So, who hasn’t been hacked[1][2] recently? Every other day I seem to wake up to news of yet another security breach. Most recently, it was the International Monetary Fund, supposedly hacked by a government. Affiliates of the FBI have not been immune either. To turn the tables a little, MI6 has been hacking Al Qaeda, with cupcake recipes. Anonymous has been threatening NATO.
Read more on ORGZine.
I never trust statistics I haven’t forged myself. Case in point on the Today Programme this morning, with regards to public sector pensions.
Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS Union, made the reasonably well-known point that the relatively generous public sector pension provisions are a compensation for relatively lower pay during your career, compared to people in the private sector doing work of similar value. But he also questioned quite how generous those public sector pension provisions were: the average civil service pension is £4,000 a year, he said.
This was put to Frances Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister. Said Mr. Maude:
Let’s be clear about this. A civil servant on median salary, the middle salary, of £23,000, will retire after 40 years – a career of 40 years which many of them will have had – with a pension pot worth £500,000. Half a million pounds.
So how do both contributors score on forging your own stats?
Let’s take Mark Serwotka first: a quick Google search reveals he’s not quite right. The average civil service pension is around £6,000 per year – it’s the average local government pension that’s around £4,000. Neither of these numbers is something you’d want to live on in your old age, but one is 50% higher than the other. Having said that, using an average (mean) is probably being slightly generous here anyway because it allows the few individuals with the truly “gold-plated” pensions to drag everyone else’s contributions to the data set up. A median would be a much more useful figure if we had it.
Francis Maude does use the more meaningful median figure when he quotes civil service salaries[1]. But watch how he hedges his bets: it’s only after a 40-year career, “which many of them will have”, that civil servants reach the mythical 500k pension pot. We have no information on how many people within the civil service actually will have the 40-year career. Given that the civil service employs over half a million people, Francis Maude’s “many” may refer to as little as 10% of that figure.
The other catch, of course, is that the assertion about the 500k pension pot is actually meaningless in the context of Defined Benefit pension schemes. Mr. Maude may have multiplied the annual pension resulting from a 40-year career at the median salary by the average life expectancy beyond retirement of civil servants to get that figure, but by definition a Defined Benefit scheme doesn’t have a “pot”.
So the Cabinet Office Minister is employing two tricks here: he has singled out a group of civil servants which may or may not be representative or significant, and he has deliberately quoted their pension benefits in a format which is designed to make them look larger, but is actually misleading and meaningless.
This is yet another example of policy by anecdote. Compare the stories of the £26,000 benefit scroungers to see the same approach being applied to different areas. What was utterly disgraceful about this morning’s episode, though, was that Jim Naughtie let it go through unchallenged. Most people don’t question the data they are presented with, but I would expect presenters of the caliber of Mr. Naughtie to do better than this.
Now, there may be (and probably is) a perfectly valid case for reforming public sector pensions, and the government’s proposals on the subject may even be the right thing to do. We will, however, never really know, because instead of presenting us with meaningful data and arguments, government ministers are relying on anecdotal, sensationalist soundbites.
[1] Interestingly, the median salary across all sectors in the UK is around the £21,000 mark. Does this mean that Mr. Serwotka’s assertions that public sector employees are paid less than private sector ones is not true either? Not necessarily. Remember the qualification: we’re talking about work of similar value. The national median earnings figure will include all types of work, from cleaning to being a chief executive. You would have to get a breakdown by sector and type of work to make a meaningful comparison. For time being, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Serwotka on this one.
I could, I suppose, be accused of having an unhealthy obsession with Nadine Dorries. But then again, she is the one who has an unhealthy obsession with what goes on between my legs and inside my uterus – so I suppose it’s only fair.
Dorries’ proposals to target abstinence education at girls, and well as her and Frank Field’s move to introduce additional mandatory counselling before a woman can have an abortion are some recent examples of the brand of small government she champions – small enough to fit in my bedroom. What is even more chilling is that both these proposals are cleverly disguised in a “caring for and empowering women” rhetoric. Here is Dorries on abstinence education:
I want to place an emphasis on girls. I do. It’s girls who get pregnant, girls who lose their education, girls who are left to bring up a child on benefits, girls who reach old age in poverty, girls who are subjected to a string of guesting fathers as they throw in the towel in a life of welfare misery, girls who seek abortion, girls who suffer the consequences of abortion, girls who are subjected to the increased medical risks of giving birth at a young age, girls who have little control over condom use, girls who are pressurised, girls who are targeted by lad mag marketing, it’s seven year old girls Primark made alluring padded bikinis for, girls who are targeted by paedophiles.
And again, on abortion:
We are no longer chanting the ‘right on’ mantra of the elitist university graduates of the 1980’s. Real women, those who are not motivated by political ideology, want real choice and the last thirteen years just haven’t given them that.
I would like to make one thing clear: Nadine Dorries’ agenda is about as far from an empowering, pro-woman agenda as we can get. And frankly, it’s about as far from a pro-children agenda as we can get.
There are subtle differences between teaching girls to say no and teaching all kids to make an informed choice on when they are ready to have sex and have constructive conversations about it with their partners. Something which struck me when doing some high-level reading on abstinence education is that success tends to get measured based on how many teens went on to have or not to have sex over a period of time following the education programme. This then gets compared to the same figure for teenagers who’ve had more comprehensive sex education. This says a lot about the real goals of promoters of abstinence. They may talk about preventing teenage pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections, but all they’re really interested in is enforcing traditional gender roles and views of the family: one man, one woman, married and only having sex for the purposes of procreation.
There is nothing wrong with having sex – no, not even with teenagers having sex. As long as the sex is consensual, respectful and safe, it is a perfectly natural, human thing to do, and discovering your sexuality is a part of growing up. It is the “consensual, respectful and safe” parts of this we should be focusing on in order to empower girls and young women, not the “sex is icky and damaging” message that Dorries wants to push, which empowers no one.
On abortion, too, Nadine Dorries is attempting to reposition herself as empowering, pro-woman, pro-choice – as long as your choice is not to terminate a pregnancy. Yet putting up more hurdles for women who wish to access abortion services (they already get counselling) only delays the procedure, increasing the risk of complications for women. Instead of empowering women, such tactics endanger our health.
But here’s the real catch: I want every child to be an actively wanted child. I want Mum and Dad (or Mum and Mum, or Dad and Dad, or just Mum or just Dad) to have sat down and talked about it and decided that now is the right time for them to have a child, that they are emotionally, physically and financially[1] in a position to raise a child, that it’s the right thing for them and that child. Talking a woman into wanting a child is not, and cannot be in the interests of either the woman or the child. To me, that’s a no-brainer. And therefore Nadine Dorries’ approach by definition cannot be either pro-woman or pro-child.
On Monday, I attended a not very secret meeting in London to discuss how we counter Nadine Dorries’ anti-choice, anti-women agenda. It was a very productive session, and I am very much looking forward to the action that will come out of it. One thing I made clear at the meeting is that we cannot afford for this to be a campaign exclusive to London. We need to make it clear that the majority in this country reject the Dorries agenda[2]. We need to regain control of this debate everywhere, not just in London, and we need to make every single one of our MPs understand that women’s right to choose is not up for negotiation, and neither is our children’s right to fact-based, impartial sex education. If anyone in the Northeast is interested in this area, or already doing something, then please give me shout. Let’s get our voices heard.
[1] And I don’t mean David Cameron style “only the middle classes should breed” financial situations, just that people should at least have thought about it.
[2] 75% of people in this country believe women should have the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. And one in three women will have an abortion at some point in her life.
I attended a workshop today organised by the Parliamentary Outreach Service on engaging with proposed legislation. It was an incredibly useful event, but it did highlight some of the issues we still face when it comes to our political system’s accessibility to “ordinary people”.
There were five speakers at the event, covering a range of topics. James Rhys talked about the basic procedures a Bill follows as it goes through Parliament, as well as the specifics of Public Bill Committees and the Committee Stage. Matt Ringer took us through some of the amazing functionality on the parliament.uk website. (You can find out what stage a Bill is currently in, see all proposed amendments as well as those selected for debate, find out the timetable for the Bill and if/when a Public Bill Committee is calling for evidence to be submitted, see all the written evidence, as well as the research on the subject produced by the House of Commons Library for MPs.)
There were also three more “practical” sessions – people sharing their personal experiences of engaging with Parliament, from both sides. Kevan Jones MP and Lord Shipley covered the Parliamentarian perspective, while Yetunde Adediran shared her experience of submitting evidence to Parliament.
By this point, you should be noticing something: out of five speakers, four were white and male. (The audience, in contrast to the speakers was actually reasonably diverse for the North-east.) Not only were the speakers unrepresentative of British society, but so were their stories. Kevan Jones in particular shared his experience of getting a Private Member’s Bill on the statute books – and there was nothing in that story that made me think that Parliament was anything other than an Old Boys’ Club. Lord Shipley’s stories, while making the House of Lords seem slightly more approachable (paradoxical, I know), also failed to feature any persons who were not white, probably straight, men.
I fully appreciate the spirit of the event, and as I said above, I found the information very useful. However, at times it did feel a little like we had come to be lectured by our betters. While the organisers could have put more effort into making the speakers more representative of society in general (we do have female MPs in the region!), we also need to recognise that this is only a symptom of the general state of our politics. There are still not enough women in Parliament (either house!), or people of colour, or representatives of various other minorities. Political careers (elected or otherwise) are increasingly closed and inaccessible to the working class. Take a look at the people who last year decided the fate of the country in the coalition negotiations: there wasn’t a single woman among them (though interestingly there were three or four gay or bisexual men).
Workshops like today’s are a great start to getting people more engaged in politics at all levels – but we need to do more. Political parties as well as institutions like Parliament need to do more to get minorities and disadvantaged groups engaged and participating in politics at all levels.
You may be familiar with Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book “Freakonomis” – a collection of curious and entertaining case studies from the world of behavioural economics with subjects ranging from sumo wrestlers to drug dealers. In the introduction to the (less entertaining, less well researched) sequel “Superfreakonomics”, Dubner and Levitt reveal the unifying theme of their work: people respond to incentives.
Read more at ORGZine.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And after today, it must surely be a truth universally acknowledged that V. S. Naipaul has never read Jane Austen.
Before I go any further, I shall put my hands up and admit that I have never read any of Mr. Naipaul’s fiction either – so the below is purely based on his comments at the Royal Geographical Society.
He said of Jane Austen that he
couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world.
Now, anyone who has read Jane Austen and engaged with the text for about 30 seconds would struggle to call her work sentimental. I often joke that Austen gets her own special exception to the Bechdel Test. While she has plenty of female characters and they do often talk to each other, they rarely talk about topics other than men. And yet, every time a female Austen character discusses men, she is actually commenting on the social and economic conditions of her time. There is nothing at all sentimental about being one of five daughters who will be left penniless after their father’s death, and for whom therefore securing an advantageous marriage is a matter of survival. Mr. Naipaul’s understanding of both Austen and the world in general seems incredibly limited if he cannot get his head around this.
Of women writers in general, V.S. Naipaul says
Women writers are different, they are quite different. I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.
He puts this down to their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”.
And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don’t mean this in any unkind way.
I especially love that final disclaimer – almost like he realises he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar but can’t quite work out why this is a bad thing. Then again, “unkind” is perhaps too mild a word to apply to Mr. Naipaul’s comments. With a few words, he invalidates the experiences of half the human race, makes it clear that he finds nothing of value in those experiences or in women’s attempts to express them.
I guess that’s his prerogative – just as it is mine to think that V.S. Naipaul has failed to meaningfully engage with the world around him. So I for one shan’t be engaging with his work.