Shuggy's Blog

"We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small" - Edmund Burke

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Cameron announces big government ghettoization plan?

The demand for 'social housing' exceeds supply so to try and ease it, the Tories want to, in effect, allocate said housing according to a means-test. The thinking behind this is that presently council and housing association properties are occupied by people who don't need them whilst those who do languish on a housing waiting list. Hence this idea of temporary tenancies.

Might seem not entirely unreasonable but there's at least two problems with it:

1) It would further homogenize council estates. Someone getting a job when they had been previously unemployed or getting a promotion or something has positive externalities in the form of extra dosh to spend on local services, for example. Under Cameron's plan, one presumes, as soon as a person's income rises above a certain threshold, they'll be punted out. It could surely serve as a disincentive and would therefore produce less, not more, 'social mobility'?

2) Central government, yet again, seems to be throwing its weight around rather a lot in the 'Big Society'. Cameron claims that it would be for councils to decide whether they would implement this scheme but one wonders how those deemed to be distributing scarce resources inefficiently might fare in future allocations of central government funds. The notion that 'council tenants could be forced to downsize' reinforces this impression. Kinda grates when it's coming from someone who doesn't appear to know how many homes he owns.

For the 'mixed economy'

David Cameron has intimated that the cuts are not a short-term measure to reduce the deficit but will remain in place at the top of the economic cycle too. It's part of the whole 'Big Society' initiative, which assumes - in a way that they haven't quite been honest enough to spell out - that the state has 'crowded out' the bounty of volunteerism that lies dormant in this land, waiting to be unleashed, like some kind of Anglican Prometheus, if only the dead weight of the evil welfare state can be made to wither and fall under the sword of righteous budget cuts.

Here's an argument that is designed to appeal to no-one, being as it is conservative with a small 'c'. Because regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum - these days it doesn't do to be anything other than 'radical'. Or 'progressive'. Both, if you can manage it. It's one for the interregnum - that space between this present darkness and the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its internal contradictions/the advent of that last great untried utopia - the completely free-market [delete according to preference]. How should we arrange things in this brief interlude in human history that has lasted for, ooh, nearly two hundred years?

I have a suggestion, which I'll be self-indulgent enough to introduce by the way of personal anecdote. My father was an academic who specialized in Soviet education. In this capacity he visited the USSR several times. I was invited to to come along when I was about sixteen or seventeen, which I declined on the teenage grounds that a house free from parental control for a week was preferable to what seemed then an unappealing foreign holiday. How was I to know that freedom from parental control would prove to be a more enduring feature of my existence than the Soviet Union? Anyway, I asked my mother what it was like. She described it as, 'public opulence amidst private squalor'. Glorious public buildings and trains that run cheaply and on time - but the people traveling on them can't get a decent pair of jeans for love nor money - unless the money in question was US dollars or British pounds.

This is what you get if the state is too large. And if it's too small? America I have been to. The reverse is the case: private opulence, public squalor. My sister lived in California for five years. America's richest state had the parents of publicly educated children exerting themselves in various fund-raising activities because their local schools couldn't afford to employ PE teachers.

The alternative? While we're waiting for the End of History, I would say the compromise that continental Europe has settled on is the best. Not private squalor and public opulence nor its opposite but something in-between. I appreciate it isn't very fashionable to make this argument but in the midst of all this rhetoric that promises us 'newness', I'd be very suspicious of anyone who has forgotten to say that there is nothing new under the sun.

Friday, July 30, 2010

'Free-schools' and the Dawkins delusion

How do salvation religions respond to the fact that the world is evil, asked Max Weber? His answer was that they can either: 1) retreat from it quietistically, 2) engage with it ascetically or 3) try and take it over theocratically.

Some might argue that the whole business of 'faith-schools' should be slotted under 3 but this is a misunderstanding. 'Theocratic' is slowly becoming one of those words like 'fascism' in that it is being emptied of meaning - its overuse spreading like a semantic virus.

The quest for state-funding for religious segregation and indoctrination in education is unjustified - but it does not represent a theocratic take-over. It should be slotted under 1 and 2 - both of these essentially being about the religious attempting to carve out a space for themselves in this world where they can keep their garments unstained by the spirit of the age.

The extent to which this is pursued depends on the intensity of the belief. Someone of a religious disposition may, for example, send their children to a supposedly secular school but insist that their children are withdrawn from activities such as sex education, music classes or swimming.

But if the religious convictions are held with any depth at all, generally an educational space that provides institutional withdrawal from theologically disagreeable pursuits is often preferred.

Those of us who think this is undesirable - and who particularly don't appreciate being compelled to finance services that exclude our children - are inclined, therefore, to be very sceptical about Mr Gove's educational reforms since everyone, opponents and advocates alike, agree that they will facilitate more of this kind of thing.

It is on this front that Richard Dawkins has done the cause of secular education an enormous disservice with his suggestion that he would like to set up an atheist 'free-school'. His groupies have completely missed the point by rushing to his defence and saying he said 'free-thinking' and not atheist. Nevermind that anyone with an ounce of historical sense should understand what this term has served as shorthand for in the past. Dawkins has implicitly given his support for government policy and inadvertently reinforced the impression - one he rightly takes issue with - that secularism is just one of a number of 'worldviews' that customers should be invited to buy in some postmodern supermarket of ideas.

Instead of trying to build an escape hatch within the system - a retreat from this world - he should be challenging this felt need to have an atheist school at all. And if he wants to refute the lie that secularism is just a form of religion-like ideology like any other, it might help if he didn't behave like a Seventh Day Adventist himself.

On centralization

Despite all the talk of 'new politics' it seems that some of the trends that we have seen in British politics for at least thirty years are set to continue. We saw it under Thatcher and I wouldn't dispute for a moment that the Blair years represented a continuation of the accumulation of power to central government at the expense of local.

The trick of the establishment has always been to dress this up in the language of 'choice' and 'empowerment' so that centralizing moves are presented as the exact opposite.

In education this has been attempted in the form of grant-maintained opt outs and now with the academies plan. I'm wondering if Michael Gove will come to realise what his predecessors did - that the oversight of local democracy in education remains irritatingly popular.

Now with this notion that council tax rises should be subjected to local referendums, we have yet another power grab by central government being presented as local democracy in action. It contains all the features loathed by Paul Evans - populist nonsense that undermines proper deliberative democratic control over the provision of local services. The Communities Secretary Mr Pickles said that he was "in favour of local people making local decisions" but even a cursory analysis of these proposals reveals that he is in favour of nothing of the sort. For what 'choice' are local voters to be given in these referendums? To veto council tax rises if they exceed levels set by central government. What business does central government have setting a ceiling on local taxation? Their scope is already limited by the relatively small share of finance that is actually raised locally - now it is to be constrained further.

We already have a mechanism by which local people can exercise control over local taxation. It's called representative democracy. You don't like the level of services and the price at which you are being charged for them? Vote for someone else then.

I used the term British advisedly because we've seen this in Scotland too. Council tax has been frozen for two years - but at least here central government had no power to impose it and was dependent on the cooperation of local councils. The English proposal, on the other hand, is a classic populist technique for circumventing decisions made at a local level that are uncongenial to a central government with a state-shrinking agenda. In British politics it seems there is nothing new under the sun - but you can be sure that this won't deter this shower presenting this as a 'radical' move. Emptying words of meaning - another tiresome trend that goes on and on...

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Back from ma hols

If you're like me, you'll glaze over after more than a few holiday pics so here's jus one or four...



Here's a mosaic from the world's largest collection of mosaics in Tunisia.



Here's an amphitheatre...

Just put them to pretend I spent my time taking in culture, which of course I didn't. Spent most of the time drinking and getting some sorely-missed vitamin D.

The locals kept asking me if I was English or Irish. No offence to any English or Irish readers but I'd much rather be mistaken for a Scandinavian - but when you see these blond giraffes with their sickeningly even tans, it isn't really difficult to see why no-one made that mistake.



Our friendly driver whose 'tut-tut' could carry six people - or four Germans - to the beach...

And finally...



Here's how you know at least some of the people on the Glasgow flight ended up at the same hotel as you.

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