Homelessness – a drive-by post

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About half an hour ago, Housing Minister Grant Shapps tweeted this:

We’re investing £400m in tackling homelessness over the next 4 years – zero cut to this budget in order to protect the most vulnerable.

This begged the question of how much homelessness was predicted to rise by as a result of the government’s policies. I’m thinking here of caps on housing benefit, sweeping changes (read cuts) to disability benefits, as well as of Mr. Shapps’ own proposal to evict people who took part in the recent riots (and their innocent families) from council housing. Because, you see, having a flat budget to tackle homelessness in the face of rising homelessness is effectively a cut.
Responding to my tweet asking this question of the Housing Minister, Sue Marsh quoted some stats, on decrease of homelessness under Labour and rise under the current government.
For the last half hour Mr. Shapps has been busy explaining how Labour doctored the stats. I am still waiting for an answer to my original question about his own doctoring of numbers and have tweeted it at him repeatedly. Do we think he’d spot irony if it bit him in the arse?

On the choice to be an incubator

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In debates about abortion, anti-choice activists often advocate the option of putting a child up for adoption as and alternative to abortion for women who do not wish to, or have no means to raise a child. In the United States in particular, a dangerous rhetoric has developed to counter the Planned Parenthood slogan “Every child a wanted child”.
Pregnant Pause is a good example of this. They argue that every child is a wanted child, as up to two million American couples are currently waiting to adopt a child, and 1.3 million abortions are carried out in the US every year. If only every woman who found herself unwantedly pregnant chose to carry the pregnancy to term, all of these babies would find happy, loving homes with one of the two million couples waiting to adopt them!
The US-based anti-choice lobbying organisation National Right to Life makes this bold claim: “Adoption is a thoroughly responsible, helpful-to-all alternative to abortion that is, unfortunately, not well understood.” The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children and abortionfacts.com go a step further, to paraphrase the Planned Parenthood slogan as “every unwanted child a dead child” and “Every Child a Wanted Child, and if not wanted, kill!”, respectively. Ultimately, what we are being told here is that women who choose to abort an unwanted pregnancy are murdering children, and that instead they should simply act as incubators for those who want to adopt children instead.
A similar discourse can be observed among anti-choice organisations in the UK, though it is more subtle. Care Confidential gives information about the different options available to pregnant women. Just a quick glance at the paragraph heading on their abortion and adoption pages gives you an insight into which way Care Confidential leans. After some more-or-less factual information on medical and surgical abortions we get “What are the health risks of medical abortions?” and “What are the health risks [of surgical abortion]?” The list of “risks” is rather more extensive than those given by the NHS, with in some cases drastically inflated numbers and in-depth discussion of “post-abortion stress”. When it comes to adoption, the paragraph headings are “What’s good about adoption?”, “What is the adoption procedure?”, “What support is there for adoption?” The page makes no mention, for instance, of mental health impacts of carrying a pregnancy to term to then give the child up for adoption, nor of the risks posed to a woman’s physical health by pregnancy and childbirth.
Alternatives Pregnancy Choices Newham has a similar approach. The organisation states that women are entitled to have “all the information about all three options” (keeping the baby, adoption and abortion). Yet a good two thirds of the information page on abortion is dedicated to risks and particularly potential mental health issues. There is a certain implication here that women should feel guilty and traumatised after an abortion. The adoption page, on the other hand, concentrates on describing the improvements in approaches to adoption, how the woman would be involved throughout the process, for instance through being able to choose the adoptive parents, and how she can change her mind for up to six weeks after the birth.
Particularly worrying is the fact that these organisations offer information and counseling to women in unplanned pregnancy situations, who may often be in a vulnerable position and in need of factual, impartial advice rather than the
railroading, judgmental “information” offered by anti-choice organisations.
The leaflet Baby Adoption Today [PDF] published by the Adoption Support Society and linked to from the Care Confidential website makes at least a token effort to address some of the emotional issues around adoption, with questions like “I couldn’t go through 9 months of pregnancy and then give my baby away”, and “What would I say to family and friends afterwards – pregnant one week and without a baby the next?” The answers it gives, however, are far from unbiased.

It’s still hard to decide. Isn’t an abortion more straightforward in the long run? It may seem to be in the short term, but in the long run you could be coping with the emotional problems and depression that can follow and abortion and which may be ongoing. If you choose adoption, you may also experience similar emotions but your baby will have the chance of life in a loving home.

I am particularly concerned by the answer to the “What would I say to family and friends” question:

You may feel awkward or embarrassed. Tell people you decided on adoption because, although it was a very painful choice, you believe it was the right and loving decision for you and your baby.

There are other problematic passages in the leaflet, characterised by the assumption that the default state of a woman is to want a child, and that only external circumstances prevent her from being able to keep and raise that child herself. Advocates of adoption as the alternative to abortion often fail to deal with a number of basic issues: that there may be more than one reason for not wanting a child beyond simple inability to support them economically at a particular point in a woman’s life; the emotional and physical effects on a woman of carrying a pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption; and the social, economic, and educational impacts of this process.
The disruption that even a “normal”, complication-free pregnancy, where the woman fits all the social norms of being happily married and financially stable, causes to a woman’s life is significant. I have watched friends and colleagues go through this: doctor’s appointments, loss of energy, physical side effects, being off work sick. Imagine now someone who fits the stereotype of the Baby Adoption Today leaflet: relatively young, not in a financially stable position, possibly not in a long-term relationship, either still in education or possibly in an unstable, low-paid job. Some of the issues this woman might face if she chose to carry the pregnancy to term to give up the child for adoption include:

  • Workplace discrimination: Although this is illegal in the UK, it still happens [PDF] What’s more, the government is currently not collecting or publishing statistics on distrimination due to pregnancy so we have no meaningful ways of addressing this.
  • Missing out on school/university: This can be simply to attend doctor’s appointments, but also due to physical side effects of the pregnancy – loss of energy, morning sickness, etc. Over the course of the nine months, this can be incredibly disruptive and damaging to a young woman’s education, and significantly impact her future educational and career choices and path.
  • Having to take time off work: Never popular, often seen as a justification for employment discrimination; in a job paid by the hour or with few or no benefits, this will also have a significant financial impact on the woman throughout her pregnancy.
  • Social stigma: To be fair, there is a lot of this going round, regardless of whether a woman chooses abortion, adoption or to keep the baby. Adoption, however, seems to offer the worst of both worlds in this area: unlike an abortion it’s not something you can keep secret, and after months of visible pregnancy having to explain to friends, family, colleagues and the nosy lady next door that you aren’t keeping the baby can be extremely challenging.
  • Lack of benefits/legal protection: A woman keeping her baby would be entitled to maternity leave – both to help her recover physically from pregnancy and childbirth, and to give her time to bond with and look after her child. A woman giving her baby up for adoption, while she doesn’t have a child to look after, has still gone through the same physically traumatic experience of pregnancy and child birth and is additionally going through what may be a very stressful adoption procedure. Yet as best I can tell, she would be expected back at work the day after giving birth. At best, this is a legally grey area.

To be honest, even in my stable relationship and middle-class, salaried job with exceptionally good benefits I wouldn’t want to put myself through any of the above unless I genuinely wanted a child. To ask a woman to put her life on hold for the better part of a year, to expose herself to risks of short- and long-term health problems, discrimination, of not being able to fulfill her life ambitions as she misses out on educational, social and employment opportunities, so that her “baby will have the chance of life in a loving home” is beyond reasonable. There may be women out there who are selfless enough to do this. Ultimately, though, denying women the choice, presenting adoption as the only option for a woman in an unwanted pregnancy situation, asking them to make such sacrifices for a bundle of cells they never wanted is not a viable alternative. The message proponents of adoption send to me is that I am only valued as an incubator; that the baby that may come out of my uterus to be adopted by others is of more value than anything else I can offer society through who I am, what I can do or what I personally aspire to.

In the words of the Kaiser Chiefs – some musings on the riots

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“Mindless violence”, “thugs”, “criminality of the worst kind” – these are the words used over and over again by police, politicians and the majority of the media to describe the riots we have seen in London and some of Britain’s biggest cities over the last few days. To a certain extent, there is no denying this logic. This is no peaceful read-in at a Vodafone store, nor a carefully organised, meticulously planned and highly creative action like the UK Uncut action in Fortnum & Mason. It isn’t even a largely peaceful political protest parts of which got out of hand. These riots are markedly different: there are no political demands, no slogans or chants – just destruction, theft and violence. So is it right to dismiss them as nothing more than the actions of violent thugs?
The first thing to note here is that at this stage, we know very little about the people involved. We have seen images of mostly young men, some of them from black or minority ethnic backgrounds but also many white faces, we have been told that in many cases it’s even very young kids – 10, 11, 12 years old – getting involved, and young women. Making generalisations is difficult – and so it should be.
The government obviously has a vested interest in representing the riots as mindless, criminal violence, rather than politically motivated action. Anything else would mean that at least some of the blame for what is happening would fall on the shoulders of our overlords – and that’s not something they can afford. Sometimes, however, there is not a clear line between criminality and political acts, and I believe what we are witnessing right now falls into that area of shades of grey in between.
Some of the soundbites journalists have managed to get from rioters and looters are particularly telling. In this one, young girls drunk on looted wine talk about what they’re doing and why. There’s a vague attempt to blame the government there, somewhat undermined by one of them saying “Yeah… Conservatives… I don’t know who it is!” When questioned why they are attacking businesses in their local community, the girls answer, “It’s the rich people, the people that have got businesses, and that’s why all of this has happened. So we’re just showing the rich people we can do what we want.”
Another item on the Today Programme this morning featured a young male rioter talking about his perception of the consequences of his actions. His expectation was that he would never get caught as police were overstretched, and even if he did, the consequences would be minor – prisons are already overcrowded so the worst he would get, he thought, was an ASBO – not something he considered a big deal.
On the surface, it is easy to interpret these remarks as willful criminality and mindless thuggery. Yet they betray a staggering level of alienation from society. What these young people are saying is essentially “Your system, your social structures, your reward and punishment mechanisms don’t apply to us.” The people some of our leaders call Alarm Clock Britain – small business owners who are struggling in the current economic climate – are viewed by the rioters as “rich people”, with no distinction between them and, say, investment bankers.
It is a commonly used tactic of the privileged to dismiss the arguments of the oppressed unless they are phrased and presented on their terms. You’ve probably heard such dismissals: just think “You’re just being over-emotional”. What I think is happening in the discourse on the riots is much the same thing: the privileged political classes refusing to recognise as political expression anything other than the kind of well-organised, targeted protest that predominantly white trade unionists and middle classes tend to engage in. Yet just because these young people’s feelings and experiences aren’t expressed in a sanctioned way, just because they feel they have no constructive way (or for that matter reason or incentive) to engage with the rest of society, doesn’t make their alienation any less valid, their acts any less political.
Do I support rioting and looting as a means of political expression? No. Do we live in a world where “society” is only for the privileged, and we quite literally have no common language with the truly alienated and oppressed? Probably. The biggest challenge once the riots are over will be to find a common language, to give these kids a reason to believe that there is a place for them in our society and that it is worth their time and effort to take that place.

[Elsewhere] Web blocking rears its ugly head

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Reading the headlines Wednesday morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that one of the long hard battles the Open Rights Group has been fighting for the last couple of years – the one on the web blocking provisions in Sections 17 and 18 of the of the Digital Economy Act 2010 – had been won. “Government scraps plans to block illegal filesharing websites”, proclaimed the Guardian, with similar headlines on BBC News and other outlets. The reports referred to comments made by Business Secretary Vince Cable in the wider context of his response to the Hargreaves Review.
Read more at ORGZine.

An exhibit in the national curriculum

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Lee Hall, the writer behind Billy Elliot, has written a moving piece for the Guardian today as his most recent project looks to be on the brink of collapse due to what is – frankly and simply – homophobia. The community opera “Beached” is developed and set in Bridlington, on the beach, and has a cast of nearly 400, 300 of whom are primary school children. It is, in Hall’s own words, “a comedy about tolerance and inclusiveness” and was backed by Opera North as part of the their wider Sing Up! Bridlington initiative.
Yet with two weeks to go until the premiere, the project has reached an impasse, with the primary school involved demanding that references to the main character’s sexuality (“I’m queer” and “I prefer a lad to a lass”) are removed from the libretto. Having accommodated several other change requests, Lee Hall is making a stand on this one. He has proposed a number of options to move forward, including asking Opera North to help him engage directly with parents and the school and paying for Stonewall’s education team run workshops with children and parents. Neither of these options were deemed acceptable and it is now looking like the project will be canceled.
You might think “Homophobia in English education system” isn’t exactly a news story, and you would be right. We are still feeling the aftermath of Section 28. What is particularly disappointing in this case, though, is Opera North’s acceptance of the school’s prejudice and refusal to engage further on the subject. Their response shows a stunning level of bigotry.
Firstly, it tries to dismiss the significance of the issue:

It is a huge disappointment that the wider vision of the Bridlington project is currently being overshadowed. Opera North has been leading a community funded community engagement programme for the last two years, which has successfully established seven different choral groups, reaching in excess of 1,500 people in the local area from 0-82.

It even tells us that the only money that might be lost by the project not going ahead would be the commission fee for Beached, a mere £15,000. The time and effort of the hundreds of volunteers and members of the community who have been involved with Beached is clearly not sufficiently valuable to consider here.
Opera North then proceed to tell us that they

appreciate the viewpoint of the school about when they make the decision to teach PSHE to their pupils. This project is part of their formal learning and pupils from the age of 4 are performing, watching and taking part in the entire piece. PSHE begins from year 5, ages around 9.

And aye, there’s the rub. The prejudice and bigotry implicit in this comment, both on the part of Opera North and the school, are shocking. Apparently it is partly “down to the architecture of a performance space which has no on or off stage, meaning all performers are involved at all times”.
The unspoken assumption here is that children must be shielded from gay people. If there is a chance that they might overhear the lines spoken on stage between adult characters referring simply to the fact that a man has relationships with men rather than women, then that needs to be prevented, and if it means scrapping the entire production then so be it.
Gay people, in this world view, are not so much people but some sort of exhibit, a part of the national curriculum, something you teach, not human beings like you and me with feelings and lives and agency of their own. This characterisation of gay people as “Other” is damaging – both for those of us who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, but also for the children growing up in such a society.
How, I wonder, is the school planning to explain to those 300 kids why all of a sudden they can’t take part in the performance they’ve been looking forward to for the last six months? What excuses are going to be offered to those children? What message will the 30 or so of those children who will grow up to like and love and have relationships with people of their own sex take away from this? Would the school take the same stance if the relationships referred to were, say, between people of different skin colour?
Here’s another question: How many of those 300 kids have ever used “That’s so gay” as a way to alienate, insult and humiliate their class mates in the play ground? What does the school, so worried about teaching anything related to PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) before Year 5, do with those kids who say “That’s so gay” before the ripe old age of 9? The only action consistent with their approach to Lee Hall’s opera would be to expel those children, lest they pollute their class mates’ minds with concepts that couldn’t possibly be contemplated before Year 5! Somehow I doubt very much that is the stance the school takes – for if it was, they’d have no pupils.
We are not other, not alien. We are not a museum exhibit, a topic in the national curriculum. We are people. We are all around you: your friends, and colleagues, and family members. We fall in love, we have relationships, sometimes we end those relationships – just like you. Stop treating us, dear Opera North, like we are something else than human beings!

On foreigners and benefits scroungers

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It might as well be there in black and white in the Conservative manifesto: “We will play off poor people and foreign people against each other, for political gain to the Conservative Party and the general entertainment of Daily Mail readers.”
Last month we had Graeme Archer, who describes himself as “a bog-standard Conservative activist”, lecture us about how poor Polish workers are paying tax to subsidise all the benefits scroungers. Ping.
Today, the tables have turned, with Iain Duncan Smith pretty much calling for British jobs for British people. Pong.
Isn’t it great to throw a bone and watch the dogs fight over it? You can lean back and put your feet up in the absolute certainty that in their frenzy over benefit-scrounging scum and filthy foreign scum the media won’t notice some key points:

These are just some highlights of the monumental structural and social problems which are likely to be this government’s legacy to the UK. It is not me, the immigrant, taking your jobs – it’s your government. And it is not the poor, disabled and disadvantaged who deserve your scorn for having tax money spent on them – it is your government for continuing to stick their heads in the sand and refusing to acknowledge that their economic policy is simply not working.

[Elsewhere] Cybercrime spree

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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.

Numeracy Wednesday

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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.