The Daily Blog

The future of A-Levels

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:52:00 GMT

What future for A-Levels? With another year of record results now behind us the debate will now focus on the uncertainty of the exam’s prospects under Gordon Brown. We know they have no guaranteed future beyond a review in 2013 – and that in the meantime the Government is pressing ahead with its new diplomas as an alternative to the A-Level. As Rachel Sylvester argued in the Times recently, if the Government continues down this track and scraps A-levels altogether, it “could turn out to be the biggest policy shift Gordon Brown has introduced since taking over from Tony Blair.”

This attempt to end the historic gap between academic and vocational education and achieve the much-vaunted ‘parity of esteem’ seems to have become a zero sum game whereby you raise the profile of vocational education by undermining the rigour of academic disciplines. This is surely exactly the wrong approach: we will only have true parity of esteem with a rigorous academic exam system and an equally rigorous but distinctive vocational programme – neither of which are currently on offer. The flaws in the Government’s apprenticeship scheme, for example, were well-documented on the blog by Scott Kelly recently.

Muddying the distinction with the new diplomas will not fool employers, who have already spoken out against the value of the new qualifications, and it does a disservice to the pupils undertaking them. As Martin McElwee argued back in April there are encouraging signs about new entrants to the exam ‘market place’ – not least the Pre-U system created by Cambridge University. However, the A-Level has historically been described as the ‘gold standard’ for exams and the risk is that a combination of grade inflation and the shift to the new diplomas will move us further from a rigorous and universally respected academic exam system and send the A-Level the same way as the original Gold Standard itself.

'Doing God': Faith and Politics in Britain - Paul Woolley

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The response to Christina Odone’s recent CPS report, In Bad Faith, The New Betrayal of Faith Schools, was intriguing for a number of reasons. Underpinning the arguments about whether or not the government is ‘aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools’, the question of whether religion should be permitted to contribute to education and public policy at all surfaced once again. Indeed, this is the argument that really gets people going.

The point that public atheists continually fail to recognise is that, contrary to the received wisdom, society is undergoing a process not of secularisation, but de-secularisation. Indeed, as the philosopher Julian Baggini, has observed: ‘When the UK Prime Minister’s spokesperson remarked in 2003 that “We don’t do God” what was striking was that until that point it went without saying that politicians don’t overtly discuss religion. The need to rule god-talk out was a symptom that it was coming back in.’ Opponents of religion can scream all they like, but religion won’t go away. How could it do otherwise, given its concern with the ultimate questions of identity, existence and purpose?

It is certainly true that the renewed interest in religion has taken some people by surprise. In 1968, the sociologist, Peter Berger, confidently predicted that by ‘the twenty-first century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture’. In The Desecularisation of the World in 1999, however, he admitted that he had got it spectacularly wrong, arguing that ‘the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false: The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.’

Why, then, is the role of religion in society increasing? The obvious answer is the emergence of radical or political Islam (Islam is inherently political – as is Christianity by the way, although in a different way, so I am not sure that term is especially helpful). Certainly, the events of 9/11 and 7/7 are evidence of religion re-asserting itself and are part of the reason why it is back on the agenda, but there are other contributing factors too.

The first is what could be described as the return of civil society. One of the findings of the Citizenship in Britain study was that those individuals who regarded themselves as belonging to a particular religion often exhibited atypical characteristics. Such people recorded comparatively high levels of interpersonal trust, of trust in the police, of respect for the law and of a citizen’s duty to vote. They also recorded higher than average levels of group membership, of engagement in informal activities, of political participation and of time ‘donation’. It is people of religious faith who are often the most active in rebuilding broken communities. Faith works. It is the engine that drives a great deal of the social and political activism taking place in society.

Secondly, there is the emergence of well-being. In 1995 Tony Blair said, ‘We enjoy a thousand material advantages over any previous generation, and yet we suffer a depth of insecurity and spiritual doubt they never knew.’ Since, 1995 levels of insecurity have only grown but study after study demonstrates the importance of religious faith as a contributory factor to human well-being. Thus, Richard Layard of the London School of Economics can assert that: ‘One of the most robust findings of happiness research is that people who believe in God are happier.’

Thirdly, and finally, there is the politics of identity. It is clear that well-formed and deeply-rooted religious identities form an inescapable part of the growing identity politics in the UK. One of the best ways of tackling the extremism that can occasionally accompany religious thinking is to include religious groups in public debate, requiring them to justify their convictions in publicly-accessible terms.

The debate around faith schools will continue, as will the wider discussion about the nature of religion’s contribution to society. The opponents of religion will get more extreme but the arguments are unlikely to be new. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and co. will persist in repeating (albeit with increasing moral indignation) the rhetoric of Voltaire at the end of the eighteenth century and Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth. It is difficult to know where it will all end, but one thing is clear: Religion is going to play a more significant role in society and, on the whole, that is in all our interests.

Paul Woolley is Director of Theos, the public theology think tank

The Roots of Conservative Recovery - Dr Kieron O'Hara

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:09:00 GMT

It was only September 2007 when Labour had double-digit opinion poll leads and policy reviews were perceived as adding to confusion about Conservative identity under Cameron, whom Anthony King dubbed “a rich man’s Iain Duncan Smith.” What a difference ten months make. The problem for the Tories now is expectation management – anything less than a landslide victory might well look like a failure.

Cameron has certainly had a bit of luck along the way, but we are seeing the culmination of a long-term strategy. He has shifted the Tories back towards the ideological centre, and cemented that change with a thoroughgoing remodelling of image, shifting rhetoric and candidates’ demographic profile. This is the first time since 1975-9 that a Tory opposition leader has adopted a strategy and stuck to it.

It seemed obvious to all but the Tories that the electorate wanted change. And it was the leadership contest in 2005 that acted as the catalyst, as Andrew Denham and I describe in our new book Democratising Conservative Leadership Selection: From Grey Suits to Grass Roots. Cameron established a mandate for his strategy with the seven month campaign, and deployed it effectively as he came under attack from the right almost immediately.

As Denham and I argue on the basis of a study of all the contests going back to 1965, the effect of the mandate provided by a leadership contest in the Tory Party is temporary and fragile. Several rule changes and increasing democratisation have not altered that. But the mandate is real, and when things are rocky, it does not oblige the leader to listen to those he or she defeated. It can be used intelligently to commit the party to a direction. It is to Cameron’s credit that he appreciated that.

Cameron used his mandate to ‘decontaminate the brand’, as the oft-quoted slogan has it. Had he listened to his detractors, his previous patience and hard work would have come to nothing. But he went (mildly) green, resisted calls to promise tax cuts unequivocally, and imposed the A-list of candidates on an unwilling party.

Having done the hard work to establish his own mix of progressive and conservative ideology, the platform is now there for his conservative thoughts about social and personal responsibility, Michael Gove’s ideas about relationships, or George Osborne’s thesis, delivered to the CPS, about social justice and economic efficiency, none of which frightened the horses as they would have done in 2005. Cameron has also enabled William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith to make far more effective interventions than they managed when they were running the show.

Cameron has given us an object lesson in how to deliver an ideological shift in the face of a sceptical party and a hostile electorate. As Denham and I show, the leadership contest and its aftermath are extremely instructive about the position of the party in 2008.

Harm reduction for the Rausings – a good basis for drugs policy? Kathy Gyngell

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:15:00 GMT

Melanie Reid had a point when she blamed the rich for feeding the drugs industry and questioned the associated culture of tolerance.[1] The Rausing case not only exposed a discriminate police and Crown Prosecution response to drug crime which operates one rule for the rich and another for the poor. It also revealed an approach to policing (conscious or not) that supports the fashionable thesis that it is not drug use per se that is socially damaging but only the criminal activity to which those who cannot otherwise afford their habit ‘have’ to resort.

So it is perhaps unsurprising to find that this myth, perpetuated by the drug using rich (that the prohibition of drugs and law enforcement is ineffective, that it is prosecution of these crimes rather than other outcomes of drug using behaviour that is destructive) is uncritically accepted by many of the middle class liberal intelligentsia including several esteemed newspaper columnists.

That “...additional enforcement efforts had had little adverse effect on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK” was the overriding conclusion drawn by the UK Drug Policy Commission from their report, Tackling Drug Markets And Distribution Networks In The UK, published around the same time. Despite their chairman’s later and somewhat contradictory denial that, ‘...we did not say that government and enforcement agencies efforts are not working’ though ‘big drug hauls have little sustainable impact on street level availability’[2], the message of enforcement failure was what the press picked up.

Yet the argument abstracted by the UKDPC in their press summary begs a number of questions. First they say the UK’s illicit drug market sized at £5.3 billion “is considered” to pose the single greatest organised crime threat to the UK. But a recent breakdown of the constituents of the £40 billion crime empire run in the UK puts money laundering at £15 billion, tax lost through the counterfeit cigarette trade alone at £2.9 billion with an estimated cost to the economy of fraud dominating at £14 billion.[3] This is not to underestimate the cancerous impact of drug crime on the economy, only to put it into perspective.

However, if we accept that its seriousness is paramount, is not an expenditure of only £380 million per annum dedicated to reducing supply worth £5.3 billion pitiful in relation to the size of the market and the size of the problem? No commentators have to my knowledge, to date, posed this question: is the Government’s investment in any way proportionate to the size to the problem that they have to deal with?

Were the analysis to be approached this way then the actual cost benefit of current policy might look rather different. If a budget of £380 million per annum can ‘take out’ up to 12% of a £5.3 billion drug market, this suggests a significant degree of efficacy; that contrary to the UKDPC’s conclusion, additional enforcement efforts have had an adverse effect on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK.

Indeed it could be argued that the enforcement agencies are doing rather well with limited resources. An interesting thought for those concerned with drugs policy reform is that to multiply current investment fivefold could be to take out 60% of the market!

Such an approach throws a rather different light on the UKDPC’s judgement that drug markets have proven to be extremely resilient. While acknowledging that throwing public money at a problem on its own is rarely the answer to a problem, if the investment in education, health or any other public service were similarly low it would reasonably be asked what results could be expected. The fact is that neither experts, commentators nor the public appear to have any idea of how to measure what investment it might take to turn back the drugs tide or what it would take to make for effective rehabilitation, as delivered by RAPT [4] or by Swedish youth detention approaches, following enforcement and prosecution.

The UKDPC’s intention to work “… with enforcement agencies to consider how they can maximize their role in reducing drugs harms”[5] does not offer much clarification. In fact it seems rather bizarre that having failed to make the curious but failed concept of ‘harm reduction’ work as a treatment philosophy they are now hoping to open the way to applying this construct to enforcement.

Should such a relative approach to crime be adopted – just what was so wrong with the Rausing case – the drugs policy debate would be in danger of moving into the realm of farce. Who would decide the mitigating circumstances of the less famous and the less rich and on what basis? What would to happen to perpetrators and victims and to the notion of justice?

The fact is, as Neil McKegany recently said, the sooner we stop regarding illegal drug use as a human right and start to see it as a destructive social cancer the better. Only then will we make the proportionate and appropriate financial response.

[1] The Times 1.8.08

[2] The Times 4.8.08

[3] The Times 8.08.08

[4] Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust

[5] The Times 4.8.08

Decision time for Stamp Duty and a review of Home Information Packs

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:51:00 GMT

The Government’s ‘will they won’t they’ stand off on stamp duty has paralysed the housing market. In the hope of getting some good headlines they ‘briefed’ that they were considering suspending stamp duty on property sales. They were warned by industry insiders that they would have to make a decision straight away, as the whole market would grind to a halt in anticipation of the removal or reduction of stamp duty.

Of course, Alistair Darling hasn’t made up his mind, and the market has halted.

Instead of piling more pressure on house buying and selling, the Government should be considering bold measures to bring greater freedom to the market.

Following George Osborne’s lead and scrapping stamp duty for 90% of first time buyers would be a good start. They should also reconsider the way Home Information Packs (HIPs) have been introduced. Much of the information in these packs is based on the usual searches that are part of buying a house. The main difference is the new Energy Performance Report including the ‘Home Energy Certificate’. This rates the energy efficiency of your home from A (most efficient) to G (least efficient).

As Dan Hannan has pointed out, this requirement within the Home Information Packs, follows a European Union ruling that all houses should be environmentally surveyed.

One solution to the problem of the compulsory introduction of this energy surveying process would be to immediately rate all homes in the UK with the bottom rating of G. Then those individuals, who had invested in energy efficiency measures within their homes, could pay to have their rating reviewed and upgraded when they come to sell their property. If it is believed that a higher rating on the Home Energy Certificate would increase the value of the property, then they would probably he happy to pay the cost of the re-rating. For those who would rather not undertake this expense, they could keep their existing rating.

From Washington: Institutionalizing International Religious Freedom

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:54:00 GMT

As the Olympics open today in Beijing, the host country's repressive measures against religious believers continue to elicit concern. Buddhists in Tibet have been imprisoned or missing since their peaceful protests this spring; hundreds of Protestant leaders have been held in the past year; and more than 30 Catholic bishops and priests are currently in detention, with two arrested just in July, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

Since 1999, China has been designated among "Countries of Particular Concern" by the U.S. Secretary of State for its religious freedom abuses. This policy framework was established by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, a law intended to make religious liberty a permanent, central focus of U.S. foreign policy.

The International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998 established the Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department and mandated an annual report on the status of religious liberty in foreign countries. Those nations that have "engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom" are to be identified as "Countries of Particular Concern" with the Secretary approving "Presidential action" from those specified under IRFA, which include economic sanctions. IRFA also established the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a citizens' panel appointed by the President and Members of Congress to make recommendations on promoting religious freedom.

IRFA was intended to institutionalize religious freedom as a goal of U.S. foreign policy. But a decade on, the religious freedom agenda remains on the periphery of U.S. policy, according to Thomas Farr, a former director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and author of the forthcoming book World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security (Oxford University Press, October 2008).

IRFA's goals include freeing religious prisoners, opposing persecution, and promoting religious freedom as the foundation of liberty. The former goals, however, are overshadowing the latter, according to Farr--and all three are threatened as a result. The role of human rights monitor has represented an important step, but foreign policy engagement on religious liberty should go further. Particularly as U.S. foreign policy advances democracy, the religious liberty mandate should be construed more broadly so that the office serves as a resource and offers strategic input in the essential task of establishing freedom of conscience as the foundation of democracy.

Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute provides a full legislative and implementation history of IRFA in a recent article for The Review of Faith and International Affairs. While writing the article, Shea reports that she met a senior official for Iraq policy at the State Department who was unaware of the existence of a religious freedom office at State. Securing international religious liberty will require institutional changes at home as well as abroad.

Too fast, too soon: the Government's proposals on the constitution - Martin McElwee

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:00:00 GMT

It hasn’t been hard to pick holes in the Government’s constitutional changes – both past and proposed. Last week’s report from the Joint Committee on the Draft Constitutional Reform Bill identified not just some holes, but a complete lack of coherence, commenting that:

“We have found it difficult to discern the principles underpinning the Draft Bill and we ask the Government to reflect further on whether “Constitutional Renewal” is an appropriate title.”

Conservatives have been similarly critical of the coherence of Labour’s constitutional reforms, from the introduction of the Scottish Parliament (what to do about England?) to the proposals on Hose of Lords reform (what does it mean for the Commons?).

But overarching logical coherence has never been a hallmark of the UK constitution. Rather, our constitution has developed incrementally, piecemeal. The pace of change has generally been slow, allowing careful assessment of each reform. The Strathclyde deal on House of Lords reform was a good recent example of incrementalism in action: the House of Lords that will emerge from any future reform will not be the same as that which Tony Blair would have created around the turn of the century.

In almost every other area, though, Labour has tried to proceed at breakneck speed (and would have done so in the House of Lords had it not been for the Strathclyde deal). Witness, for example, the plans to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor – announced as an afterthought to a cabinet reshuffle – before it was realised that there was no way it could be done. Witness the way in which government departments of long standing have been chopped up and then combined again. Witness the way in which change has been piled on change in the UK's approach to the rights of those in police custody.

This is the most salient criticism of Labour’s plans, including those set out in the Draft Constitutional Reform Bill – they are rushed once again.

The proposed changes to the courts and judiciary are a case in point. The system in operation following the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 was a compromise carefully negotiated by Lord Woolf, as head of the judiciary, and Lord Falconer, then Lord Chancellor. That compromise had to be pieced together from the debris thrown around in the Government’s first announcement of its 2005 plans, as Lord Woolf has chronicled. It has been in place for just a couple of years.

And, yet, nothing has been learned: the Government proposes to throw all the pieces up in the air again.

As the Joint Committee rightly comments:

“It is far too soon to propose significant reforms only two years after the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 introduced a carefully calibrated balance between the roles of the Executive, judiciary and the newly-created Judicial Appointments Commission.”

When it comes to constitutional change, governments have no need to move with haste: voters aren’t beating a path to Downing Street to demand reform of judicial appointments. Ministers have the benefit of time. They should take it.

Supporting real apprenticeships

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:07:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago the Conservative Party launched its Green Paper on Skills. At the heart of the paper are plans to revive real workplace based apprenticeships through greater employer support. Although the Green Paper was launched at Policy Exchange, the proposals have there origins in a pamphlet published by the CPS last year co-authored by John Hayes and me entitled ‘Towards a Gold Standard for Craft’.

In the pamphlet we examined the true state of apprenticeships in Britain. Behind the rosy picture of growing numbers painted by the Government we found evidence that the apprenticeship brand was in danger of being devalued. We found that many apprenticeships contained little or no workplace training; most were not directly mentored; and some enjoyed no employer engagement whatsoever. We also found that all of the growth in apprenticeship numbers since 1997 had been below the level of training considered the norm for apprenticeships in other countries. Before 1997 all modern apprenticeships were at level 3 (the equivalent of 2 ‘A’ levels), now most are at level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships have been in steady decline since the beginning of this decade.

While commentators may have recently focused on the influence of Policy Exchange on the emerging Conservative Party agenda for Government, the Skills Green Paper shows that the CPS is at the heart of debate. Anyone interested in understanding how Conservative thinking is developing would be wise to keep an eye on CPS publications.

The merits of competition

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:00:00 GMT

The Labour Party looks like it is realising something 14 months late: that it should have had a proper leadership election to replace Tony Blair. The coronation of Gordon Brown might have looked disciplined and united at the time but it has become clear that the Party is now paying the price for forgoing an open and vigorous debate about life after Blair. Instead Gordon Brown was not put under pressure to explain why he was the right man for the job or to lay out exactly what his ‘vision’ for the country was. Compare that to the 2005 Tory leadership election, which proved the benefits of a competitive, open contest, with a wide-ranging debate both about the different personalities standing and the future direction of the Party.

Labour figures talked of renewing the Party after ten years in power, but there was no actual evidence of the sort of debate which would have demonstrated what this ‘renewal’ really meant. John McDonnell may have had the courage to put his name forward, but he was hardly the candidate to give Brown a run for his money and to ‘road test’ the former Chancellor’s suitability for the top job. In the only ballot that Labour held McDonnell managed just 29 nominations from the Parliamentary Labour Party, to Brown’s 308, thereby failing to trigger a proper election. So the Labour Party itself, let alone the country, was denied a real contest. Instead, Brown played with the fire of speculation of an early election to secure a proper mandate – and the rest is history.

Clearly Gordon Brown’s stranglehold at the top of the Labour Party was felt to be too powerful for any of the Blairites to challenge him but it has become apparent since then that a bit of competition would have done them more good a year ago than it is doing now.

Lords plan betrays confused thinking

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:00:00 GMT

The frequency in the last decade with which the Government has returned to the dispatch box with a muddled set of proposals for House of Lords reform has turned the subject into a tiresome exercise in political bargaining. And so it was as Jack Straw introduced a new white paper on Lords reform just over two weeks ago.

Far from carrying out constitutional reform with swiftness and clarity the question of the Lords has been pushed back and back, exposing the lack of a coherent vision dating back to the early days of this Government. What the Government appear to be missing was alluded to last week by Peter Riddell in The Times. Since the stage one reform, which saw the removal of all but 92 hereditary peers, has settled, the House has been quietly carrying out its business in an effective manner, as recent debates have shown.

More importantly, as Straw acknowledged in his statement to the Commons in support of the white paper, the work and relationship of the two Houses is functioning perfectly well. The proposals for a majority elected upper House will serve only to confuse the role of the Lords. While on the one hand seeking to make the House representative and accountable, the Government remains adamant that the primacy of the Commons will be preserved, as enshrined in the two Parliament Acts.

The problem with this proposal is that while the Government will provide a democratic check on the Lords, it will offer it no corresponding strength of mandate. Is it any wonder the Lords have wholly rejected the array of part-elected compositions offered to them so far?

The Government’s fudged reform timetable, dating back to 1997, has whittled away any interest the electorate may have had in the way the country is governed. Constitutional reform commitments will not win anybody an election. Which is just one more reason to leave the Lords as they are.

Internationally Lawless - Victors' Justice in the Balkans Continues

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:18:00 GMT

Of all the medical terms to be adopted into everyday language, “paranoia” is surpassed only by “shock” in the degree to which it has departed from its original, technical meaning and, through multiple cycles of overuse, come to be devalued into a description of mere anxiety, snappiness or intolerance of criticism. Clinically though, psychiatry describes a state of irrational, delusional apprehension of persecution – a totally unjustified and nonsensical belief that the world is out to get you.

Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding term to describe a situation where a patient rationally believes he’s being persecuted; when the evidence suggests the world really is out to get him. Given the events of the last fifteen years, there is now a firm basis to describe this state of mind. It can now be known as being a Serb.

As Radovan Karadzic arrives in The Hague having been effectively sold for hundreds of millions of euros in EU aid, he faces trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a court so transparently biased in its constitution, its processes and its deference to its political masters that it would not have looked out of place in any of the 20^th Century’s shoddier dictatorships. So appalled was one journalist, John Laughland – the most attentive of an otherwise wilfully blind bunch – that he felt bound to expose the tribunal’s fundamental corruption in a book, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice. It ought to be mandatory reading for anyone who assumes that anything resembling justice is done there.

Why did an FBI team sent to Kosovo return home, not having found a single one of the mass graves NATO claimed existed? How did a Milosevic speech praising ethnic diversity and harmony come to be reported as “viciously nationalist”? Why has the Muslim warlord Nasser Oric walked free from the tribunal, despite his men gleefully displaying the severed heads of their Serb victims for the cameras? Sadly, the majority of the Western media has no appetite for the answers.

Lies, damned lies and statistics or government in denial? Kathy Gyngell

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Ten days ago saw the publication of the annual crime statistics. The incredulity that greeted government claims that crime has fallen suggested that one of the government’s latest quangos, the UK Statistics Authority, established earlier this year, has done nothing to ameliorate the public’s cynicism that it was set up to address.

“An independent body operating at arm's length from government as a non-ministerial department” its overall objective was “to promote and safeguard the quality of official statistics that serve the public good “.

Two of its stated tasks were to monitor and report on all UK official statistics, wherever produced, and to provide an independent assessment. None such appear to have been published alongside the recent British Crime Statistics. Apart from wondering what this quango has actually been up to the question remains had an independent assessment been produced, would it have made any difference? After all public disbelief is also about the claims made by government in relation to the statistics - the associated spin as well as the core statistics.

This government has consistently ingenuously and naively attributed far too much significance to selected statistics - inviting us too to join them in their spurious virtual reality. As far as the BSC is concerned the truth is that it is not so much that they are wrong but that they really don’t mean very much. In fact the source survey – the British Crime Survey - is little more than an opinion poll and a selective one at that.

Marian Fitzgerald, Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, was recently reported to have said that the survey failed to capture the extent of violence because of difficulties in gaining access to households in high-crime areas. “The people who are most at risk of crime and serious violent crime are young men in inner cities. For the last decade social surveys have found it difficult to get into these areas.” As a result, she said, the survey offered a more comforting picture to ministers about the extent of violence.

Examination of the ‘harder’ recorded crime statistics shows that the picture is not so rosy after all. Officials as well as ministers have by contrast minimised these and the bad news they contain. Drugs crime statistics – trafficking and possession and, as I understand it from footnote explanations, drugs offences involving assaults - have in fact gone up by an astonishing and worrying 18% in just one year. The official publication of Crime in England and Wales chooses to explain this rise as ‘largely associated with the increased police use of powers to issue warnings for the possession of cannabis (Table 2.04 and 2c),’ by implication diminishing the significance of this finding (and as though cannabis possession did not really matter). In fact, examination of the table shows that the explanation is pretty specious anyway, or at least rather less than the truth. The table shows that all categories of drug offence are well up: possession of controlled drugs excluding cannabis is up by 15%, including cannabis by 21% and ‘other drugs offences’ are up by 19%.

Ironically, the rise in these drug offences which the government appears to have chosen to ignore should be their focus of concern. The chances are that this rise is closely associated with the rise (whether admitted on not) in violent youth crime and knifings.

The fact is alcohol and drugs are an ever present factor in youth violence – the proof has been provided by the hospitals. The police need to begin to officially monitor this. And the sooner the government faces the truth that is staring them in the face the better and whatever its surveys say. This means cracking down on the availability and affordability of drugs and alcohol by all means possible. Other recently published youth crime statistics show that of 3% of all 10 -25 year olds who have committed drug offences the majority of these are continually repeating male offenders. It cannot therefore be difficult to identify them and to provide court ordered secure and structured rehabilitative treatment for them on the Swedish model – with their criminal records expunged with specified drugs, alcohol and crime free years behind them.

A brave government would use statistics to help focus practical solutions not to continue in blind denial.

Buckaroo!

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:26:00 GMT

“Load up the moody mule for your gold mining trip, but watch out – he may buck at any second with no warning! Gently saddle him up and load on your gear. Will he remain calm or will he kick up a storm and send everything flying? You never know what will set him off”

The description of the Milton Bradley childrens game seems like a pretty accurate narrative for Labour’s economic policies, and life must feel a lot like the last round of Buckaroo for Gordon Brown. At one moment he is poised, sweaty palmed, ready to place the last piece onto the back of the mule to win the game. Seconds later he is a loser, on all fours and trying to recover the rope and shovel from underneath the sofa.

But while he sits and contemplates the unfairness of it all, he might consider how it was he got into this situation. It wasn’t the last piece of plastic that caused the mule to buck, but the combined weight of all the others he had carefully loaded on to the beast’s back.

Gordon should realise that the public are not as fickle as he might think. The collapse in Labour’s fortunes is not a result of one particular policy, or the fact that the new Prime Minister doesn’t have many good jokes. It’s just that people have reached a point where they can’t take any more. And the idea that we need his experience to see us through the tough times doesn’t wash, when people realise that he has led us into this mess in the first place.

When he makes another impassioned commitment to social mobility and supporting peoples everyday aspirations, he increasingly sounds like a panellist on the radio game show, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue” - in particular the round where the contestants are asked to ‘sing one song to the tune of another’.

Gordon tries to sing the words of aspiration and achievement, but the voters can recognise the tune. They remember that he is the man who has increased taxes on the low paid, charged stamp duty to first time buyers, increased the numbers of working aged people living on benefits. His policies have undermined people’s savings for retirement and have seen Britain fall behind its competitors in levels of youth unemployment.

Now we are faced with the very real prospect that Labour will have to put up taxes again if they are to support their failing policies, or run up the bill on the national credit card further still.

From Washington: Virtual Disruption of the Education Status Quo

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:52:00 GMT

Since the days of the Apple IIe, computers have been tucked into American classrooms, used like digital textbooks, word processors, or virtual libraries, without really changing much of the learning process. Now that's beginning to change. Online education is picking up rapidly, with the potential to change profoundly the way we learn and how basic education is delivered.

One million American students are taking courses online this year. By 2019, 50 percent of secondary school courses will be online, according to estimates by Clayton M. Christensen of Harvard Business School and Michael B. Horn, co-authors of a new book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learn. As they explain in a recent article:

The way to implement an innovation so that it will transform an organization is to implement it disruptively—not by using it to compete against the existing paradigm and serve existing customers, but to let it compete against “non-consumption,” where the alternative is nothing at all. …

At first glance there appears to be little non-consumption of education in the United States since students are required to receive schooling. Looking deeper, however, reveals many pockets of non-consumption where students would be delighted with computer-based learning rather than the alternative, nothing at all.

One such pocket is advanced coursework (such as Advanced Placement courses which can lead to earning university credit early). Online courses allow students to access curriculum not available at their local school--high-level science or math, and foreign language courses, for example. For other students, online courses offer a remedial alternative when they fail a course in the regular classroom setting.

But for some, online education is offering a completely different format for their schooling--and this model also represents a part of the competitive market for new delivery of the public good of education. In 2007, 173 virtual charter schools in 18 states served 92,235, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. Virtual charter schools assign a licensed teacher to instruct online and monitor progress, typically with some in-person sessions as well. The Florida Vritual School is the oldest statewide Internet-based public high school in the nation, operating since 1997.

Online education is leading to new curriculum development models as well, breaking out of the old textbook formulation process. K12.com is a pioneer in the field, providing online curriculum that can serve as a full homeschool program or a supplementary component. The company also provides curriculum to virtual public schools across the country, including a number of statewide charter schools.

Virtual education is emerging on the higher education level as well, popularized by the University of Phoenix, now the largest private university in North America.

One higher education example filling a "pocket of non-consumption" is YorktownUniversity.com. Launched in 2001, YorktownUniversity.com is triply novel: it delivers conservative content, online, with a for-profit business model. One of the school's objectives is to "Educate a new public service leadership distinguished by its informed responsibility to civil society."

The recently accredited school offers a bachelor of arts degree, with courses priced at $399. Dick Bishirjian, the project's trailblazer, estimates that "a fully functioning serviceable [online] university with senior scholars doing really credible work at every level for 3 percent of the costs of a physical university." By contrast, average annual private college tuition and fees amount to about $24,000.

Bishirjian thinks that two decades from now half of existing private colleges and universities will be closed. If visionaries like Bishirjian, Christensen and Horn are even partially accurate in their predictions, U.S. education is on the cusp of significant transformation.

Who's afraid of Glasgow East? - Martin McElwee

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I grew up in the constituency immediately next door to Glasgow East, where today's by-election takes place. My schoolmates and I knew its streets well. Some of them came from Carmyle, firmly within the constituency. Shettleston, which appears to have given palpitations to many a Southern journalist in the past few weeks, is where we all took our driving lessons and sat our tests. And the Celtic Park ground made the area a popular destination during the football season.

Much of the reporting in the past few weeks has painted Glasgow East as something from the other side of the Styx. For some, like the Sunday Times' facetious A A Gill, it has been a source of amusement and bewilderment. For others a source of despair.

Some of this is true. The statistics do not lie when they show that this part of Glasgow has woeful levels of educational achievement, health outcomes and levels of poverty. Life expectancy - a function of all these things - is horribly low.

But, without wishing to lapse into a McIlvanney-esque working class romanticism, it sometimes feels that communities like Shettleston retain, at some levels at least, a sense of community which relative want brings to the fore rather than destroys. There remains a sense of neighbourliness which is too often lost in the prosperity of London or Edinburgh - or even in Glasgow's more well to do Merchant City.

To the extent that its best features are drawn from adversity, far better, it is true, that the adversity should not exist in the first place. But it seems strange at a time when we feel such concern about our broken society, that we should fail to notice those that there are still unique social networks and links even amidst such deprivation. It is critical that, in seeking to reduce want and lack of opportunity, we do so in a manner that builds on, rather than ignores or, worse, undermines, those enduring links.

We must finish what we have started

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:34:00 GMT

Last weekend I saw ‘Never So Good’, the brilliantly staged and acted play about the life of Harold Macmillan at the National Theatre. Only Howard Brenton’s script lets things down as it contains few insights into the life of a Prime Minister who personified the end of an era. Probably the most dramatic episode concerns Macmillan’s involvement in the Suez crisis. In 1956 Britain colluded with France and Israel to attack Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. With British troops already heading for victory, Macmillan advised the then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden to agree a humiliating retreat to stop a financial crisis.

It is almost impossible not to make – as Brenton does – comparisons between Suez and the war in Iraq. Back then it was America that pushed for a negotiated settlement through the United Nations. President Eisenhower eventually forced Eden’s hand by instructing the US Federal Reserve to sell Sterling.

For many historians the significance of Suez is that it showed Britain to be no longer a world power. But this is a rather parochial view of what was an international crisis. By forcing Britain to back down, Eisenhower fanned the flames of Arab nationalism, a process that eventually led to the rise of Saddam Hussein. If there is one lesson that America should learn from Suez it is that we should finish what we have started.

Protecting ourselves from protectionism – why free trade is still important

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Many of the debates and stump speeches made by the candidates during the recent Democratic presidential primaries in the US featured a protectionist tone, masquerading as “putting American jobs first”.

This followed the furore in 2006 when Dubai Ports World acquired five container ports on the US East Coast. Many contributions to the public discourse when the deal was referred to the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) for review were of a highly protectionist nature (and indeed some came close to racism, as the fact that a Middle Eastern firm was buying the ports was given undue prominence).

In times of increasing economic strife, the temptation for some politicians to jump onto the protectionist bandwagon appears overwhelming. It is very easy to blame nebulous factors such as “globalisation” for job losses, and to advocate raising the drawbridge against international market forces.

The attitude of the international community towards free trade (particularly developed economies such as the US and the EU) is going to play a key part in the success, or otherwise, of the latest set of negotiations in the Doha Round of world trade talks which start in Geneva this week. Much of the media coverage has picked out a dispute over tariffs on bananas as emblematic of the likely failure of the talks.

When President Sarkozy came to power in France last year, many of us hoped that he would provide a “rupture” with traditional French protectionism, particularly in agricultural matters, and instead lead the EU in dismantling obstacles to free trade. Instead, in preparing for the Geneva discussions, he has expressed continuing support for tariffs and subsidies to support the French farming community, as well as support for the position of some former colonies in the “banana wars” to prevent other countries having wider access to the EU’s markets.

In the short term, the failure of the Doha Round could signal an end to all the efforts made in recent years to achieve a comprehensive global settlement on free trade. Instead, countries would have to resort to bilateral or multilateral agreements to eliminate or reduce tariffs or subsidies. Unfortunately, the absence of a global agreement will result in the proliferation of such barriers to trade. Regional bloc organisations such as the EU will continue to trade on favourable terms with a few select nations, and erect ever higher obstacles to other countries, barring them from being able to trade in our markets and barring us from their goods and services (except at increased cost).

In the longer term, this will undoubtedly damage the world economy and may result in the negative effects of the “credit crunch” (which has become a catch-all term to describe the current economic malaise) being prolonged for far longer than necessary.

All of the evidence shows that free trade benefits all participants in terms of economic growth, continued rising prosperity, and higher employment. Britain, since the Thatcher Government deregulation and supply-side reforms of the 1980s, stands as a testament to the benefits of open and globalised markets. America has historically been the world leader in free trade and has delivered wealth on an unprecedented scale to her citizens as a result.

It would be nothing short of criminal if the current downturn in the world’s most developed economies saw America turn in on itself, and the EU play a key role in the failure of vital world trade talks. After all, full participation in international free trade is the only way in which less developed countries will become more prosperous.

It is time for our politicians to stand up and make the case, loudly and forcefully, for sticking to the ideals of free trade. John McCain is making the right noises in the US, but only time will tell if he will be drowned out. We need someone to make the case on this side of the pond.

The Future of Broadcasting

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:14:00 GMT

The Chairman of Ofcom made a significant intervention in the ongoing debate about the future of public service broadcasting and the BBC last week. Lord Currie questioned the validity of the BBC’s long-standing claim that it had a ‘unique link’ with licence fee payers – a claim that has been used historically against calls for the BBC to share the licence fee with other broadcasters. He highlighted research that shows that even when prompted, 80% of people think the licence fee funds TV programmes on BBC1 and BBC2 with just 60% believing that the licence fee funds the corporation’s digital services and 50% thinking it includes radio services.

The idea of a ‘unique link’ has sat alongside another key idea – that because everyone is forced to pay for the BBC, the corporation should offer an all-encompassing service - everything from Radio 3 to BBC3. But attempting to do a bit of everything has blurred the BBC’s public service mission and risks crowding out innovation across the sector.

In his recent CPS pamphlet How to Save the BBC Antony Jay identifies a ‘corporate gigantism’ which, he argues, has been the prevailing mindset of the Corporation, and a presumption that because the BBC can do something, then it should do it. As he says in the essay, the BBC’s “resources are spread too thinly over too many channels”.

In this fast-changing, multiplatform world the broadcasting sector is going through some seismic shifts. We have more TV channels than ever and innovative new content springing up online by the hour. And the rise of on-demand, broadband TV is already having a big impact on viewing habits. Yet in all this, content must remain king. Which is why we need a much clearer focus on what is already being provided by the market, where the gaps are and will be, and what the role of the BBC should be. The Corporation should no longer be trying to do everything, but should be offering the distinctive, high quality and original programming for which it is most respected.

The Surveillance Society - Dr Kieron O'Hara

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:39:00 GMT

In his speech launching his annual report, the Information Commissioner Richard Thomas this week reminded us once again that restrictions on excessive surveillance are building blocks of our liberties. Yet he still has to warn us about shadowy proposals to create a database of virtually all electronic communications in the UK. It seems governments can’t help but be excited by the possibilities of digital technology.

The power of IT available is eye-popping. As Nigel Shadbolt and I describe in our book The Spy in the Coffee Machine, Moore’s Law has resulted in awesome abilities to gather information from the environment, store it, and retrieve it. Any two of those developments would complicate our lives; the combination of all three changes everything.

Government intrusion is a serious problem whose scale is increasing, not helped by a cavalier attitude to both privacy and security. Though let’s not ignore the private sector, of which we as consumers are far more trusting.Indeed, public attitudes themselves are a worry: we are quite happy to give information to a supermarket which we would never trust the government with. Privacy is a public good – many of its benefits accrue to society, not the individual. The notion of a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ is key to interpreting intrusion laws – but our own practice is constantly driving reasonable expectation downwards.

As we argue in Coffee Machine, the privacy debate cuts across other information policy issues. First, after the political argument about how much information government needs access to, is the orthogonal question of whether the government, with its iffy security record, should keep that information itself. There is no reason why it should hold all the information that it needs. Info-hunger should not imply info-retention.

The second issue is that government information is not routinely released, creating an information asymmetry between government and the public, making it harder to hold government to account. There is no reason why much (obviously not all) government information could not be published in neutral formats, to allow users to amalgamate data creatively (rather than government deciding how data is presented, selectively, abstracted from the detail, in league tables, or whatever).

At a recent CPS-Microsoft seminar on privacy, the excellent chairman Simon Jenkins raised the most difficult question of all: how can we get governments to respect privacy, given that all the imperatives push them the other way? How can we ensure that the Opposition’s commitment to privacy will remain when they have to deal with terrorism, organised crime, anti-social behaviour etc? Will they remember Richard Thomas’s warning when snooping helps, when tying their own hands hinders, and when most voters and the media are unenthused by the issue?

Knife crime culprits: political expedience, media opportunism and adult irresponsibility

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:00:00 GMT

There is a ghastly tragic irony surrounding the events of the last two weeks. It began with a national and local political witch hunt for Boris Johnson and Ray Lewis. It resulted in days of shameful public pillorying of Ray and the vile private harassment of his family and friends at the hands of a cynical and conscienceless media. It culminated in more knife crime committed in a week than ever reported before, followed by a knee jerk (lock ’em up) reaction from Cameron and the inevitable convoluted action plans from Brown.

Knife crime was what Ray was employed to counter.

The truth is that none of our politicians know how to mend our broken society. But Ray Lewis does and he has practiced what he preached with great effect. That is why is he was an inspired choice for Boris Johnson.

At East Side Young Leaders Academy he saves, and has saved, boys from a life of disturbance and crime. What is more, he turns these troubled youths into young men with values and an ability to communicate that puts both state and public school educational sectors to shame.

All this he has achieved from the poorest and least privileged of backgrounds himself, through the strength of his own personality -through his drive, entrepreneurship, intellectual clarity and his extraordinary ability to communicate.

Anyone who has ever listened to Ray speak, anyone who has read his pamphlet from ‘Latchkey to Leadership’, should know that his concern is with how we think and with changing that.[1] At EYLA he is clear first that unless we discipline ourselves as adults there is no road forward and second that the trend toward moving power away from adults to children must stop. Simple though this sounds Ray as deputy mayor would have been challenging an ideology that has infiltrated virtually every level of our educational and youth welfare establishments.

And therein also lays the challenge to politicians of both parties. Once adults take their power again, they have to accept their responsibility.

The 24 hour drinking, club and drug culture, of which knife crime is a direct outcome, is fairly and squarely the responsibility (or lack of it) of adults, primarily of politicians, national and local. The liberalising of licensing – seating capacity and opening hours – has been reckless, greedy and blindly optimistic. Furthermore letting kids as young as 14 participate in 24 hour drinking ‘culture’ that has arisen, letting them stay out on the streets till 2 or 3 in the morning, is also the responsibility (or lack of) of adults and parents.

So no more handwringing.

This Saturday’s Guardian investigation into knife crime confirmed what police surgeon Dr Robin Moffat also pointed out in the Spectator last week - which is that both the perpetrators and the victims of knife attacks are up to their eyes in alcohol, cocaine and cannabis - part and parcel of the 24 hour drinking culture.

Make no mistake, the easy availability and affordability of club and other drugs has ridden on the back of a night time club and street culture stimulated by the 2003 Licensing Act.

None of this is rocket science. But it is a challenge to the laziness, self indulgence and self interest of adults as well as to their convenient liberal if not libertarian precepts. The finger has to point back at us.

Tony McNulty (Home Office Minister) said on last Friday’s TV news that dealing with knife crime was an issue beyond party politics. Would that it were. But the last weeks have once more confirmed it takes more than sentiment to affect deeply ingrained political and media behaviour.

Ironically his homily followed hard on the heels of Labour’s defensive reaction to the CPS’s critique of the failure to control the supply of drugs into prisons (prisons where the young knife crime arrestees will end up and which are fast becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution).[2] In one breath the MOJ gave the CPS report short shrift saying it was astonishingly ill informed. In the next they accepted all the recommendations from Blakey Report which mirrored nearly all of the CPS analysis and recommendations. Maybe the problem was with the messenger not the message. Political manoeuvring dies hard.

The fact is that the Labour Party or their apparatchiks were set on discrediting Boris Johnson from day one. And it took Boris, also being a politician, only two days to revise his better judgement and ditch Lewis. The Tory high command went one better. Nothing to do with them, one said to me, adroitly distancing himself as though Central Office had not propelled Boris in Ray’s direction in the first place. So it was hardly surprising to hear no mention of the Tories’ inspiration for fixing our broken society, let alone an acknowledgment, in Cameron’s speech from Glasgow’s Gallowgate last week. Yet Lewis was the man on whose premises and with whose prestige Cameron launched both his leadership and the party’s Social Justice Policy Review.

If Ray was the first casualty then truth has been the second. We may have come to expect little else of Labour’s politics but it is sad to see Cameron’s new Tories letting political expedience take precedence over the common good as soon as the going gets tough.

[1] From Latchkey to Leadership – A practical blueprint for channelling the talents of inner city youth, Kathy Gyngell and Ray Lewis, CPS 2006

[2] Inside Out – How to get drugs out of prisons, Huseyin Djemil, CPS 2008