On the food bank hysteria

Media Personage: "Mr Average, you use a food bank. Correct?"

Mr Average: "That's right. I mean, why pay for food when you can get it for free?"

MP: "But why have you started to use one now? Is it because the evil Coalition have been deliberately starving you on ideological grounds?"

MrA: "Not really. It's just that I didn't realise that there were people giving away free food until I read about them in the paper on my way to work."

MP: "And there you have it: more and more people are using food banks because the evil Coalition—cruelly limiting a household's benefits to an equivalent pre-tax income of a mere £34,000—are starving them utterly to death. On purpose. Back to you in the studio, Tom."

Tom: "Er…"

My favourite Olympics moment...

... was, without doubt, my friend Frank Turner going the warm-up for the Opening Ceremony with his song I Still Believe.

Why? Because it's a really good song but also because he stood and warmed up the crowd with the line "Come ye, come ye, to soulless corporate circus tops".



One can only admire his cheek!

I met him through a friend, and was thrilled to find that Frank was not only a fan of The Kitchen but also—though once embraced by the left—a thoroughly libertarian gentleman.

But don't take my word for it—just listen to Sons of Liberty (especially the coda)...

So if ever a man should ask you for your business or your name
Tell him to go and fuck himself, tell his friends to do the same.
Because a man who'd trade his liberty for a safe and dreamless sleep
Doesn't deserve the both of them, and neither shall he keep.

I have had lots of fun with Mr Frank Turner—I highly recommend supporting him. Apart from anything else, he's a very nice chap...

This is a work of non-fiction

In case you don't know, a certain gentleman named Mike Daisey caused something of a stir with his one-man monologue called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. In it, he tells of visiting the Foxconn factory in China, and of the appalling working conditions there which he heard about, first-hand, from the workers that he met (many of them horrifically crippled from their work in the factory).

Mr Daisey has actually been hawking his play around the smaller theatres of America for some time now, but his big break came when a radio station called This American Life broadcast the show in one of their episodes. Now, I bet that they wish they hadn't: for, whilst it was their most listened-to show, it turns out that it was a pack of lies—and they had to publish an embarrassing retraction.

Over at Forbes, Timmy published an excellent article that took a far more balanced view of the working conditions at the Foxconn factory (which, by the way, assembles just about every computer brand going—not just Apple machines).

The general suicide rate in China is 22 per 100,000 people. That is a high rate by international standards but that is the one that we should be looking at to try and judge the suicide rate at Foxconn.

Foxconn employs some 1 million people in total so, if the Foxconn workforce were to have the same suicide rate as the general Chinese population (which, to be accurate, it won’t for suicide is not equally divided over age groups and the workforce is predominantly young) we would expect to see 220 suicides among such a number each year.

Timmy also points out that, whilst there have been some tragic deaths at Foxconn, it's actually safer than the American workplace. And, whilst wages are low compared to the West, they are high compared to the rest of China. Paul Annett then produced a graphic that neatly illustrated all of this...

Let us return to Mike Daisey, however.

Mr Daisey claimed to have travelled to China and hung around outside the Foxconn factory. Since he doesn't speak Chinese, he hired an interpreter and, through her, was able to elicit these tragic stories from the workers as they changed shifts. Unfortunately for Mike—who made every effort to stop This American Life contacting the interpreter (as you'll hear in the retraction)—a China-based reporter named Rob Schmitz decided to investigate, and tracked down said interpreter.

What he found was that Mike Daisey had not, in fact, actually seen any of the things that he claimed.

Take one example from his monologue—it takes place at a meeting he had with an illegal workers union. He meets a group of workers who’ve been poisoned by the neurotoxin N-Hexane while working on the iPhone assembly line: “…and all these people have been exposed,” he says. “Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them…can't even pick up a glass.”

Cathy Lee, Daisey’s translator in Shenzhen, was with Daisey at this meeting in Shenzhen. I met her in the exact place she took Daisey—the gates of Foxconn. So I asked her: “Did you meet people who fit this description?”

“No,” she said.

“So there was nobody who said they were poisoned by hexane?” I continued.

Lee’s answer was the same: “No. Nobody mentioned the Hexane.”

I pressed Cathy to confirm other key details that Daisey reported. Did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey? With each question I got the same answer from Lee. “No,” or “This is not true.”

Daisey claims he met underage workers at Foxconn. He says he talked to a man whose hand was twisted into a claw from making iPads. He describes visiting factory dorm rooms with beds stacked to the ceiling. But Cathy says none of this happened.

Whoops.

On his blog, Daisey defends his lies thusly...

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.
...

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations.

Again at Forbes, Timmy uses pretty much the same defence.

Which is where my defence comes in: I think it’s just fine to manipulate an audience, to tell them half truths, even to make up events entirely in order to get at those emotions. No one really thinks that Romeo and Juliet went down just like Shakespeare said (nor even the Leonard Bernstein or Mark Knopfler versions) but we’ve been queueing up for centuries to be so lied to. Even when The Bard was obviously correct as to the righteous course of action (“First, we kill all the lawyers” has always appeared pretty sound to me) we know that it’s something said by a character to contribute to the overall truthiness of the entire experience.

Which would be fine, except...

Except that Daisey, despite his protestations, actually insisted that what he said was truth. How do we know this? Because the marketing manager at the theatre which developed the show, Alli Houseworth, has told us. [Emphasis mine.]

In 2010 I worked at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, when The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (TATESJ) was “birthed” at the theatre, and the following spring was the marketing and communications director who worked on the show at Woolly. Today, as an independent consultant, I write as a former marketing director who is no longer bound by the public statement of her institution in this matter, and what I would like to say is this: Mike Daisey, you should be ashamed of yourself. And to members of the American theatre: we should be disappointed in ourselves too.

For months and months four major non-profit organizations across the US (Seattle Rep, Berkeley Rep, Woolly and the Public Theater) worked to put TATESJ on the stage, bringing the story we all felt was so enormously important – a story Mike told at least me time and time again was true. He insisted that “This is a work of non-fiction” be printed in playbills [PDF]. This was to be a work of activist theatre. Staff at Woolly handed out sheets of paper to every audience member that left our theatres, per Mike’s insistence, that urged them to take action on this matter. (I and other staffers would get nasty emails from him the next day if even one audience member slipped by without collecting this call to action.) As the head of the marketing staff at Woolly, my staff and I worked hard to get butts in seats, and it worked. We sold out our houses. As in the other cities where Mike appeared, we got Mike in every major news outlet in DC, and the buzz, hype and importance of the show only grew along the way.

And then what happened? We learned from a radio producer, a year later, that Mike’s facts weren’t true. And what Mike did was apologize to him, to Ira. But he never apologized to us, and he never apologized to our audiences. In fact, what he did in his retraction interview [PDF] was say, “I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theatre that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.” My answer to that is that “This is a work of non-fiction” is pretty clear language. And how dare you, Mike, how dare you say to Ira Glass that the context in which the work is presented is different. All this time I thought you respected this industry, respected our audiences the very same, if not more than the audience of This American Life. To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement.

The defence that theatre is not journalism simply doesn't hold up in this case. When we go to the theatre, or watch a movie, we assume that it is fiction: for sure, it might want to make a point and, in doing so, employ some "truthiness" (as Timmy put it). But we assume that elements have been dramatised.

However, when the writer of the piece insists that "this is a work of non-fiction" be printed on marketing material, we must then assume that... well, that it is a work of non-fiction—that all of the facts and experiences are true. We expect, in fact, the journalistic standard rather than the theatrical.

Alli Houseworth's revelation blows Daisey's defence out of the water: he is revealed as a liar and a charlatan, who will stoop to sordid depths in order to promote his own work. And, a little like a woman who falsely cries rape, Mike Daisey has implicitly tainted any other reports of worker abuse in China.

DISCLAIMER: I no longer own any Apple shares although, given current performance, I wish I did! However, to me the company has the same kind of status as their football team has to many other people.

Refusal to see the irony

Sitting in Edinburgh airport, I have just watched a representative of the Dowler family [...]* earnestly telling BBC News reporters that this general furore has demonstrated "the power of the public can defeat an organisation, no matter how large" [from memory and thus possibly paraphrased].

And all of this delivered from in front of Number 10 Downing Street.

The righteous and totally hysterical attitude of people like this—when, let's face it, no one at the NotW actually murdered Milly Dowler or, indeed, anyone else—would be annoying enough.

But to deliver it from in front of what might be designated the effective headquarters to a "large" organisation that maintains its power through thuggery, extortion and violence—that derives its mandate from, quite frankly, mob rule.

Oh, and look...! Here's rent-a-gob Don Foster MP, telling us all that it is a "great testament to the power of the British people that they have forced Parliament to take the strong line that they have on this matter." [Again, from memory.]

And now Don Foster MP has just dropped a massive hint that Parliament thinks that, not only should NewsCorp not be allowed to buy the rest of BSkyB—through not being a "fit person"—but that the government should use the same excuse to steal the 39% that NewsCorp currently owns.

Thus neatly proving my points, above, about "mob rule", "thuggery, extortion and violence".

Thanks, Don, you fuckwit, for confirming that we should fear and loathe you and your endemically corrupt cronies even more than Murdoch.

* UPDATE 00.47 14/7/11: I have deleted the observation used here, since it detracts from the point of the post and some people got their knickers in a twist about it.

I would point out—as I have in the reply to the vicariously-outraged Anonymous—that the Dowlers have now made themselves into a political issue. Regardless of what happened to their daughter—which was (and I really shouldn't have to say this but, given the current hysteria, I must) really unpleasant—the Dowlers are using their situation and the accompanying media profile to drive some developments that I consider extremely dangerous to freedom in this country.

Hacked?

Your humble Devil is having a nice holiday in Edinburgh at present but I thought I'd pass some comment on this phone hacking lark.

Others have made this point, but I think it's important to remember, amidst all of the furore and moral outrage, that the state doesn't need to hack your phone—they can simply demand that your supplier hand over all of their records.

And your mobile supplier, and your Internet service provider (ISP), keep extensive records of everything that you do—because the state demands that they do so.

So, if some tabloid arsehole wanted to get details of your conversations, or your browsing habits, or your emails they would be far better off simply paying a public servant to get them instead.

And with over 900 police officers and staff were disciplined for breaching the Data Protection Act between 2007 and 2010, I wouldn't imagine that such a person would be so terribly hard to find...

Strangely, I've not noticed that nice Mr Cameron announcing a "probe" into those figures...

Quote of the day...

... comes from Toby Young's scathing appraisal of socialist media darling, economic illiterate and all-round arse, Laurie Penny.

She’s so earnest, so self-absorbed, it’s impossible to take her seriously. Almost everything she writes is beyond parody, as if she’s the creation of a brilliant Right-wing satirist rather than a real person...

In many ways, I would love to believe that Penny is, in fact, such a creation.

Alas, I fear that this is not the case, and that Laurie is not only real but just as self-absorbed, fatuous and earnestly pretentious as the articles that fall like turds from her metaphorical pen.

Laurie Penny would be funny—if she were an invention rather than a dangerously influential parody of an intelligent and knowledgable human being...

UPDATE: back in February, young Penny wondered at her fortunate state...

So, I'm experiencing a bit of vertigo. Nine months ago I had just over a thousand Twitter followers; now it’s nearly thirteen thousand. Nine months ago it was a huge nerve-wracking fiasco for me to talk on a regional radio driveshow; last month I was a panellist on Any Questions. Nine months ago I was a blogger in the process of trying to improve my writing in the hopes of someday, maybe, being a ‘proper’ commentator’; I’m now a columnist for the country’s foremost leftwing magazine, earning a living as a full-time comment-and-features journo, and have written opinion pieces for the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the Independent and others. I got to talk at the Fabian Society conference! People from the BBC sometimes ring me up and ask what I think about things!

Penny thinks! Super! But don't worry—Laurie is not letting any of this go to her head. Actually, maybe she has—but that is all going to stop...

Meanwhile, I’m gradually learning how to handle all the pressure without being a total dickhead.

We're waiting...

Any time now...

UPDATE 2: the wife was at Wadham College, Oxford, at the same time as Ms Penny...

But stacked against everything else that comes out of Wadham College, what is Laurie Penny really doing?

She is travelling an extremely well-trodden road bearing the placard of thoroughly-explored philosophies. And the destination, reached so many times before, has benefitted no one except the travellers themselves.

This is not a condition, I fear, that is exclusive to Wadham...

Common Purpose

One of the most frequent submissions to fakecharities.org is the organisation called Common Purpose. My colleague and I have rejected it just as many times for one simple reason—there are no state grants (or not enough) on its accounts. As such it does not qualify.

A number of people have pointed out that Common Purpose receives large wads of taxpayers' cash; this is true, but in return, Common Purpose delivers a service and we cannot tell whether that service is worth the money or not.

However, some people have a bit of a bee in their bonnet about the organisation, seeing it as some kind of shadowy "world government" group; many have asked why I haven't written much about them on The Kitchen.

The answer to that is simple: because I have been told, by people that I trust, that there's really nothing particularly sinister about them. And reinforcing that view is Tory councillor, Simon Cooke, who has decided to outline his experiences.

Now this is admission time. I have spoken to “Common Purpose” meetings on several occasions (although I haven’t done and would not do their “course”) – all “Chatham House Rules” but otherwise very cuddly and convivial. For me, it was a chance to ‘tell it like it is’ rather than feel constrained by the possibility of publicity. But what stood out was the sheer lack of challenge, of questioning of independent thought. As if those assembled were unable to see what was said and to ask whether it was right. What I saw was the triumph of received wisdom rather than some attempt to form the vanguard of some new authoritarian super-state.

Now for the tin-hatted ones, I have a further guilty secret to reveal – my wife is a Common Purpose ‘graduate’. She quite enjoyed the course, got some business from it and came away with a very jaundiced view of public sector values.

For most folk Common Purpose is just a networking organisation, something to put on the CV and a break from work. True, it promotes a pro-state, EU supporting view at its national level but locally it’s just a networking group that has disappeared up the pompous backside of the state so as to get funding.

Now, one can argue that the public sector should not be spending large amounts of our cash on such networking groups, but one could argue that about any public sector spending. On anything.

No doubt I shall be accused of being part of Common Purpose's evil cabal, or perhaps being paid large wads of cash by the organisation (an accusation that one excitable fakecharities.org correspondent levelled at me), but I'm not.

And, frankly, there are quite enough conspiracies for me to skewer that will do us real and lasting harm—such as the loonier members of the IPCC and its acolytes—that means that I would rather not waste my time on Common Purpose.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that their "pro-state, EU supporting view" is not utterly wrong—it is. But there are many hundreds of such organisations (and, indeed, individuals) and the way that I try to address their idiocy is through advocating the benefits of the libertarian alternatives—both on this blog and in speaking engagements at universities and think-tank events.

Five myths about alcohol

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen—I am, in fact, The Filthy Smoker)
[Some links need to be fixed—on-going. DK]

No. 1—We are drinking more than ever and 1 in 4 people are drinking at hazardous levels

This claim has been made regularly since May of this year, based on data from the Office of National Statistics. The Telegraph's report was entirely typical:

One in four drink too much, official figures show.
Ten million people in England—one in four adults—are putting their health at risk by drinking too much, official figures have shown.

'Too much' is more than 21 units a week for men and 14 units for women. The highly questionable nature of these 'daily limits' has been discussed by my gracious host before; he has also recently touched on the changing way in which these units are counted, all of which reinforce the myth that there is a mounting epidemic of binge-drinking.

Since 2007, the Office of National Statistics has assumed larger glasses are being used and stronger alcohol is being consumed. They now assume that a glass of wine contains 2 units, rather than 1, as it did before. With beer, what used be counted as 1 unit is now counted as 1.5, what used to be 1.5 units is now assumed to be 2 units and what used to be 2.3 units (a large can) is now counted as 3 units.

As you might expect, this has made a dramatic difference to the statistics. The graph below shows the percentage of men and women drinking more than their 21/14 unit weekly 'limit' under the old system*:


Nothing to see here, is there? A downward trend since 2000 is evident for both sexes.

But this is how the same statistics look using the new system:


Wa-hay! Booze Britain! Exactly the same data but very different results.

So which is the correct estimate? The ONS is, in my view, a basically honest institution and it seems fair to estimate 2 units are in the average glass of wine. It is less fair to assume stronger beer at a time when two of the biggest selling lagers—Stella and Becks—have introduced weaker brands. But wherever the truth may lie, the fact remains that even if the ONS had changed its system 10 years ago, the overall trend would remain downwards.

That consumption has actually been falling recently—albeit slightly—is confirmed by figures for pure alcohol consumption. These show that per capita consumption peaked in 2004 and has since dropped off:

Litres of alcohol per person aged over 14 (PDF)

2002: 11.13

2003: 11.34

2004: 11.59

2005: 11.4

2006: 11.0

2007: 11.2

This data is significant because per capita consumption effectively measures the amount of ethanol consumed by a person, which is what the system of units is supposed to do. But while units have to be clumsily estimated, the per capita system measures what has actually been bought and therefore, one has to assume, been drunk.

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies—no friends of the booze—total alcohol sales have fallen by 13% since 2001/02**. According to the ONS, the number of teetotallers has risen from 9.5% to 14% since 1992. And pubs are closing at the rate of 53 a week. And per capita consumption of pure alcohol currently stands at 11.2 litres, much less than Luxembourg (15.6 litres) and, indeed, less than 14 other European countries. That's your ‘Booze Britain’ for you.

* These figures are shown in table 2.5 of Statistics on Alcohol, England 2009

** Page 8 of Drinking in Great Britain (PDF)

No.2—Alcohol is cheaper than it was 20 years ago

This forms the cornerstone of efforts to introduce a minimum price for alcoholic drinks by, amongst others, Fatboy Donaldson:

In his report, Sir Liam noted that over the preceding 20 years, the country’s disposable income had risen faster than alcohol taxation, and alcohol had become ever more affordable.

It is true that alcohol has become more affordable. Everything has become more affordable as a result of rising prosperity. Most people would consider this to be a good thing. But relative to other products alcohol has become less affordable.

When inflation is factored in, British households' disposable income increased from 100 to 208.8 between 1980 and 2008. In other words, people can afford to buy more than twice as much as they could in 1980.

In the same period the affordability of alcohol—thanks to above-inflation tax rises—has only risen from 100 to 175. To imply that alcohol is actually "cheaper" is disingenuous in the extreme.

In fact, as the Office of National Statistics concludes, it is plain wrong:

Between 1980 and 2008, the price of alcohol increased by 283.3%. After considering inflation (at 21.3%), alcohol prices increased by 19.3% over the period.

In real terms, as well as in monetary terms, alcohol is more expensive that it was 20 years ago.

No. 3—There is a worsening epidemic of underage drinking

Here's The Telegraph again:

Teenage drinking epidemic 'causing misery'

Britain needs to wake up to the epidemic of binge-drinking among teenagers and the misery it is causing thousands of families, one of the country's most senior policemen has warned.

He criticised the drinks industry for targeting the young and exporting its "negative costs on to the streets, hospitals and into the criminal justice system".

But only last week the Trading Standards Institute reported:

A survey of 13,000 young people by the Trading Standards Institute found the number of teenagers who drank weekly fell from 50% in 2005 to 38% this year.

Which backs up what they said in 2007:

Fewer teenagers are drinking regularly—partly because it is becoming harder for youngsters to get hold of alcohol, a Trading Standards survey suggests.

And this is supported by figures from the Office of National Statistics (May 2009):

One in five pupils (20%) [11-15 years] had drunk alcohol in the last seven days, a proportion which has declined from 26% in 2001.

Furthermore:

The proportion of pupils who have never drunk alcohol has risen since 2003, from 39% to 46% in 2007.

Underage drinking—at whatever level—is clearly an issue for parents and the police, and yet, Trading Standards exhibited the same attitude of buck-passing as the copper above:

Trading Standards North West, which carried out the poll, said it intended to write to the firms behind these drinks to "seek clarification of the plans for action to reduce their appeal to young people".

That's right. It's "the firms". Not the police, not the parents, not the shopkeepers and not—heaven forfend—Trading Standards. It's down to the manufacturers to stop people buying their products illegally.

No. 4—Alcohol-related hospital admissions have risen by 69%

Responsible journalists usually follow this little nugget of information with an important proviso:

The number of people admitted to hospital in England with alcohol-related problems has risen by 69 per cent in five years, to 863,000 in 2007-08, although changes to data collection—which now include secondary diagnoses, such as alcohol-related injuries—have contributed to the surge in cases.

These "changes to data collection" do more than merely "contribute" to the "surge in cases"—they are the overwhelming explanation. The redefinition is sweeping and appears to include anybody who turns up in hospital with a trace of alcohol in their blood, as the ONS explains:

“These figures use a new methodology reflecting a substantial change in the way the impact of alcohol on hospital admissions is calculated. The new calculation includes a proportion of the admissions for reasons that are not always related to alcohol, but can be in some instances (such as accidental injury).”

This covers a multitude of sins. As a helpful commentator recently pointed out, alcohol can be linked to virtually any disease, usually very tenuously. Sure enough, the largest proportion of "alcohol-related" admissions involve people with geriatric diseases:

Overall, the number of alcohol-related admissions increased with age in 2007/08, rising from 49,300 admissions among 16 to 24 year olds to 195,300 admissions of people aged 75 and over.

Only a quarter of the 863,000 admissions are directly attributable to alcohol. Not that any of this was deemed worthy of mention by, for example, The Daily Mail:

Alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in England have soared by more than 50 per cent over the last five years, latest figures revealed last night.

Startling data from the Department of Health showed there were 863,257 drink-related admissions in 2007-08, up sharply from 569,418 in 2003-04—the year Labour's reforms ushered in round-the-clock drinking.

No. 5—Lager is cheaper than water

This doozy is a favourite of pretend charity Alcohol Concern and has been repeated many times, particularly by the The Daily Mail:

Drunk for £1: Anger as leading supermarkets sell lager for 22p a can

Supermarkets are selling beer at a cheaper price than water, fuelling concern over their role in Britain's binge-drinking crisis.

Despite repeated public health warnings, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda now offer lager at just 22p a can—less per litre than their own brand-mineral water and cola, and cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1.

Let's ignore for a moment the obvious point that someone wanting to buy water is hardly likely to buy lager on an impulse instead. Let's even ignore the fact that water comes out of the tap for 0.02p per glass.
Instead, let's look at Tesco's own brand lager. Here it is.

It costs 91p for a 4-pack, or 5.2p per 100ml.

And here's Tesco's own brand mineral water.

It costs 13p, or 0.7p per 100ml.

So please can we put this one to bed now?

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted something about the own-brand lager—it is piss-weak (2% ABV). Frankly, you might as well drink the water. 4 cans of this stuff equates to about a can and a half of Stella. Hardly enough to get "drunk for £1", although that didn't stop the Mail from printing a hilarious account of someone pretending to do just that.

Away from media hysteria and the medical lobby's hyperbole, the facts are plain: we are drinking less than we did 100 years ago, more than we did 50 years ago and less than we did 5 years ago. We are middle-weights in the European drinking league and the fact that we have a lot of knob-heads causing problems in our towns and cities at the weekend is because there a lot of knob-heads in the UK. The reasons for that is a whole other story, but it has nothing to do with advertising, happy hours or the price of lager.

It is doubtful that even the British Medical Association really believes that charging 50p a unit or banning Guiness adverts will make the slightest difference to rates of consumption, but that is not really the objective. The objective is to officially identify drinking as 'bad' in the same way that smoking is 'bad'. From that starting point, all else follows.