The Obscurer

Month: February, 2006

Wednesday 15th February 2006

No Cigar

Everyone knew that the proposed law banning smoking in public places was absurd; for smoking to be outlawed only in pubs that served food meant it was likely that some pubs would ditch food and become purely drinking and smoking dens. That hardly seemed a recipe for a healthy environment and so something had to be done; but surely not the complete banning of smoking in every public place in the country?

I don’t smoke, and so I am sure that I will regard pubs as being even nicer places for me to visit once smoking is banned, but this law seems all wrong. If you were to compare the way we live now to the way things were twenty years ago – with regards the general smokiness of pubs, the number of no-smoking areas and smoke-free workplaces, and in the number of smokers in general – then you can’t fail to notice that we have already made great strides in the direction the health campaigners would like us to go, all without any legislation. So why the need to ban smoking now?

I can understand the argument for banning smoking at work; I once worked in an office where most people smoked and it was pretty unpleasant. The proposal that I could just leave and get another job if I didn’t like it didn’t seem that fair to me (especially as this was in the middle of a recession and it had been tough enough just getting that job in the first place), and so I can sympathise with pub workers who don’t want to indulge in passive smoking but feel that they have little choice. Surely, though, there are all sorts of alternatives to an outright ban. You could ban smoking in the bar area itself, for example, or offer the carrot of tax relief or even the stick of health and safety regulations to encourage premises to improve their ventilation and air conditioning systems, or to create separate areas so that smokers and non-smokers are provided with a choice of where to sit. Of course, bar workers would still face smoke when they move out of the bar area, to collect glasses and so on, but then many workers face similar problems when they venture out of their offices or places of work. Plumbers, for example, may have their own smoke-free office, shop or showroom but could still have to work in a house owned by smokers, and they have to accept others’ freedoms in their work environment; or does this new law mean a private house becomes a workplace when workmen are there? Are people now going to be prevented from smoking in their own homes when they have an electrician in doing a re-wire?

It is easy, and all too tempting, to blame this law on a Labour government that is continually assailing our civil liberties in the face of public anger, but it is more depressing than that. The 200-vote majority in the commons on a free vote shows that this is not just a New Labour thing; politicians of all parties supported this bill. Also, as with ID cards and terrorism legislation the government can genuinely claim that they are in agreement with the general public on this one, as opinion polls regularly attest to. If anything, though, the figures on smoking are more disturbing.

Because I can see why people could support ID cards, 90 days detention, laws against glorifying terrorism, even capital punishment if they believe that such things will make them safer and aid national security; I don’t agree with them, but I can see there is an argument there. How though can you explain the Newsnight survey that suggested that if anything this government isn’t authoritarian enough; 64% of those polled agreed with the smoking ban, but many wanted the law to go further. 68% said that pregnant women should be banned from smoking at any time, 69% said that those with children should be banned from smoking in their own homes, and 48% wanted a total ban on smoking, full stop. I doubt many people think it is a good idea to smoke if you are pregnant, or to smoke around children, but for a majority to think that it is alright for the state to legislate in such areas seems quite worrying. For those who want a freer and more liberal society, it is starting to look like we may have no alternative but to impose it!

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Friday 10th February 2006

Jeffrey, With One F, Jefrey

Jarndyce has gone into semi-retirement, again, and I know the feeling; but I don’t think I will ever follow suit because I will never stop shouting at the telly, I will always have something I want to get off my chest. I think this blog will just continue in its erratic and irregular nature, occasionally going quiet for weeks and perhaps even months at a time when inspiration and interest desert me. I won’t be going anywhere, but I may not be coming here regularly for all manner of reasons; this past week for example, I haven’t been blogging because I have been busy working, socialising and engaging in discussions with a two year old about why, although “please” is the magic word, it is not so magic that it will produce a biscuit when a) there are no biscuits in the house, and b) you have eaten eight biscuits already today and are subsequently in real danger of actually turning into a biscuit. Such things often crush the possibility that I can comment topically on a subject of interest, while I seem to have loads of time on my hands when nothing is happening in the world to get vexed about. And what is the point of writing a post today about something I heard on the radio nearly a week ago?

I don’t know, but here it is anyway.

I have never listened to Jeff Randall’s Weekend Business on Radio FiveLive before; in part because I have always been doing something else, but also I have never held Mr Randall in very high esteem. When he regularly popped up on the news as the BBC’s business editor he always struck me as a bit of a bumbling and incompetent buffoon; I even remember Andrew Neil ticking him off on The Daily Politics for not having any statistics with him to support his take on some business story or other. However, I recently read this article in The Observer where I learned that he is now the Daily Telegraph’s editor-in chief, and indeed that he has had a pretty successful career. The Observer summarises

Jeff Randall, 51, studied economics at Nottingham University and lectured briefly before switching to journalism. He worked on trade titles before joining the Sunday Telegraph as a business reporter in 1986. From 1989 to 1995 he was City editor of the Sunday Times, then briefly joined PR firm Financial Dynamics as chairman. He returned to the Sunday Times as assistant editor and sports editor in 1996 and was launch editor of the Barclay brothers’ Sunday Business in 1997.

So it seems that being a bumbling and incompetent buffoon needn’t be a barrier to success in the media. Perhaps I should make the switch.

Anyway, last Sunday I listened to his radio programme and it was actually quite interesting, and unintentionally amusing. A cast of business leaders were interviewed on the programme, all perfectly nice people I thought, but what was notable, if perhaps not exactly surprising, was how many of them spoke managerial English in rounded pseudo accents. Much of their talk was liberally peppered with the usual clichés about visions, journeys, environments and experiences, throughout which you could hear the faint echo of the public speaking course. I can only imagine that these people only ever move in circles where such speech is the norm, and that no one ever points out how we talk in the real world.

The most interesting part of the programme, however, was when they discussed this news story about an accountant who sued a management training company when she injured herself on a team building exercise where she had to walk over hot coals. Jeff questioned John Holden of Resource Development International, another training company, about the worth or otherwise of these courses. Jeff did alright I guess, questioning what fire-walking actually has to do with team building, how relevant it all is to the office or shop floor, and about the cost of these exercises, while John Holden trotted out the managerial speak; these courses are about personal developmental processes and journeys, they are about challenging self limiting beliefs and breaking down the barriers in your mind, that wise companies pay a lot of money for these courses because people are a scarce resource.

It is nice that the staff are valued so highly that firms are expected to waste money on this nonsense. The nearest I have been to this sort of thing was on one course where juggling was used at the start as an “ice breaker”. This was a particularly weird set up, as I went on this course with about fifteen people I knew from my office; we were then split up and put on different tables with staff from other offices and had to engage in this farce in order to get to know each other. If my office colleagues and I hadn’t been split up in the first case we could have dispensed with this ice breaker bollocks altogether and just cut to the chase; but then a two hour presentation wouldn’t get stretched out into a whole days training, and that would never do.

Anyway, some plastic balls were placed in the middle of each table and some trainers instructed us all on the basics of juggling; then it was our turn. The “point” of this charade was that we would learn that what had seemed impossible at the start of the lesson was actually far easier than we thought once we applied ourselves. Now in my case all I actually learnt was that I can’t juggle (or perhaps that I don’t apply myself) but even if I had succeeded in this pointless task just how was this seriously meant to affect me? When struggling at work, trying once more to match the quart of workload to the pint pot of resources, is it expected that I will think, “But hey, I can juggle! I can do this”? Probably, but I am never going to; that is never going to happen.

And that’s the real point; through all the talk of valuing teamwork and fostering self awareness there was no attempt on the part of John Holden to explain just how walking on hot coals, or juggling, has ever been of any actual practical assistance to people in their working lives, or if there is evidence of any tangible success for these courses. More interestingly, perhaps, Jeff Randall, a journalist with an impressive CV and an apparent extensive knowledge of business practices, didn’t think to ask.

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Saturday 4th February 2006

Fishing For Fascists

Whilst I applauded when the government was defeated in parliament over the law on inciting religious hatred, the failure to convict the BNP’s Nick Griffin and Mark Collett for the existing crime of inciting racial hatred shows how difficult these things are to enforce in the first instance, and that concerns over the bills’ implications for freedom of speech, while genuine, may not be as strong as suspected. If you can’t convict BNP leaders for being racists then these laws seem as pointless as they are wrongheaded.

But perhaps the worst thing about these laws, as I argued over a year ago, is that they are counterproductive; that they give the BNP and their ilk the opportunity to cloak themselves in respectability. This court case has allowed the BNP to stand proud as bold advocates of free speech, as the agents of liberty, as the persecuted purveyors of truth.

It is not just that I think free speech should extend to the BNP for its own sake, though, just because I believe in free speech as a principle; I personally think that Nick Griffin and his associates should be in the media far more often than they currently are. Rather than trying (and failing) to use the law as a sledgehammer to protect the public from the BNP, we should be putting Griffin on TV and radio daily to show him for what he is; the man is a fool. For example, when interviewed on FiveLive by Peter Allen the other day, Griffin said that race relations in this country were leading to a future Bosnia, indeed that just prior to the war in Bosnia that country “was probably in some ways less unstable than parts of Europe and parts of Britain are now”. When Allen said “so you’re seriously saying, and you are the leader of the party, that the BNP believes that this country is in danger of civil war” Griffin sort of paused and had to check himself, aware how melodramatic such a statement would sound to the majority of the public. He then admitted that there was no immediate danger and that we probably had a good 30 years to prepare for becoming an Islamic republic.

The problem is that such debates with the BNP are rare; too often their statements and complaints go unchallenged and unanswered by the media and mainstream politicians, their pronouncements exist in an echo chamber. When the media do cover the BNP, rather than tackle the details of what they actually say the media are often more interested in challenging the morality of what the BNP stands for; as such they make it easy for the BNP to present itself as a defender of freedoms cowed by a liberal establishment.

With news programmes last night showing the BNP as the epitome of free speech, juxtaposed with pictures of Muslims around the world protesting about the re-publication of a crap cartoon (which has allowed some to dust off their Islamophobia; as if believers in other religions never overreact) some people are likely to become quite confused; and the confused, I imagine, form a large part of the BNP’s constituency. If we allow the BNP to have their say then we strip them of their image as free speech martyrs and simultaneously allow their statements to be fully scrutinised and challenged which rarely happen now; in effect we give them enough rope. Allow them the oxygen of publicity and with luck they will be left flapping about helplessly like fish on the shore.

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Friday 3rd February 2006

Joey

If I still sound a little hoarse it is because I spent much of Wednesday evening booing Joey; no, not the Ginsters Pasty sponsored Friends spin-off (which I have never seen) but Mr. Barton, footballer, currently of Manchester City.

Actually, I didn’t even do that, but many people did jeer him half-heartedly throughout City’s 3-0 P45-inspiring victory over Newcastle, until he was finally substituted to generous applause because of his pretty good performance that night. I didn’t see the point of booing him during the game; would you boo him if he was clean through on goal, or if he cleared the ball off the line, or was about to take a penalty? Apart from not helping the team, those who booed him through the match really were hostages to fortune.

The reason for City fans’ chagrin is that Barton has asked for a transfer because he wants more money than the club are prepared to pay him, a measly £28,000 per week according to reports. Of course, Joey has claimed he wants to leave for all sorts of other reasons, claiming the club lacks ambition, but in the end it comes down to the fact that he thinks that merely being offered more per week than the average worker earns in a year is “insulting”. This would be less galling if it wasn’t for the fact that were he not a half decent footballer you can imagine Joey would be grateful just to receive a fortnightly giro.

Is Joey pleading poverty? Not quite, but his antics have made me think about the term, or rather about two terms; absolute poverty and relative poverty. The former is a measure that defines those whose level of income has fallen below a definitive poverty line, the latter is usually used to refer to those who earn less than 60% of the median average income. There are arguments over which measure is the best one to use when discussing poverty.

Personally, I favour using absolute poverty; relative poverty seems to be a bit of a statistical conceit. I wince whenever I hear Labour politicians talk about having “taken a million children out of poverty since 1997” when you know they may just be talking about some statistical jiggery-pokery; but then again I wince when I hear Labour politicians talk most of the time anyway. If we are talking about actual poverty then I think we should look at how well off people really are, rather than just how they compare with the average. For example, the number of people in relative poverty will reduce if the poor’s income were to remain static while the median average income falls, which seems nonsensical to me; if this were to happen then you could cheer a cut in levels of poverty, when in fact to me the poor would still be just as poor as before while the average worker would actually be worse off, which seems little cause for celebration.

But there are some misunderstandings about relative poverty; one being that, as those who are poor are defined as earning 60% or less of median income, “there must always be some proportion in poverty”. It is surprising how often I have heard this statement, as if it is proof that relative income is a political tool to ensure there are always some poor to fight for; but even I, as a very poor mathematician, know that if everyone were to earn the same then as a result everyone would earns the median income, therefore everyone must earn more than 60% of the median wage (because everyone would be earning exactly 100% of the median income). If you can accept this as a possible, if unlikely, scenario, then you must accept that there may be numerous other occasions where relative poverty could be zero.

In fact, as my above example shows, relative poverty seems if anything to be more of a guide to inequality; and call me old fashioned but I still think that inequality is something to be concerned about. I may prefer absolute poverty as a definition of poverty, but I do think relative poverty is a useful statistic on its own terms; our relative incomes do affect our access to goods and services and our opportunities in life, we do judge how well off or otherwise we are by comparison with others rather than by an objective assessment of our material wealth. If anything I just think that “relative poverty” is a misleading term, perhaps “inequality index” would be better; either that or people make it crystal clear what they mean and which term they are using when they talk about poverty. The problem with two definitions of poverty, as with two or more definitions of anything, is that people will always choose the one that best supports their case.

But if you think that relative poverty doesn’t matter at all then just have a word with Joey Barton. Actually, if you see him, don’t bother having a word as I wouldn’t expect to get much sense; if you do see him, just give him a slap, and say it’s from me.

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