Tuesday, 21 January 2014

The capture of opportunities by the rich at the expense of the rest

Some people think that Bill Gates is a jolly decent chap because he gives some of his wealth away. This is the same perverse thinking that celebrates philanthropy as it disempowers people in poverty. I’d like to live in a society where people question the systems and structures that allow half of the world’s wealth to be owned by just one percent of the population. The Oxfam report which publicises this statistic (speaking truth to Davos) makes the point:

‘Some economic inequality is essential to drive growth and progress, rewarding those with talent, hard earned skills, and the ambition to innovate and take entrepreneurial risks. However, the extreme levels of wealth concentration occurring today threaten to exclude hundreds of millions of people from realizing the benefits of their talents and hard work.’

It does look like we’re well-past the tipping point of ‘some economic inequality’ and we’re now into dangerous extremes. Oxfam note that:

‘over the past few decades, the rich have successfully wielded political influence to skew policies in their favour on issues ranging from financial deregulation, tax havens, anti-competitive business practices to lower tax rates on high incomes and cuts in public services for the majority. Since the late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available.’ (Guardian article)

And I weep for all the rights workers in the seventies and eighties who laboured to get equalities principles understood and acts of law passed. Now we have governments that routinely disdain equalities in pursuit of the re-feudalisation of society.

Is there much awareness, let alone discomfort, about this state of affairs? Is it true, as I suggested here, that 'most people don’t really notice, and some even believe them to be doing their best'? Maybe more awareness than I’d have suspected: the Guardian article refers to Oxfam’s survey research:

‘In the UK, some 67% agreed that "the rich have too much influence over where this country is headed" - 37% saying that they agreed "strongly" with the statement - against just 10% who disagreed, 2% of them strongly.’

George Monbiot, meanwhile, is asking whether the reason we’re all so indifferent about the abuses of power around us is because we’re satiated with comfort: too much freedom to be bothered about freedom.

Perhaps that’s part of it – certainly I don’t see how our cultural emphasis on consumption and celebrity can be regarded as healthy – but I wouldn’t want to lose sight of the issue of equalities. Oxfam are right to stress its centrality to social justice. There are people in positions of responsibility who spout the rhetoric of social justice who could appreciate that; but it's not in their interests, or those of their friends.

 

 

21 Jan 2014 09:10:45 | Social exclusion

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Less education, more play Since my kids were at school, many moons ago, I’ve been highly sensitive to the need to challenge the obsessive over-regulation of childhood generally and school time in particular. So thank you Peter Gray in today’s Indy for a forceful and knowledgeable articulation of the arguments. His article reviews the human value of play and its social importance, then reflects on the significant reduction over a couple of generations in the amount of time children have to play. Gray notes that these changes ‘have been caused by a constellation of social factors, including the spread of parents’ fears, the rise of experts who are continuously warning us about dangers, the decline of cohesive neighbourhoods and the rise of a school-centric, or ‘schoolish’, take on child development – the view that children learn more from teachers and other adult directors than they do from one another.’ Apparently this dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play ‘has been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in childhood mental disorders:’ ‘research indicates that empathy has been declining and narcissism increasing, ever since valid measures of these were first developed in the late 1970s.’ Successive governments, feeding the peculiar ambitions of many parents and also being encouraged by those aspirations, have insisted more and more fervently on regulating, controlling and managing a high proportion of children’s lives. And yet: ‘The most important skills that children everywhere must learn in order to live happy, productive, moral lives are skills that cannot be taught in school. Such skills cannot be taught at all. They are learned and practised by children in play. These include the abilities to think creatively, to get along with other people and cooperate effectively, and to control their own impulses and emotions… ‘We no longer need people to follow directions in robot-like ways (we have robots for that), or to perform routine calculations (we have computers for that), or to answer already-answered questions (we have search engines for that). But we do need people who can ask and seek answers to new questions, solve new problems and anticipate obstacles before they arise. These all require the ability to think creatively. The creative mind is a playful mind.’ I will be pondering all this more deeply, but I have to pop out shortly to pick up a friend’s children from school, let them loose on a few games for an hour, then ferry them to a tennis lesson…
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Neighbours won’t be incentivised to police bad parents. Can we move on now? Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills, seems to like to lob a banger into the fire every now and then. A few sparks have arisen this past few days after he made remarks that have been taken to suggest that neighbours should pry on and police the parenting of fellow-residents. In some cases, perhaps unsurprisingly, this has been interpreted as deliberate policy-distraction on behalf of the government, to keep the anti-scrounger attitude levels high. To be fair to Wilshaw – there’s a phrase I never would have thought I would write – I think it’s nothing of the sort: it was just an eccentric offering of his own, pre-considered and ill-considered. I reach this view because I have watched a good deal of the select committee meeting where the remark was made. Committee chair Graham Stuart MP (at 10.00.49) was asking, somewhat optimistically I felt, for some guidance on how as a society we might go about compensating for the (perceived) ‘hollowing out’ of family and community. The Chief Inspector’s remarks were contextualised with reference to the idea of the ‘big society’, first by a member of the committee (at 10.02.46) and then by Wilshaw himself (at 10.06.01). He deliberately prepares the ground for his remarks, even saying that it’s a point he intends to return to later in the discussion. He talks of addressing ‘social taboos’ (such as fathers not accepting their parental responsibilities and parents not engaging with their children’s schools) that he believes are diminishing. (Wait: though this be method, yet there is madness in it). He says that this creates a vacuum and that ‘there will be people who can step into that vacuum.’ Then follows the now widely-quoted challenge to policy: ‘How do you incentivise good citizens, good people, good family members to engage with the worst, the most difficult members of society? That’s a policy issue for government. How do you financially incentivise those people to get up in the morning and knock on the neighbour's door and say 'your children are not up yet, they've not had their breakfast yet, why aren't you taking them to school?'’ To their credit, it seems like the committee, unlike some journalists and many others (e.g. in the comments here) were ready to dismiss this as random silliness and move on; and so should the rest of us. It’s not a sensible suggestion and it’s unlikely to have been fed cynically into the system by Tory Central, despite their fondness for blunt and polarising moral over-simplification. But it was articulated in public and was clearly pre-considered. So not for the first time there are questions about how someone who thinks so carelessly at times can have so much power and influence in the educational and child care sectors. And how can we have a head of Ofsted who talks so irresponsibly about responsibility, flinging around arbitrary judgemental phrases like ‘good people’ and ‘the worst, most difficult members of society’ when giving evidence to...

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