in Tottenham

Whenever a big protest happens when property is damaged, I always find myself in a curious situation where I wonder whether I agree with it or not. There are always people who will support any riot regardless of what it’s about, because it represents some kind of rebellion against the state, and similarly there are people who’ll say things like “there’s no excuse for violence” and always condemn any kind of disorder.

Last night a riot broke out in Tottenham, a pretty working class area of London, after earlier in the week a black man called Mark Duggan was killed by the police in an arrest attempt. Police cars and a bus were all burnt out, as well as a fairly high number of shops in the area, and another nearby area called Wood Green. Should we condemn this? Let’s look a bit closer.

There are quite a few things you have to take into account when you’re not at the scene yourself. You cannot trust the media to give an accurate representation of what’s happening, and that’s not because it’s all a big conspiracy, there are some very good reasons behind it. The media like immediacy. They’ll crawl all over any kind of angle they can find to try and get one over on their competitors. They want pictures and figures and anything else to fill those excruciatingly repetitive minutes on 24 hour news channels, and the coverage on those news channels shapes the view of the protest that the next day’s papers and the public have about it.

Now the police and the government can provide those things, they can issue statements, they can (falsely) claim to represent the silent majority, they can give the news channels figures on how many officers were injured, and make it seem like they’re the victims. The protestors can’t do that. There’s no-one counting the protestors who get smacked around the head, unless they go to hospital about it, but if a police officer grazes their knee they can count that as an ‘injured officer’ and report it as such. The protestors don’t have spokespeople, and the people who are most involved are often too busy or riled up to give a well thought-out statement (or they don’t want to be identified), so you often get the news interviewing some twonk who’s got no idea what they’re talking about. This gives a biased view. It’s only a very long time after the event that the real facts come out, by which time everyone’s forgotten about the riot and don’t reconsider whether it was justified, if the facts come out at all. Alfie Meadows barely got a mention in the news until well after Millbank. You even still get people who condemn the Brixton riots in 1981.

The media toss-up between editorial independence and access also means that if they don’t seem pro-establishment (or at least painfully ‘balanced’) then they risk losing their access to government officials and statements, upon which they rely for their stories on a daily basis.

Right now the media have been claiming that Mark Duggan was some kind of gangster or drug-dealer, and implying that he shot at the police, which is why he was killed. But people who knew him are saying he was a normal bloke. If the reports turn out to be false, will people reconsider what they think of the riot? I don’t think they will, not for a long time. It seems a bit fishy to me that they shot him twice in the face, shouldn’t they rather be trying to disable a dangerous suspect rather than go straight for the kill?

How come the people who are condemning the “violence” aren’t focussing on the one death in the whole story? What is violence anyway? If you bully someone to the point where they kill themselves, is that violence? In that case, is cutting benefits to disabled people and pushing them to the point where half have considered suicide, is that violence? Does property damage always count as violence? Undoubtedly it does sometimes, such as if I punched the wall right next to someone’s head, but is that true in all cases? I don’t think so.

I think people also put an unfair emphasis on whether the property damage can be justified. They’ll often ask whether it will help the cause or whether it will just turn people against them, but that is asking a mob to have an unreasonably high level of forward-thinking. It’s not a useful distinction to make. I much prefer to think about whether what’s happening is understandable, and I think in this instance it is. It’s a reaction to the institutional and structural damage that is being done to the people in Tottenham.

So does that mean I agree with everything that happened? No, of course not, and in particular I think burning buildings down was fucking stupid. They had no idea if people were still in there, and they had no idea how far it could have spread. I don’t care about the property damage so much but they put lives at risk and I don’t think it was necessary. Neither do I think people were rioting because they disagree with the concept of a police force, as much as some people amongst the left would like to think so. But what I do think is that what happened last night was the inevitable consequence of pushing a community to the edge. The features section of a newspaper is often more important than the news section, because it focusses on long-term trends rather than individual events. The features section might have told us about the way black people are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people. The news section will only tell us about the riot.

And that’s why the real news isn’t what happened last night in Tottenham, it’s what’s been happening there for the past few decades.

Is privatisation inherently wrong?

Hell yes.

Last night I was at a very well-attended community meeting at Meadowbank Stadium, where local councillors were invited to explain what’s happening around the plans to privatise £1bn worth of public services at Edinburgh City Council. I say well-attended, but I mean well-attended by the public, not by the councillors. All the back-office functions like HR, revenue and benefits, council buildings maintenance, cleaners etc are all involved in these plans, along with environmental services including bin collections and looking after Edinburgh’s award-winning parks. That’s an awful lot.

If you haven’t heard anything about these plans then you’re not the only one. There has been little to no effective consultation of the public, and even Gary Peacock, the Liberal Democrat backbench councillor who attended the meeting, didn’t seem to know anything about the details of the plans. Indeed although the Labour group and the Green group have consistently voted against the privatisation of services, really the only people that have been keeping track of the developments and holding the council leaders accountable for these plans have been the trades unions. It’s not the councillors who are standing up for the interests of the people; that duty has fallen to trades union organisations like Unison and PCS, who I’d urge you to support. The SNP, despite being one of the larger groups on the Council, couldn’t find anyone to attend this meeting, or the last one on the same topic about a month ago.

Anywho over the past week I’ve been asked several times what’s so bad about privatisation, so I thought I’d put a post together on the topic. I took a quick look at it a couple of months ago but it’s worth revisiting. Let’s have a list:

1) The efficient private-sector is a myth. There are only a small number of ways in which private companies can run a public service more efficiently. Let’s have another list:

• Reduce the quality of the service
• Sack people
• Pay their employees less
• Hire less qualified staff
• Reduce working terms and conditions

If the private company is being more efficient in other ways (so let’s say they change supplier and buy a necessary product at a lower price), then those options are also open to the government in-house, and the privatisation isn’t necessary. What privatisation essentially does is pass the service onto a company where the trades union representation isn’t as good, so they can treat their staff worse than they could get away with if they did it in-house. I don’t think that’s what the people want.

I’ve said it a million times before, but there are 2 types of efficiency. The one that private companies are concerned with is money earned vs money spent, whereas the one that government should be concerned with is money spent vs quality of the service. There is a real danger when you privatise services that you get a race to the bottom, where companies are willing to compromise on the quality of a service in order to slip through the cracks in procurement processes that aren’t tight enough, and thus get awarded public contracts.

Remember too that a large proportion of the money the government pays will go straight into the pockets of shareholders rather than towards paying for the service. That’s another huge layer of inefficiency which doesn’t seem to get recognised often enough.

2) It takes control of public services away from your representatives. Now if you’re not happy with a public service, you can go to your councillor and tell them, and because it’s carried out by the council, they can try to change the service. Once the service is privatised, you go to your councillor and complain about it, and they’ll send you to go and talk to a private company, and they’ll more than likely tell you to sod off, because they’re carrying out the service as it was defined in their contract, and as long as they’re doing that they’ll get paid, so they don’t give a monkeys if you’re happy with it or not. Privatisation takes the control of resources away from democratic structures. So does capitalism by the way, but there you go. The heads of the IMF and WTO aren’t elected. There’s a very specific part of this which I think deserves its own point.

3) Contracts limit democratic control over a service. Due to European tendering law, once the specification for a contract has been written, whichever company can fulfil that specification for the lowest price has to be chosen. Whilst on paper this is a good idea because it helps to prevent government corruption, in practice it is terribly limiting, and companies can often sneak through the gaps in the specification if they’re not written tightly enough, as they often aren’t. That’s why the University of Edinburgh banks with RBS, because its ethical investment policy didn’t form part of the specification when it went out to tender, and so it was legally obliged to choose RBS, to the dismay of many of its students.

It’s also not unheard of at all for private companies to stick to the exact letter of their contractual agreements, even when a higher level of service would clearly be overwhelmingly in the public interest. So as a hypothetical example whereas a school caretaker working for the council would clear the whole playground of snow, a private company might choose to just clear a path from the gate to the front door in order to stay within its contractual obligations whilst saving money. Any subsequent changes to the contract are met with huge charges.

4) There’s no guarantee that the terms of the contract can be met. As we saw with the trams fiasco, a company can claim to be able to complete a project with a certain amount of money, but then realise that they can’t do that. The council is then left with a choice, either they can give more money to this company to finish the job, or they can have a half-finished job that’s no use to the public, but which has cost the public lots of money. The threat of bankruptcy, which according to capitalist theory keeps standards high, is completely useless in this situation because it’s not just the company that loses out, it’s the people. In the case of the privatisation plans in Edinburgh, the City Council estimates it can save £90m, but what is the guarantee that they’ll be able to do so? And if the company runs out of money, where are they going to turn to to get more?

5) Private companies with dodgy records can be given contracts. Even just in these privatisation plans in Edinburgh, companies have slipped through the net and been allowed to continue in the procurement process, even though they’ve been found guilty of negligence causing workplace deaths, even though they’ve taken part in price-fixing. These companies don’t care about the welfare of their staff or the public, they care about money.

6) It’s a reactionary redistribution of wealth towards the rich. Public services primarily benefit working and middle class people because they’re the people that rely on them the most, and they’re the people that benefit from the jobs that are created by the provision of that service. Privatising that service not only risks its quality, but it also means that a big chunk of public money is taken from the pockets of the people and placed straight into the bank accounts of the rich shareholders in that company. On a small scale that’s not especially objectionable, but when privatisation is as hegemonic as it has been in the UK since the dawn of New Labour, it represents a systematic redistribution of wealth to the top.

7) Corruption becomes very real. When representatives are involved in the awarding of contracts for millions of pounds, corruption suddenly becomes a very real prospect. Not so long ago in the US we saw private prison contractors paying judges to send more kids to juvenile detention so that they’d make more money. This is the kind of thing that becomes a possibility when you start putting profit before the provision of service.

8. Privatisation is often a 1-way street. If and when it becomes obvious that a service would be better run in-house by the government, setting it up as a public service again can become impossible, because you’ve got to hire a tonne of staff, set up all the infrastructure all over again, and the cost of doing that is so prohibitive that you have to stay with the privatised arrangements, even if it’s a bad deal for the public, and the whole time you’ve got a private company that’s going to make the process of renationalisation as difficult as possible, because it’s in their financial interest to do so.

There are some situations where using private companies is understandable and possibly even beneficial. Situations where there’s a one-off job that needs doing, that requires special expertise that the council doesn’t have, and where it’s not practical to do it in-house. I’d argue that there are other ways to do those jobs, such as using central government resources and sharing them between councils. But even if you accept that premise, in this case we’re talking about privatisation of services which are already run perfectly well in-house. It’s not an extra burden that the council’s not able to deal with.

And there are plenty of examples of privatised services gone wrong. The trams in Edinburgh, BT in Liverpool, the Southern Cross nursing homes, the Elsie Inglis nursing home in Edinburgh, and the national rail service are just off the top of my head. The NHS is one of the most efficient health systems in the world (pdf)*, and is ranked #2 overall, and yet the government still wants to privatise huge swathes of it. It is ideological, not in the best interests of the public.

* I originally wrote “the most efficient health service in the world”, but that was based on 7 data points which isn’t exactly fair (HT Ian). It’s difficult to know for sure because I can’t find any papers on it, but the NHS comes 9th overall according to the WHO in 2000, and I think we spend less per capita on healthcare than all of the countries ranking higher, except for Japan. That would indicate to me that we’re probably 2nd to Japan in terms of efficiency. But the point remains, as the services near the top like Norway and Sweden, which spend a fairly comparable amount on healthcare, are almost entirely nationalised systems, and others that aren’t nationalised are very heavily regulated. Switzerland is also at the top, but it spends almost double what the UK does on healthcare.

A look at RUK fees

I think I’m gonna have to change the title of this blog. More and more I’m just talking about lefty stuff. I had a quiet afternoon yesterday so I wrote a bit of a ranty response to the Scottish Government’s proposals to raise fees for RUK students. This is it:

On 29^th June 2011, Michael Russell, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, made an announcement in Parliament on the future of Higher Education in Scotland. Following that announcement, a consultation document was issued containing more detailed information, and asking for responses until the 2^nd September. Anyone can respond to the consultation so feel free to print one off and send it in. The proposal at the moment is to raise the cap on fees for students from the Rest of UK (RUK) so that universities can set their own fees, up to a limit of £9,000 per year.

Russell begins his statement by claiming that Scotland will not follow England by putting an unmanageable debt burden on its graduates, and yet, for around 15% of its graduates, under these plans Scotland will become by far the most expensive place in Europe to study for a degree. He says, and I agree, that “the Scottish election established a clear consensus that tuition fees – upfront or back door – are not the right solution”. It was widely suspected during the NUS Reclaim Your Voice campaign that the Scottish Government, whoever won the election, would have to raise fees for English students, but no one was speaking about £9,000 fees. The figures that both Scottish Labour and the SNP were talking about were around £6,500, and I accepted that, albeit uncomfortably. Whilst higher education should be free and funded through a more progressive system of raised income tax, without tax-raising powers the Scottish Government would have to take money from other public services in order to fund university places that should rightly be funded by Westminster.

In both his statement to Parliament, and the consultation document, Mr Russell claims that the main purpose of this proposal is to maintain the current levels of cross-border flow of students, thereby protecting university places for Scottish domiciled students. That is clearly not the case. If Russell’s main objective were to keep that flow at the same level, then he would have looked at the situation from the students’ perspective, and realised that with a typical 4-year Scottish degree, these proposals will make it much more expensive to come to a Scottish university than to study in England. Even before taking into account an extra year of maintenance loans, a degree in Scotland will cost £36,000, as opposed to £27,000 in England. That contrasts with the action taken in 2006, which kept RUK fees in Scotland lower than fees in England, even taking the 4-year degree into account. Far from merely protecting places for Scottish students, these proposals will reduce the number of RUK students coming to Scotland through aversion to debt, and I don’t think that’s what was established as the consensus of the election. Clearly Mr Russell’s work behind the scenes with Universities Scotland has given him an institutional view which doesn’t reflect the reality of decisions that students make when applying to university.

Perhaps most worrying about this statement and accompanying document is Mr Russell’s feigned naivety about the level of fees that Scottish universities will charge RUK students. He hopes that the average fee in Scotland would be lower than in England, around £6375 per year. This number is based on pure speculation, and we’ve seen the effects of such wishful thinking south of the border, where students were told that £9,000 fees would be the exception rather than the rule. That was false in England and it’ll turn out to be false here too. The universities where the majority of RUK students go (Edinburgh,Glasgow,St Andrews, etc) see themselves as world-class institutions, and so will charge world-class fees if they’re given the opportunity. If Mr Russell is happy with the £62m that a £6375 average fee will raise, then why not set the fee level there rather than allowing Scottish universities to take more money from students’ pockets?

Another worrying aspect of these plans is that allowing variable fees will create a market in education and introduce free market forces to the Scottish higher education sector. This is an undesirable aspect of the change south of the border which the Scottish Government should reject on principle, given that it will force some students to choose their university based not on their own ability, nor on the suitability of the course, but on the amount of debt that they will be forced to accrue over the course of their studies. Mr Russell appears to have been turning a blind eye to the fee level announcements at English universities, and assumes that increased competition will drive fee levels down, when in fact as we’ve seen it has only driven them up.

Interestingly these announcements are characterised as much by what is not present as by what is. There is no mention whatsoever of the effect the new undergraduate fee levels are likely to have on postgraduate fees and international fees. These are unregulated markets, and it seems unlikely that universities will continue to charge £5,000 per year for a postgraduate taught programme whilst undergraduates pay £9,000. That will yet further restrict access to postgraduate education to those who can afford to pay large amounts of money up front.

There is also no acknowledgement of the fact that it appears Scottish students travelling to England to study will be charged up to the full £9,000 per year maximum, forcing students to choose between what may be the most suitable course for them and a large amount of debt. These plans not only fail a significant proportion of graduates in Scotland, but they will also fail those Scottish students who choose to travel to England.

Perhaps the only silver lining to this announcement is the fact that extra revenue from the increased fees will be divided across the whole sector rather than going straight to the universities who take more RUK students, and I welcome the fact that NUS Scotland will have input into those decisions. Whilst this may be less beneficial for institutions such as the University of Edinburgh, it also means that there is much less incentive for an institution to take an RUK student in place of a Scottish student, and it will prevent the gap widening between the ‘usual suspects’ and other higher education institutions. There are, however, implications for the assumption that universities will charge only £6375. If the increase in fees will replace the current teaching grant, then that fee level will only cover £4,555 of a gap left by a grant ranging from £6,000 to £15,000, depending on subject area. The rest, presumably, will come out of the centralised funds from the current teaching grants, but given the uncertainty around how much each institution will receive from that central pot, institutions will be unwilling to risk receiving less funding for those places than before, and so they’ll charge the maximum amount they can.

The proposed changes will create a precedent for a system whereby the Scottish higher education sector will be funded based on free market forces rather than on need. The Parliamentary statement is in my opinion either deliberately misleading in claiming that the fees will maintain the current level of cross-border study, or deliberately naïve in claiming that universities will charge only £6375, and I think Mr Russell should be ashamed of it. A much better policy would be to put fees at a set level around the £6375 mark, make up the rest of the current teaching grant from central funding, and then divide any leftover funds across the whole sector, using some of it to support Scottish students who travel to England to study. That would prevent Scotland from becoming the most expensive country in Europe to get a degree for a large number of its students, it would help to prevent free market forces coming into the Scottish sector, it would maintain current levels of cross-border study, and by Mr Russell’s own arithmetic it will raise an extra £62m for the sector. Whilst it will mean that in Mr Russell’s terms the policy is not ‘future proof’, in any case the cap in England has been set at £9,000, so it should never be necessary to raise fees above £6,750 in order to save Scottish places. Regardless, I hardly think that administrative ease should be the basis of a policy which costs students so much.

‘Progressives’ on the proverbial pole.

Just a quick note on this story I saw in The Independent’s sister paper i yesterday. The linked version is a little bit different to the one I saw but it’s the same gist. Tony Blair is basically warning Ed Miliband away from moving Labour to the left of politics.

Tony Blair has warned Ed Miliband not to allow Labour to drift to the left under his leadership and declared that the party must continue to modernise in order to regain power.

…

Admitting there was “a risk” of Labour turning back to left-wing policies, he said: “There is a pattern that the Labour Party and indeed other progressive parties follow – they lose an election then they go off to the left, but I meet a lot of the younger Labour people now and that gives you great cause for optimism about the future.”

He says the left is old fashioned and that the party must continue to modernise. So the right is modern? I don’t know about that. And he implies too that young Labour activists tend towards the right of the party, but that’s not what I’ve seen from my experience at all.

Notice, too, the cynical ideology of New Labour: don’t do what you think is right, do what you think the voters will like. Don’t try to persuade the public about what you think the country should do, just move along with public opinion, wherever that takes you. In my opinion progressive parties have done far too much of that already, it’s why we have someone who describes himself as progressive saying that the 50p tax rate will disincentivise people to work. It’s why whilst Damian Green is pandering to the racist right by sending immigrants home - even those who, bucking the xenophobic stereotype, work and contribute to the economy – and Gordon Brown is apologising for calling a bigot a bigot, the only acceptable public discourse about immigration is on how best to reduce it.

In his book, Mr Blair argues that traditional left-right boundaries are breaking down and that to be successful, today’s politicians need to “rise above partisan politics”.

Blair’s philosophy seems to be that the left shouldn’t have progressive policies if they don’t think they’ll get them elected, but why would a progressive want to get elected if once they’re there they don’t implement progressive policies? It’s this cynical pole-climbing and contempt for the electorate that turns people off from politics, not ideology.

More on Catholic abuse and Bill Donohue

I’m an avid viewer of an online American news show called The Young Turks. I don’t always agree with it, but it’s much better than the mainstream news and particularly on things like corporate lobbyists and tax avoidance, they’re usually bang on the money. Today I saw this video of theirs from last week in which the regular hosts Cenk and Ana comment on a new study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice:

I think that that commentary is completely unfair. First of all Cenk says that “there’s never been a dumber study in the history of mankind” and then criticises it based on the conclusion. That’s not the way this works. If you have a problem with a study you criticise it based on the method, or you look at the data and see that the conclusion isn’t supported, you don’t just say it must be wrong because it might be counter-intuitive.

Perhaps more importantly, the conclusions of the study that Cenk cites aren’t really the focus of the report. All I’ve read is the press release and the conclusion section of the full report (pg 118 onwards), which I don’t think is a huge amount to expect from someone doing a commentary on the content of a report, and the impression I was given is completely different to what they’re saying in the video. It’s as if they’ve formed their opinions from mainstream news outlets, which I wouldn’t expect from them. The main conclusion of the report is that there’s no single factor that could explain or predict abuse in the clergy, or in other words, that a lot of different things contributed to the high level of abuse.

The report does not say that the 60′s being a more “socially permissive time, and… Woodstock and all that” was the main reason for the abuse. What one of the authors of the report does say is that “the increased frequency of abuse in the 1960s and 1970s was consistent with the patterns of increased deviance of society during that time.” Now if Cenk doesn’t believe the level of abuse in society went up in the 60′s and 70′s (and I’ve no idea if it did or it didn’t), then that’s a valid basis for criticising the report, but don’t just exaggerate the claim that’s been made, that was just one of many factors.

Ana gets it right when she says that the report found that homosexuality and celibacy had no significant effect on the likelihood of abuse, but then turns that on its head (as if she thought they would) by dismissively saying the report blames it on the lack of “seminary training and emotional support to prevent them doing what they did”. It’s sort of true, the report says that a particular part of seminary training called ‘Human Formation’ was quite important, but it wasn’t just telling the priest not to rape children, as Cenk later implies. Basically what The Young Turks does here is pull out a couple of things that the report names as factors, and act as if the study is blaming the abuse on those factors, when actually the main conclusion is that no one factor can be identified as the cause.

But enough about the video, what about this conclusion that homosexuality wasn’t a factor in whether a priest abused or not? Given Bill Donohue’s tendency to blame the gays on every occasion when talking about this, will he stop making that claim now that he’s seen this report?

Of course not, it’s Bill Donohue.

Bill grandly states that “a homosexual is defined by his actions, not his identity”, and that therefore when the report says that tendency to abuse didn’t correlate with identity as a homosexual, they were missing the point. Obviously the abusers must be gay because they abused post-pubescent boys. Except that that is not what the report said. It concluded (emphasis mine):

Sexual behavior before ordination predicted sexual behavior after ordination; however, such conduct only predicted subsequent sexual interaction with other adults, not with minors. The clinical data do not support the hypothesis that priests with a homosexual identity or those who committed same-sex sexual behavior with adults are significantly more likely to sexually abuse children than those with a heterosexual orientation or behavior. (p119)

So even if homosexuals are defined by their actions rather than their identity, homosexuality still doesn’t correlate. The report did name some other factors that did have an effect (emphasis mine):

Individual characteristics do not predict that a priest will commit sexual abuse of a minor. Rather, vulnerabilities, in combination with situational stresses and opportunities, raise the risk of abuse. Like non-priest abusers, the majority of priests who sexually abused minors appear to have had certain vulnerabilities to commit abuse (for example, emotional congruence with children or adolescents), experienced increased stressors from work (for example, having recently received more responsibilities, such as becoming a pastor), and had opportunities to abuse (for example, unguarded access to minors).

But rather than focus on those, Donohue decides to blame teh gayz. Maybe he should take a look at these factors, particularly the opportunity to abuse. Maybe his oft-cited fact that most of the victims were post-pubescent males has less to do with priests being homosexual, and more to do with the fact that priests have more access to post-pubescent males, since altar-servers tend to be post-pubescent, as do children in boarding schools. Maybe his flagrant homophobia is clouding his judgement. Just maybe.

Ken Clarke and rape sentencing

Ken Clarke, the UK Justice Minister, has given several interviews today, in the first of which he appeared to downplay the seriousness of rape. Here’s a full transcript.

Recently I’ve been lamenting not writing enough on feminist issues (there are only so many times you can say “yeah, the patriarchy’s shit”), and this is quite a good opportunity. Unfortunately I find myself, to a small extent, having to defend Ken Clarke. A lot of the coverage and criticism so far has concentrated on the fact that he said date rape wasn’t as serious as ‘proper rape’ or ‘classic rape’ as he apparently later went on to describe it on Sky News. But actually, I don’t think he said that at all, and there’s certainly a compelling case that some of his more vocal critics are fully aware of that fact. I would argue that his comments are bad enough in the first place that there’s no need to overplay it.

So for example, I’ve just watched BBC News at 10, and they played this part of the interview:

Derbyshire: So is date rape not as serious?

Clarke: Date rape can be as serious as the worst rapes. But date rapes, as you are quite right to say very old experience, of being in trials, they do vary extraordinarily one from another and in the end the judge has to decide on the circumstances.

which gives the impression that he’s saying date rape isn’t serious. That would be an absolutely shocking thing to say, not least because I’m pretty sure that’s the most common form of rape. But actually this earlier part of the interview is very important:

Derbyshire: Under your plans that woman could find… that woman could find the rapist back on her street in a year and a bit. It’s an insult to her isn’t it?

Clarke: The rapist is going to be….very light sentence for a…a year and a bit?

Derbyshire: Yes. A rapist gets five years.

Clarke: Rapists don’t get… rapists get more than that.

Derbyshire: Hang on a minute. Five years on average, yes they do Mr Clarke, yes they do.

Clarke: That includes date rape, 17-year-olds having intercourse with 15-year-olds.

which makes clear that when he’s talking about ‘date rape’, he actually means statutory rape. Now I don’t think it’s a hugely controversial thing to say that when an under-16 has willing sex, that’s not as serious as what most people would colloquially refer to as rape, but that’s the comment that was twisted and used against him. That’s a bit unfair.

But he’s not getting off this altogether. There are lots of other things wrong with what he said, and I’m not particularly familiar with the way statutory rape is classified so I’m sure there are other things wrong with it that I won’t have picked up on. But there are lots of people, and I’m ashamed to say it’s mostly men, and amongst my friends it’s the usual suspects, who seem to think that all he’s said is that there’s a difference between a young couple having sex when one of them’s underage, and a rapist hiding behind a bush, and that therefore his comments were fine. That’s not true.

Fairly superficially, it is eye-opening, to say the least, to discover that our Justice Secretary apparently isn’t familiar with the difference between date rape and statutory rape, to the extent that he doesn’t correct himself despite using the term ‘date rape’ several times. As I say, when he’d had that mistake pointed out to him later in the day, he went on Sky News and talked about ‘proper rape’ and ‘classic rape’. That is mindnumbingly stupid, it’s like he’s begging for the media to rip into him.

He also fumbled considerably when he was confronted with the sentencing guidelines for rape which say the minimum sentence is 5 years (page 25), and the sentencing range is 4-8 years. He then repeated again what he had said earlier about ’18 year old boyfriends’ which isn’t at all what the interviewer was talking about. That indicates to me that our Justice Secretary also isn’t familiar with the sentencing for rape.

And that’s not to mention that, when confronted with the short sentences actually given for rape – the figure of the 5 year average sentence which Victoria Derbyshire says comes from the Council of Circuit Judges – I couldn’t tell you if it’s accurate, but when confronted with that figure, Clarke’s first instinct is to downplay the seriousness of the offence that it refers to by saying that it also includes the 18 year old boyfriends that he keeps going on about. That is indefensible, for several reasons. It’s not even true for a start, because it’s unusual for a case like that to result in a prosecution, so it doesn’t have a significant skewing effect on the figures. Additionally those cases of statutory rape which do get to court quite often involve other factors like coercion and peer pressure, for example, so they’re still serious crimes. Just because it’s statutory rape doesn’t mean it’s not serious.

In all this criticism of his comments, there has been one part that’s been largely skipped over. In his comments on Sky, he said:

“Newspapers are using rape to add some sexual excitement”.

Are you fucking kidding me?! Again even on a superficial level, what kind of a moron uses the phrase ‘sexual excitement’ and ‘rape’ in the same sentence? That is so insensitive! He could have said so many other things, he could have said that the newspapers were using rape to make the story more emotive, or to distract from the fact that this sentence reduction plan affects all crimes, or countless other things that would have been less offensive that what he said.

In addition to that, he completely misses the point of the criticism that’s been made, and this criticism actually deals with the policy itself rather than just his comments. The people focussing on rape aren’t doing so as a way to get press headlines. The objection is that in his plan to halve sentences for a guilty plea, an exception should be made for rape because the sentence for rape is already so pitifully low.

Now I actually hope that Ken Clarke isn’t fired, because if he were then I’m afraid we’d get someone worse. Clarke doesn’t believe in just banging people up, he takes an approach to law and order that’s refreshing to see from the Tories, he’s very vocally opposed to the war in Iraq, and of course he’s pro-Europe, which means he’s a counterforce to the xenophobes in the government. Ultimately, however, a justice minister should know that when you’re in an interview and the subject of rape comes up, your first concern should be encouraging victims to come forward and getting the conviction rate up. Today’s comments will only do the opposite.

Electoral Reform 2

So having covered a daft flyer from the No campaign, I’ve since been given a flyer from the Yes campaign, and it’s also terrible. It’s a shame because it’s such an easy argument to win, and the Yes campaign have failed spectacularly put across their argument. There are a number of dodgy claims on the flyer, some of which I’ll address in turn:

“A ‘No’ vote in May tells the politicians we’re happy with business as usual – expenses scandal and all.”

Not particularly. The expenses scandal has nothing to do with the electoral system at all (AV wouldn’t prevent it so if you’re voting for it for that reason you’re a bit of an idiot) and it’s clear regardless of which way the referendum goes that people were pretty pissed off about MP’s claiming for a moat around their house and things like that.

The flyer then goes through its 3 reasons to vote yes:

1) It will make all MP’s work harder for support because they have to get 50% of the vote.

Not really. It’s not as if come election season candidates are just throwing votes away by lazing around because they think they only need 30% of the vote – they take as many votes as they can get. What it may mean is that they will have to appeal to a wider section of the electorate and try to get another party’s second votes, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, if it means that candidates stick to the middle ground and refuse to be controversial, and to a certain extent they do that now anyway to get as many voters as possible. We’ll have to see how that pans out.

2) It will make your vote count.

“AV lets you show your support for any candidates you think are up to the job. So if your favourite candidate doesn’t win you can still have a say.”

This is correct but they’ve phrased it in such a ham-fisted way that it plays straight into the No campaigns hands in saying that it’s unfair and that it gives the supporters of unpopular parties an extra vote. They should have stayed well away from the individualistic point of view (after all, it won’t make any one person’s vote count any more than anyone else’s, unless those people don’t give a second preference) and instead explained that whichever candidate is elected will represent the spectrum of opinion much better than under the current system. That is one of the strongest arguments in favour, and instead the Yes campaign patronises the voter and says it’ll ‘make their vote count’, whatever that means.

3) It’ll tackle the ‘Jobs for Life’ culture – “it makes safe seats less safe.”

That might be true but not in any significant way. The safety of a seat depends not on how much of the vote they have to get, but on how likely voters are to change their voting behaviour, so actually it might not do anything of the sort, it just adds another complication to predicting results, more than actually making a seat less safe. But this is kind of a repetition of number 1, surely? Could they not think of another argument? How disappointing!

AV’s not a particularly great electoral system but there are 2 good arguments in favour of it. As I’ve already said, it’ll mean that the elected representative of a constituency represents the opinions of their constituency better than under the current system. It’ll also mean that noone is forced to vote tactically as they are now. I will be able to vote for the party I like rather than voting to keep the party I dislike out. That’s not to say it’ll get rid of tactical voting altogether, as in some situations a party with a particularly good campaign team can knock out their closest rival in the first round, but it’ll be a great improvement on First Past the Post.

And these points aren’t difficult to make! I already showed in my last post the cartoon about tactical voting, but there are also good visual illustrations of my first argument, two of which are below. I find it particularly offensive when the Yes campaign assumes the electorate is too stupid to have it explained to them in any way other than appealing to simplistic populist arguments involving the expenses scandal, because if they think the electorate’s too stupid to understand AV then that’s one good argument against bringing it in! It’s almost as if they don’t want to win.

My experience of the March for the Alternative

It’s been a very, very long time since my last post, and a lot has happened between then and now. I decided to run for a sabbatical position at my students’ union, won that election, then got myself involved in staff strike action at university, probably more demonstrations and marches than I’d ever been to before in my life, plus a little thing called my degree, so it’s been a very busy time.

The latest demonstration was called the March for the Alternative this past Saturday, you may have heard about it from the media coverage. In fact I’ve just been watching Theresa May answering questions about it, and the way Parliament is speaking you would think the media was on the side of the so-called violent minority. That’s far from the case. So here’s an outline of my day:

We set off from Edinburgh by coach at 11pm on the Friday night, and parked about 9.30am. On the way we’d seen the stage in Hyde Park which was presumably where the rally was to take place later, and IIRC overhead it read something like “all cuts are wrong”. I could imagine Ed Miliband talking there later saying “well they are wrong but we’d do most of them anyway”. Some of us went straight to the starting point at Victoria Embankment whilst the majority, myself included, decided to head to the Education feeder march at ULU. I noticed the first signs of conflict there, where a large group of more militant activists using Black Bloc tactics had already formed up and were getting restless. I later realised that the Militant Workers Bloc was supposed to be setting off from ULU an hour earlier than the Education feeder, and impatient to set off, they started getting frustrated with who they thought were the SWP, but who I knew were actually there as activists from the Glasgow anti-cuts group.

We set off at around 11.15, and the feeder was actually the best part of the march, with plenty of chants and songs going. Some of our group had instruments, and played various lefty tunes on the way. We eventually joined the main march at the embankment, and the atmosphere there was noticably different. Noone joined in with chants or songs, and the majority of people were just walking along chatting. Even uncontroversial chants like “no ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts” got no response. This was a very different march to the ones I’m used to, but given the numbers, it’s hardly surprising. It was also good to see all the old-fashioned TU banners, I’d only really seen ones from the UCU and a few from the Fire Brigade strike before.

At around 1.30pm, we got bored of the march and decided to head towards Oxford Street where UK Uncut had some action planned. We went via Trafalgar Square where a large group had gathered, and then on the way to Soho Square (near the middle of Oxford Street) we bumped into a lot of splinter groups that had already broken off. I think the 400,000 figure that’s being bandied about at the minute is a massive underestimate. A lot of demonstrators didn’t go to the march at all.

We got to Oxford Street and it reached 2.11pm, when a lot of action was supposed to start. The UK Uncut action appeared to have been taken over by people in the Black Bloc, who split up into 2 groups, heading towards each end of the street. A small group of us noticed a lot of police heading down to either end, and it seemed like a kettle waiting to happen, so we stayed in the middle, wandered down some side streets and tried to keep our friends in both groups aware of which way the main body of police was heading. Riot vans were speeding from one end of the area to the other, so it was obvious that the protestors had been too quick for the police. We passed a McDonald’s restaurant that had been smashed in, and heard about a few HSBC branches, the Ritz, Topshop and Starbucks.

After 45 minutes of that we went to Oxford Circus, where UK Uncut were supposed to be announcing a big target at 3.30pm. It was right next to Topshop where there had already been a confrontation with the police, and they dragged a Trojan horse into the Circus, and had a street party, which was nice. Apparently they later set off fireworks from near the horse and it caught fire and went up in minutes. Oh well. Instead of just announcing the target, they told everyone to follow the people with the red umbrellas, who went towards Picadilly Circus. We already knew there were masses of riot police down there, so again, to avoid a kettle, we took the back streets, and ended up in Trafalgar Square again, where there were still thousands of protestors, and we met up with other people we knew. This was at about 4.30 and we could see down the street that the main march was nowhere near finished yet. We stayed there for a while and enjoyed the atmosphere, then went back to the bus. Brilliant day.

A quick note on the violence. It’s interesting to note that the media (and the police) have latched onto UK Uncut as the main instigators. In fact, the people smashing windows in the Black Bloc were almost certainly not regular attendees of UK Uncut events, for a fairly simple reason. UK Uncut is generally run by Greens and the Robin Hood Tax people, social democrats in other words. Many of those in the Black Bloc were carrying anarchist flags, and campaigning for certain companies to pay their taxes doesn’t fit very easily into an anarchist ideology.

Inside Fortnum and Mason - hardly the most violent example of direct action

There was also a difference in targets (they overlapped, but I don’t know of any UK Uncut demo at a McDonald’s, for example), and a difference in tactics (UK Uncut generally just sit in the doorway and don’t let anyone in, rather than smashing windows), so it’s misleading to conflate the two groups. Some of the more typical targets of UK Uncut like Barclays and Vodafone seemed to have already shut their branches so there was no point in doing a usual demo there. I’d also point out that whilst the media goes into its usual hysteria about “anarchy in the UK” or whatever, as far as I know noone was actually hurt in any of the vandalism on businesses – most injuries were sustained in confrontations with the police. It’s worth keeping in perspective that we’re talking about some windows being smashed, property damage, nothing that can’t be fixed. All the right windows were smashed. Where the more typical UK Uncut group took a more typical direct action by sitting in Fortnum and Mason – nothing that could be called violence or even property damage, they were arrested and had their phones and clothes confiscated, despite being told they’d be allowed to leave. That’s probably the action that I most agreed with, the least controversial one, and yet that’s the one the police cracked down on. They were very strange and unusual tactics.

Aaron Porter needs to get his act together

Eek – I only intended this to be a few hundred words. I suppose there’s a lot to say.

Edit: It seems a lot of people agree with me. At the march in Manchester, Porter was chased away by a group of about 200 students, and the person who replaced him to give a speech at the rally was egged and booed off the stage.

Aaron Porter is the current President of the National Union of Students. He’s a Labour careerist and he just follows the status quo, for which he’s been slated by anti-cuts groups across the UK. We’ll see him in Parliament before too long. Today he wrote this piece in the Guardian in which he defends his actions and says the NUS is ‘leading the movement’ sparked in response to the government’s attack on young people. As usual, I’ll take a look at some of his claims and give a response, as rationally as possible.

At several points in the article, he points out that the groups criticising make up a small minority and “represent few people other than themselves”, and that in contrast, he has a duty to represent all students in the debate. Really? Let’s not forget that the NUS leadership is elected under a very undemocratic system – students themselves don’t vote for the President, NUS delegates from each student union do. So Aaron Porter has the position that he has because of a poll of a small group of people themselves elected by a small minority of members (in my union about 4,000 people out of 28,000 voted in the last presidential election race – significantly less will have voted for the NUS delegate). This group is dominated by Labour careerists, and it decided not to fight for free higher education. His position has no legitimacy, so for him to criticise other groups on the basis that they don’t represent students is ludicrous.

Clearly, since he was elected under a broken system, Porter cannot claim to represent the views of students. But what he can do is try to represent their interests. I argue that he and the rest of the NUS leadership aren’t doing that. It is not in students’ interest to pay tuition fees, whether £3,000 or £9,000. It is not in students’ interest to pay a graduate tax. What is in students’ interest is free, fair and funded higher education, but NUS UK has given up on that. It’s sold out. Neither Aaron Porter nor the anti-cuts movement can claim to represent the views of the majority of students, but at least the anti-cuts movement is representing their interests.

What about Porter’s claim that the NUS has been ‘leading the movement’? I find it laughable. He gives two examples of NUS leadership: the march on 10th November, and the upcoming march in Manchester tomorrow. He also claims that the NUS called a series of campus actions – this is complete bollocks. Where groups did take action in the form of occupations, he failed to support them. He himself admitted that he was spineless in dealing with that action, the action that he is now claiming to have led. What a joke.

He doesn’t mention another ‘action’ that the NUS led: the candle-lit glowstick-lit vigil on the Thames, where a paltry couple of hundred people mourned the death of higher education, whilst around the corner tens of thousands were fighting to save it. Which of these two groups was acting in students’ interests?

I was at NUS Scotland’s candle-lit vigil outside Holyrood Parliament here in Edinburgh (there was no march happening up here, unfortunately). It was pathetic. A few too many speakers addressed a crowd of about 60 people in the dark, some holding candles but most not. A speaker from the St Andrews occupation was tagged on as an afterthought, and then speakers from other occupations were asked to come forwards, only to be denied the microphone. To his credit, Liam Burns tried to get some chants going, but it just felt wrong chanting ‘no ifs, no buts, no education cuts’ whilst holding a candle to mourn the death of higher education, and frankly it fell on its arse. The NUS has done some good things. It is good at mobilising students when it wants to be, and making Lib Dem candidates sign pledges gave the movement a focus. But right now it is not leading the movement as it should be, it is lagging far behind.

Stunningly, Porter then gives as an example of NUS leadership the fact that it is collaborating with other trades unions in organising the march tomorrow. This is a perfect example of how the NUS is lagging behind! Anti-cuts coalitions have been springing up all over the place, collaborations between anti-cuts campus groups and various trades union branches, and the NUS is nowhere to be seen! Groups like the Edinburgh Anti-Cuts Alliance, for example, have existed for months! Furthermore, trades union leaders have repeatedly called the student movement ‘an inspiration’. Do you think they’re talking about the glowstick-lit vigil? Somehow I think they’re talking about somewhat more direct action. The NUS has been lacking in its dealings with trades unions.

Porter then tries to manipulate the figures a little. Yes, over 650 unions do go into the NUS, and only a small number of those have passed motions of no confidence, but one of them was ULU, the union of the UK’s biggest university, and there are more in the pipeline. I looked at my local area to see what type of institution makes up the 650 unions figure, and lots of them are tiny 6th form colleges – less than 1% of unions doesn’t mean less than 1% of students. And how many unions haven’t yet had general meetings where motions of no confidence could happen? He is trying to imply that 99% of students approve of what he has done, when that is simply not the case; the vast majority haven’t spoken one way or the other.

Modern politics will not be swayed by street protest alone and that is why I am prepared to engage with Simon Hughes in his new role as the government’s “access advocate”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know the NUS’s policy of back-room deals hasn’t exactly yielded the best results for students over the past decade. ‘Engaging with the process’ seems to mean arguing for something you think you can get, rather than something you want. It seems to mean dropping your principles to get something, anything, from politics. Aaron Porter can’t look at what’s happened in the past few days in Tunisia and Egypt and tell me that nothing is achieved by street protest.

He finishes his article by lamenting that the group is infighting, implying that these anti-cuts groups should comply with his agenda. But which group is really breaking away from the other? The 200 people on the banks of the Thames, clutching glowsticks in the dark, making a lame argument for a graduate tax, or the tens of thousands of people fighting against the biggest assault on the welfare state that this country has ever seen? If he wants unity in the student movement, he can come to us.

encourage anyone who believes the government is cutting too hard and too fast to join us in Manchester on Saturday or to safely and peacefully show our campaign has moved beyond London

“Cutting too hard and too fast”… isn’t that an Ed Miliband talking point? Fuck you, Porter.