Archived entries for

Responding to the riots – Insights from Brixton

Tony Blair asked us to reject the idea that Britain is broken. However, the Young Fabians – never to accept any one view without question, debate and a few committee meetings - thought that further investigation was and is necessary. Certainly, there was blatant opportunist criminality in the youth riots and, likely, a small minority who operate ‘beyond the pale’ involved. But the scale, spread and nature of the unrest does seem to indicate something more; something wrong with our society. A very large number of young people have demonstrated a lack of connection to, or investment in, their communities and a separation from the norms of society. It would be wrong to be complacent about this challenge.

Of course, the issues can’t be looked at in isolation. The roots are in education, in the economy, in housing, in public service provision, and elsewhere. But just because something is complicated isn’t a justification for giving up on constructive solutions.

Over the last five months, Joani Reid has been leading the Young Fabian “Securing the Future of the Next Generation” Policy Commission to provide analysis of the broader problems hitting British youth.

As part of the effort to analyse the issues, last week, the Young Fabians teamed up with A4e to visit Brixton to try and better understand the skills and employment challenges in the area. Myself, Joel Mullan, Vincenzo Rampulla and Joani Reid all took part in the site visit and held a series of interviews at the Brixton A4e training centre.

What follows is not an exhaustive analysis, but a short personal report from what felt like a very worthwhile visit – and something that the current Young Fabian Executive would like to repeat, with other partners and other areas.

Firstly – without comparing it to its competitors (because we didn’t visit any on this occasion) – I, for one, was very impressed by A4e as an outfit.

There was a huge amount of optimism and energy in the building. I suggested that a lack of jobs in the economy might be an insurmountable problem for the centre, but they went on to tell me about all the vacancy relationships they’d built up to secure job opportunities. For example, a recently secured relationship with WHSmith enabled them to link forthcoming major recruitment rounds with training programmes in local areas.

I was also impressed by A4e’s emphasis on making sure the people of an area benefitted from big investment projects. It was clear that they rejected the idea that high value added investment, like the Silicon Roundabout, are just opportunities for high skilled talent to move into the area, but advocated, with enough time, planning and upskilling, the opportunities for unemployed local people. This approach offers a stern challenge to those who are satisfied with mere trickle-down benefits for the local community from cleaning jobs and selling sandwiches.

At a broader level here are a five big insights for policy thinking that I took away from the interviews and meetings:

1. We need a tailored and sequenced approach to helping jobseekers.

People differ widely and so do their needs. In Brixton, the range was from job-hungry out of work professionals who had just been hit by the downturn, to those in need of skills training and with an appetite to learn, to those with much more severe health, drugs, drink, or housing problems. Particularly for those in at-risk categories, their issues need to be dealt with in the right order in order to be effective, and to reach sustainable and gainful employment as an end goal. One size doesn’t fit all. We shouldn’t talk as if it does.

2. Business, educators and jobseekers shouldn’t operate in isolation.

Our current general modus operandi – of employers wandering blindly into skills shortages, trainers training without a clear view of an end goal, and jobseekers floundering in the middle – indicates some room for improvement. It may make more sense to encourage as much communication and planning between: what businesses need, which they often know many months in advance of the time; what the educators can provide; and the aspirations and development-reach of the jobseeker. The free market is a brutally efficient model of clearing, but it is not perfection. There is value in thinking about the limits of a wage/price solution. Greater understanding and planning across the silos can help.

3. Culture matters and for-profit shouldn’t be a dirty word.

Organisational culture is of the utmost significance. It struck me very telling that A4e refer jobseekers as ‘customers’.

Public service in general should be very far removed from a tick-box process of ‘recipients’, and be, as far as possible, about enabling committed and motivated individuals to have a personal stake in the experience of public service ‘customers’. This is not to bash state provision, just a nudge to try and dislodge any automated revulsion to the concept of for-profit public service. At the very least, we should try and incorporate the motivation and innovation that ‘for-profit’ can, sometimes, demonstrate into all aspects of public service.

4. We should do everything we can to make work pay.

In interviews with ‘customers’, it was clear that there was an entrenched view out there that welfare can pay more than work can. We need to tread carefully here, maintaining the protection for the vulnerable, for mothers and for the down-and-out. But we must do all we can to make employment attractive. While it feels like there is some way to go on this challenging agenda, it is should be at the forefront of policy makers minds. Part of the solution must lie with a relentless effort to raise aspirations in all communities, especially the most deprived.

This is no easy feat.

5. We need bigger thinking on internships.

In an interview with a highly educated jobseeker with two degrees and ambitions in the fashion industry, who had been out of work for over a year, it struck that he was being led on a path that was corrosive to his sense of purpose and confidence, as well as being costly to the economy. His university careers advice centred on the importance of getting experience and an internship to make it in his career of choice. Many readers in the political world will, no doubt, be familiar with this advice. He was financial-capital poor, but human-capital rich. If he went on an internship, he claimed he would lose his housing benefit and employment benefit; a non-option without family support in London. If he took a minimum wage job, the option presented to him by the jobseeker system, he saw only the prospect of working very long hours just to keep his head above water, without any surplus income to save.

The unsympathetic might say he should take whatever job is coming, and be grateful. But surely it makes no sense to consign those who have benefitted from a high level of education to the near poverty trap of minimum wage jobs – not from the perspective of jobseekers self-worth, nor when trying to enable the greatest possible constructive contributions to society, nor when trying to make good on the state’s investment in education, and nor in our effort to encourage the flourishing of high value added employment in the UK.

A potential solution might be (with lots of weaknesses no-doubt, but also some merit): a one-shot universal jobseekers credit for, let’s say, a 6-month unpaid internship? Bolstering skills development, entrenching high-value added jobs and making the UK a more attractive place to locate business, all the while costing the state less (bearing in mind how long this category might otherwise be on welfare). Accepting internship exists rather than trying to wish them away, this could level the playing field for entry to high-skilled professions and be a significant boost for businesses.

‘One Big Chance’ internships – you heard it here first.

Policy Commissions and Young Fabian next steps: everyone should get involved

Joani and Joel are taking forward the thinking in the “Securing the Future of the Next Generation” Policy Commission. The next Anticipations edition will also have a heavy focus on the Squeezed Youth theme.

Tony Blair may be right about the need to focus on the hard to reach dysfunctional families. Or perhaps we do have a broken society and there are big ideas needed to address a lack of hope or prospects in communities up and down the country, hitting the young hardest.

Regardless, if you want to contribute to the thinking and the debate, there are plenty of opportunities with the Young Fabians. Stay tuned for information about a debate on what to learn from the riots.

Please get in touch if you would like to be involved, at any level.

Nick Maxwell is Partnerships Officer for the Young Fabians

The problem with A-Levels

In this member post, Young Fabian George Rawlinson – who has recently completed his A-levels – reflects on whether the exams have actually become too easy.

On the day of my last A-Level exam, Education Secretary Michael Gove stated in an interview with The Times that: “It has become easier to get an A at A-level or GCSE than it used to be, and that’s a problem.”

I would firstly like to congratulate Mr Gove on the fine timing of such a statement, after thousands of youngsters have toiled away to achieve the grades that they required this year (partly in order to avoid the hike in fees that his government has introduced). Mr Gove feels it is his role to tell us that it was all a waste of time and even if we did manage to avoid the £9000-a-year fees, it would not be because of our efforts, but simply because the exams were so easy!

Despite the ill-advised timing of Gove’s comments – which highlight how out-of-touch he is from the students he is meant to be supporting – his views do have some credibility.

The Daily Mail does its utmost to vindicate such comments and show its readers how stupid our generation really are, using examples of the questions we are tested on – for example, a sample biology question which read something like: ‘What does Daniel use to read the board: ear/eye/tongue/nose?’

What the Mail ignores is the fact that such questions are the easiest questions in a GCSE foundation paper in which even a mark of 100% can only result in a C-grade being awarded. What the press also fail to report is how questions do actually get harder as you progress through Sixth Form. This summer, my French A-level paper included an essay question on the themes in Sartre’s “Les Mains Sales”; my History paper one on the successes of Détente after 1970; and my Politics exam a question asking which EU institution is the most significant.

Would the Daily Mail reader considering retaking all of their exams breeze through such questions and achieve an easy clean sweep of A*’s?

Probably not. Although I agree with Gove that it is easier to obtain the top grades today.

The problem of ‘grade inflation’ has not been created by making the exams easier, however, or even by teachers who teach the exam rather than the subject, but by the grade boundaries.

The new A* grade was meant to be for the elite, the top of the top, the Oxbridge geniuses of tomorrow, but is this true in practice?

The problem is that grade boundaries are simply set too low, and it is too easy to get the top grades. Let me highlight one Edexcel course – ‘Government and Politics’ – in which a score of 61/90 results in an A* being awarded. Or the supposed ‘tough subject’, physics, where a mark of 58/80 achieves the top grade. This is the reality of qualifications today. The exams themselves are challenging. Students often leave the hall stressed, disheartened and upset. Yet they discover on results day that they have achieved top grades thanks to how low the grade boundaries have been set.

Resolving the issue of grade boundaries is one part of the answer to a very complex question. It is clear that gradually raising the grade boundaries will reduce the percentage of people with top grades and therefore increase the legitimacy of such qualifications in the eyes of universities and employers.

Leave the exams alone, target the grade boundaries instead.

Forward, not back

The Greek debt crisis has thrown into stark relief the challenges that lie at the heart of European integration.

As the Eurozone countries decide whether to endorse a second Greek bailout, many are asking whether the European project has fallen into serial decline. Eurosceptics are rubbing their hands in glee, citing the Euro’s current plight as proof of their earlier predictions.

Yet there is another way of reading current events. As former Foreign Secretary David Miliband argues in the essay in the latest edition of Anticipations, the nature of the crash that sparked Greece’s collapse demonstrates that global problems require global solutions. As China and America increasingly focus on domestic concerns, faced with a leadership transition and election respectively, Europe has an opportunity to take a lead on the world stage.

Europe is well placed to do this.

It is after all the only part of the world that has embraced the idea of shared sovereignty. While integration has not been a cost-free process it has brought with it significant opportunities. In an increasingly interdependent world, dominated by a handful of superpowers, the benefits of economic and political cooperation are more evident now than ever.

Taking advantage of this will not be easy.

Europe will first need to address the deep disconnect that currently exists between the process of greater integration and public support for the European project. This is the outcome of integration by stealth, as the public have grown weary of economic measures being used to promote a broader political goal. Few events more powerfully exemplify this phenomenon than the current crisis in Greece. We now have a single currency, which many in Europe saw as a route into federalism, undermined not only by the weakness of the Greek economy but also by widespread public antipathy towards the EU. Rarely has a strong multilateral Europe been more important or more difficult to sustain.

This has resulted in the widely held view that Europe is a distraction from more important national economic concerns.

However, as Nick Maxwell from Chatham House rightly argues in the latest Anticipations, domestic economic challenges and foreign policy priorities are far from mutually exclusive. Sound economics, just like effective politics, requires strong international cooperation.

In fact Maxwell goes a step further, arguing that the UK should be at the centre of efforts to build a more effective international framework for economic cooperation between nations. It is hard to argue with this position. As power increasingly shifts East, there is a closing window of opportunity for a country like the UK to take a global lead on such defining issues.

However, Britain’s ambitions should not be limited to economic concerns alone.

As Jim Murphy powerfully outlines in the latest edition of Anticipations, we also need to drive forward a coordinated approach to issues of defence. The Arab Spring has turned on its head established notions that non-democratic governments can be stable and sustainable. Security in the future will come not from bilateral relationships with autocratic rulers, but from strong multilateral alliances between democratic nations. This will require countries to facilitate peace abroad in order to protect their interests at home.

It is a challenging task, especially in tough economic times. However, it is one that we can rise to, especially if we are able to coordinate foreign policy at the European level.

As the crisis in Greece has shown, a more integrated Europe brings with it significant risks. However, in an interdependent world dominated by China and America surely these are risks worth taking. Now is the time for Europe to shed its image as a reluctant actor and assert its place on the international stage.

There is space in the world for another superpower. Europe must decide if it ready to become it.

James Green is Editor of Anticipations

Chalk and Cheese? Comparing the British and American Police

The fallout from the English riots has left few public institutions unaffected. Arguably, the Metropolitan Police has attracted the lion’s share. Officers were lambasted by politicians and members of the public alike for standing idly by on the streets while looting took place, and chiefs were criticised for employing the wrong tactics and deploying the wrong numbers to the wrong areas.

The government has pointed to these failings as evidence of a wider malaise in policing, and is using the public opprobrium to strengthen its case for police reform. The Prime Minister has turned his gaze across the Atlantic for inspiration, hiring US ‘Supercop’ Bill Bratton as an adviser on gang violence in London.

The appointment has caused uproar in Scotland Yard, and divided opinion across the media. There is suspicion across the political spectrum that Cameron wants to impose a US-style policing model on the capital – a poor fit for a city that bears little relation to the American metropolises of New York and Los Angeles.

This in turn has provoked an interesting debate: just how dissimilar are the US and UK styles of policing?

In some ways, the differences are clear from the badges that British ‘bobbys’ and American ‘cops’ display on their chests.

The British police are members of a ‘service’, and therefore – in theory – are public servants bound to their local communities, who exercise their powers in accordance with a tacit social contract with the people they serve. This operational model was first conceived by Sir Robert Peel, the father of the modern police force. In his 1820 manual “Principles of Policing” he stressed the importance of integrating the police service with local communities, stating how all officers must: “maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police”.

However, over recent decades this relationship has been distorted somewhat by the increased centralisation of state powers in the capital. The centralised funding structure has shifted power to shape policing policy to London bureaucrats, and in the process removed the pressure of accountability from local chiefs to Westminster politicians. As a consequence, Britain has a centrally-directed, top-down model of policing that bears little resemblance to Peel’s original vision of local forces sensitive to the requirements of their communities.

There is also little of Sir Robert’s philosophy underlying policing on the other side of the Atlantic. Primarily, this reflects the diverse nature of the American population, the federal structure of the United States and the often antagonistic relationship American citizens have with government authorities.

First of all, the number and variety of US police departments frustrates any commitment to the “consent and serve” model. America has an incredible 17,000 police agencies (compared with Britain’s 52) which vary in size and jurisdiction, from tiny country sheriff’s departments to sprawling city departments like the LAPD. As Bill Bratton observed, “none of them respond to a national mandate”, but enforce the law according to the dictates of local political authorities. This means there is a wide range of operational styles in practice across the country that defies standardisation.

However, one similarity does unite them.

American police officers are members of a ‘force’ whose focus is on ‘crime control’ rather than servicing the community. The constitutional right to bear arms requires American officers to carry weapons, while legal ambiguities concerning individual liberty often restrict their ability to stop and search, and stymie healthy relations with the public.

These factors have nurtured a culture where the police are separate from the communities they serve, and often operate in conflict with them. Jennifer Abel states that the US police today wield “immense power” and employ “aggressive tactics against their own citizenry.” Such statements are corroborated by the findings of an independent research paper, which reveals that complaints against excessive force to law enforcement agencies doubled between 2005/2008*.

This makes American cops sound more like tooled-up paramilitaries than public servants. However, the British police are no angels themselves. Recently, we have witnessed the questionable killing of Mark Duggan and the botched disclosure of the circumstances of his death. A few weeks ago, the Met’s Chief Commissioner resigned following evidence he accepted bribes from News of the World employees (he was later cleared of misconduct).

Both the American and British police systems are dysfunctional, and in Britain it is right that politicians tackle “the last great unreformed public service”. However, those in charge of reshaping the police must be sensitive to the fact that the American model has evolved to contain crime in a much more violent and diverse country than our own. As such, it cannot be held up as the ultimate answer.

After all, what works in California will not necessarily work in Cambridgeshire.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabian Blog

*Bruce Taylor, ‘Changes in officer use of force over time: a descriptive analysis of a national survey’, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Volume 34:2
Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, DC, USA

Lessons in spin – “lane-charging”

Wahoo! Today the Department of Transport have been parading their sparkly new* initiative to charge utilities companies which disrupt commuters during peak travel periods.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond says of the proposals:

“Everyone knows how frustrating it can be when you are sat in a traffic jam, unable to get to work or drop off the children at school because someone is digging up the road.

Yeah. EVERYONE knows that Phil. Even people who can’t drive and don’t use public transport and don’t have kids. They’re really frustrated.

“This disruption is expensive as well as inconvenient, with one estimate valuing the loss to the economy from road works congestion at £4 billion a year. We simply cannot afford this.

£4bn quid a year? Outrageous! I could buy shed-loads of scratchcards for that. Obviously if we can shift that cost from commuters by making those evil utility providers pay, that would be great!

“That is why I am putting forward proposals which would incentivise utility companies and local authorities to carry out their works at times when they will cause the minimum disruption to the travelling public.”

Totes amazing Phil! You are a genius. So glad we have a modern day Transport hero like you sticking it to those evil corporations.

And it’s a good job I can’t be bothered to read the actual consultation document or supporting impact assessments. Otherwise I might realise that:

  • Because of the way utilities companies are regulated, they can pass on unavoidable costs to consumers. So higher costs means higher utility bills. I guess that means that the costs to commuters would just be shifted to gas, electricity, telecoms and water consumers, right? But aren’t they broadly the same people as the commuters? So commuters will save some costs which will be paid for by… commuters! D’oh!
  • If the lane-charging costs are avoidable, then regulators can prevent the utilities companies from passing the costs on to consumers. But how often are road-works actually ‘avoidable’? Probably only a proportion of the time right? In which case, we’re probably going to continue to incur some of the £4bn in costs, aren’t we?
  • Oh, and I see that you’re limiting the scheme to critical highways. So costs to commuters on non-critical parts of the highway won’t be defrayed? That means more of the £4bn in costs remain, right?
  • Yep, they are. The DfT impact assessment shows this. In the preferred policy option, the DfT estimates that charges will result in a reduction of costs to commuters of £46m per annum (that’s their “best estimate” of the benefits), with costs to utility firms of £11.2m.
  • Hang on! I thought the costs to commuters were £4bn per annum? So if the proposals are going to generate only £46m in benefit to consumer each year, that’s only a 1% reduction in costs!???! WTF?!

I thought you said we couldn’t afford £4bn in costs Phil? Then you go and save me £46m in costs. That’s like loose change to you government types. You might just as well not bothered. In austerity Britain, I don’t get out of bed for more than 10-figures in cost-savings.

Oh, but journalists are lazy and didn’t read the documents either. So I have no way of knowing that your recycled* policy initiative is the equivalent of pissing in the wind! Huzzah!

And you get to sound all clever and stuff on the radio talking about ‘nudge economics‘.

You really are quite brilliant, aren’t you Phil!

Alex Baker is Secretary of the Young Fabians and Editor of the Young Fabians blog.

*As far as I can tell, this scheme was piloted in Camden and Middlesbrough eight years ago and found to be little more than useless.

The Search for ‘Community’

A buzzword, a fiction, or a societal necessity? The idea of a “community” is something that has been hotly debated over the last two weeks. The unrest in Tottenham can point the way to a better understanding of this term in the modern age.

Many favourite political themes have resurfaced over the last couple of weeks in response to the “wake-up call” afforded by the recent riots. The Prime Minister has resurrected “the broken society”, “responsibility” and “right and wrong” in his keynote speech diagnosing the cause of one hundred hours of lawlessness. Ed Miliband, keenly aware that the aftershocks of the unrest have reshaped the political battleground, is both complementing and criticising the Coalition by flagging up social irresponsibility at both ends of the economic spectrum and demanding a closer scrutiny of “the culture of our society.”

However, the one word that is trending most popularly with politicians, pundits, and the public is one that continues to elude a simple definition: “community”.

What is a “community”? The term rests uncomfortably in a web of ideas, meanings and beliefs that are continually shifting to form new connections. The man on the street would probably describe a community as a close-knit collection of individuals, welded together by their shared residency in a particular neighbourhood or borough. He may add that a community is bound together by its members’ obligation to safeguard mutual interests and promote local improvements – be they social, economic or cultural.

However, that definition rings false in the ears of many whose neighbours are alien to them and who feel little attachment to their particular patch of concrete. Now more than ever, it seems nonsensical- why would individual members of a community effectively wage war on their fellows if they are bound together by such meaningful ties?

Perhaps our man on the street would expand to say that a community can also mean a collection of people united by an idea, or against a specific grievance. Such communities are not confined to localities, and can transcend racial and cultural differences. Under this definition, the number of communities in any one area greatly multiplies.

David Lammy MP may talk about his Tottenham constituency as being one community, but the behaviour of many there suggests that this singular entity has fractured into different parts, if it ever existed in the first place. The riots in Tottenham (I’m setting aside disturbances elsewhere in this post) can be perceived as a clash of communities, some long established, and some newly formed.

The rioters became an ad hoc community on 6 August, unbound by a shared motive but united in their anger towards the police and the intrusive authority they were seen to represent. They chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they attacked the police whose duty it is to protect them and destroyed the buildings that made up their local landscape. As Sam Leith rightly pointed out: “‘our streets’ is an answer that only begs another question: ‘Who’s us?’”

For several nights, ‘us’ was a spontaneous community of mainly young, local residents who, despite the divisions of postcode and ethnicity, shared many similarities. They shared a culture – a street culture unique to the ethnically diverse neighbourhoods of the capital, one which places a premium on the defence of a person’s ‘yard’ (home) and ‘end’ (local area). They shared a grievance with the police- who were seen to be a force of oppression and discrimination. They even shared a language, clumsily called “Multicultural London English” (MLE), from which terms like ‘Feds’, ‘gansta’ and ‘shank’ derive.

Another community that could rightly claim ‘our streets’ as their own include the residents of Tottenham who took part in the initial peaceful protest against the police’s bungled disclosure of Duggan’s shooting. They marched against the perceived injustice and jeered at the police, but did not take part in the riot or use the opportunity to loot and pillage. The members of this community were derived from a wider variety of social backgrounds and ages, yet clearly shared a sense that they had been misled or cheated by the police.

The other community involved were those who stayed at home, who sided with the police and condemned all those involved in the clash. These were the people who David Lammy was most likely referring to when he stated that the community was “anxious”.

Certainly, not everyone in Tottenham was. The first community was angry, violent and selfish. The second was angry, disillusioned and frustrated. The third was fearful, uneasy and threatened.

Tottenham is not one community. It is many. So are all the other communities torn apart by the recent violence. The way forward is to find a way to reconcile these different groups in peaceful coexistence.

It is time to junk the outdated logic that a “community” is something wedded to a specific place. A “community” is an idea that takes a different shape in the minds of different people. In Tottenham, one community is moved by the idea of police oppression, another by the havoc caused by “feral youths”. Attempting to meld them together will only cause tensions in the future.

What is needed is a new discourse on “community”, and a retreat from the idea that all our difference can be subsumed beneath a shared postcode.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabian Blog.

The ‘Invisible Link’

The connection between rioting and economic deprivation must be recognised by a government and public venting its fury in all the wrong directions.

The chaos and wanton destruction of the past week has provoked a new bout of soul-searching within Britain. In the race to identify the origins of the rot that spread out to consume an alarming number of our communities, politicians, broadcasters, journalists, and British citizens have scrutinised the social fabric of the nation and unearthed a rich variety of possible answers. The public can already choose from a range of conceptual lenses through which they can interpret the acts of rioting, looting and murder that have so shaken the national psyche. It is tempting for the politically conscious to grasp at the interpretation that best accords with their stance on the political spectrum to the exclusion of all others, and understand the rioting through the distortions of their personal ideological prisms.

There are many who have already taken this course of action, and are lashing out in screen and print with their own half-formed ideas on the cause of the rioting. The Daily Mail published Melanie Philips’ decidedly right-wing analysis of the riots, attributing “the violent anarchy” of the last several days to “the three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.” On the other end of the spectrum, Nina Power has projected the London riots as the inevitable manifestation of an unequal society where “the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country”.

In a previous post, Alex evaluated the riots as an economic equation balancing costs and benefits. Labour and their supporters have spouted dozens of statistics in a bid to prove a link exists between economic instability with social disorder. Such analysis may appear cold, sterile and unappealing to the passions of many who want to brand those responsible as “scum”, “feral”, and “evil” in order to vent their understandable frustration. But it has to be recognized, it must be understood that there is a real, tangible link between economic permutations and social unrest.

It also has to be made brilliantly clear that there is a link between personal economic success and psychological resilience. I have discussed the correlation between unemployment and mental health in a previous article, but still many will state that an individual’s employment status is detached from their internal moral compass. The real link must be made more explicit.

Why does a certain individual see a discarded brick, pick it and throw it through a window, while another walks on by? Why does one teenager loot while another, who has the same ability to take what he wants and the knowledge that no-one will stop him, attempt to prevent him?

The answer lies in the individual’s psychological make-up, and the temperament of the invisible policeman of his conscience. However it can never, never be said that the mental state of any individual is constructed in a vacuum. The argument that the environment an individual grows in shapes his character is termed ‘behaviourism’, and is studied as a branch of moral philosophy. It has featured many times as part of discussions on incidences of supposed moral disintegration, perhaps most recently in Britain with the 1993 murder of Jamie Bulger, when Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said: “We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions… These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name.”

Would those words being any less aptly used today?

Were the riots a product of moral disintegration in some sections of our community? Yes – and the right is quick to acknowledge this. What it fails to do, and what the left must impress upon the public, is that this moral disintegration occurred in community environments that bred contempt, hate, and anger, and that these environments have been allowed to flourish because of institutional failures that neither Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron have successfully addressed.

The depressed communities of Tottenham, Hackney, Birmingham, Salford and elsewhere have been failed by both left and right. They have been cut-off and isolated from the rest of society just as the rich and powerful have cloistered themselves away in opulent London enclaves.

The Prime Minister has been careful with his choice of language over the last couple of weeks, but I applaud him for acknowledging that this is still “our” society, thereby implicating all peoples and classes in the shame that has engulfed our country. As he stated in the Commons, “There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick”.

When one part of the body falls ill, the rest will soon follow unless immediate action is taken. That action cannot be isolated to condemnation, imprisonment, punishment and further deprivation. To do so would be to poison these environments further, and conjure up an even greater storm a decade down the line.

Instead, the link between deprivation and disruption needs to be made more explicit than ever, and severed once and for all.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabian Blog.

Why we can’t turn into ‘part-time Britain’

Young people need to show they care about the type of jobs that are being created and not just the numbers.

Yesterday’s labour market figures are truly depressing. 38,000 more people unemployed than the previous quarter, 2.49 million people without work.  It puts Eric Pickles’ trumpeting of the Government Enterprise Zones, with the promise of 30,000 jobs by 2015, into perspective.

As David Blanchflower predicted last month, the Prime Minster is going to have to do some nifty footwork given his assertion that unemployment will fall each year this Parliament; both the PM and the Chancellor have been given their come-uppance.

But policy makers and politicians need to be mindful of the longer term social effects of this economic pain. George Eaton has pointed out the five worrying trends in the published figures but there are two areas Young Fabians should be especially concerned about:

1) Youth unemployment continues to rise and it is lasting longer –

One in five economically active 16-24 year olds are not working. A massive 39 per cent of have been unemployed for over 12 months (up 2.5 percentage points on last year) and 95,000 have been waiting over two years for a job.

That means more  young people starting life out on benefits which is precisely what the Government says it doesn’t want.

More worryingly, the longer young people stay out of the workplace the deeper and longer-lasting the social and economic consequences (David Blanchflower lists 10 reasons why politicians should care).

So the question is: how is the Chancellor’s Office of Budget Responsibility going to cost these long-term social and economic effects? And what is this going to cost us in the long run?

2) There’s a deepening dependence on part-time and temporary work –

Both the number of people in temporary and part-time work are up (1.2 and 0.1 percentage points this quarter respectfully).

But it is the number who fall into this type of work because they couldn’t find permanent or full-time work that is most worrying: a 5.1 percentage point increase and a 7 percentage point increase respectfully.

Let’s not pretend a job is a job is a job. The Government should recognise the negative and perverse effects of long-term involuntary involvement in part-time and temporary employment. It can be a trap as well as a short-term solution.

If young people are starting their careers here it needs to be out of choice not desperation. And there needs to be a clear route into permanent, full-time work.

It is easy to just see numbers when we talk about jobs and the economy. Instead young people need to start championing the kind of job creation they want to see, not just what politicians think they can make do with.

Vincenzo Rampulla is Officer without Portfolio on the Young Fabian Executive.

Smash and Grab Britain

Reflecting on all the online chatter about whether the riots were caused by the cuts and/or the recession, and also all the talk about the rioters having a sense of ‘unearned entitlement’, it struck me that a better reading might be that both phenomena (the recession/cuts and the looting/riots) may stem from the same social malaise, which has just manifested itself in different ways at the top and bottom of the social food chain.

The narrative would run something like this: Britain is country where for years smash and grab activities by banks and bankers have been tolerated, politicians have committed expenses fraud with impunity and where both politicians and the police have been in the pockets of the right wing media, where a credit orgy for the middle classes led to a credit crunch that has put thousands of working class people out of work, and where an unelected government intends to pay for the bail out of the very same financial system by cutting benefits and services to the most vulnerable, justifying its agenda with spin about a ‘big society’ that can only ever exist in communities that least need it.

When the culture of ‘Smash and Grab Britain’ hits the streets, should we be surprised?

Claire Leigh is Treasurer of the Young Fabians.

The F-Word

In her latest column for the Young Fabian Blog, Young Fabian Women member Anna Bage explores the word “feminism”, arguing that Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ still provides inspiration today.

Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ was first published in 1970 and went on to become an international bestseller. A key text of the feminist movement, it was broadly discussed and criticised by other feminists at the time, covering a wide range of topics and introducing new and controversial ideas. Over 40 years since its first publication – how has feminism changed? Is there such a thing as 21st century feminism?

The word ‘feminism’ has undoubtedly undergone a transformation over the last century. What was once a dirty word has interminably flickered from inappropriate, to confused, to irrelevant, to beside the point, to centrally important. Feminism in its broadest sense is a woman’s right to equality, something which 21st century women have now arguably gained. We can vote, divorce, work and govern. We have had a female Prime Minister, the Equal Pay Act, and today countless women now feature in positions of power. We have broken the mould of the 1950’s housewife, thrown in the tea towel and made the leap from baby-maker to bread-winner.

How, then, is the feminism in Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ still relevant?

Published in 1970, ‘The Female Eunuch’ made many a controversial claim. It was completely devoured by a wide range of women (and men), from students to housewives, and today is being rediscovered by a new generation of women like myself. My future is one orientated towards the fulfilment of promises for equal pay in the workplace, the equal representation of women in the Houses of Parliament and a level of respect equal with that shown towards men. Can ‘The Female Eunuch’ still be significant to a woman in her twenties?

There is no denying that a lot of ‘The Female Eunuch’ is based on Greer’s contempt for women. Her outrageous and offensive claims that women bring violence on themselves, and her utopian views of the ideal society, promote a kind of feminism that many women find alien and quite frankly embarrassing. It is no wonder that many women have abandoned the F-word completely, silently applauding the cause for equality as they work their way up the career ladder, rather than donning their ‘What Would Germaine Greer Do?’ t-shirts and burning their bras. I don’t blame them. Some of the views that feminists like Greer promote are sometimes isolating, and always radical. But the overarching message that Greer promotes is still relevant to 21st century feminism. Amongst the fervent cries for emancipation lies a very simple and effective message: women can be liberated through self-reliance, hard work, drive and strife.

However, 40 years on from Greer’s manifesto, what women need to be liberated from has changed. No longer do they have to struggle against the clutches of dirty dishes and apron strings. Now they must resist having to settle for less pay, respect, or equality than men. We are also, slowly, being liberated from the sexist and outdated view of women that the media used to play upon, with every ambitious woman a wannabe man and every cut-throat woman a heartless Medusa.

When the phone hacking scandal hit Britain last month, the representation of Rebekah Brooks was something, I think, Greer would applaud. The media did not dismiss Brooks as an ardent Harpy of the media world, with her talons firmly planted in the Murdochs and her sweet song entrancing the paid police informers she hired to feed her the next story. She was not portrayed as a Cruella De Ville; she was just a suspected criminal. Her gender was essentially irrelevant to the media’s coverage of the ensuing criminal investigation, something Greer would have been heartened by.

It is time for women to reclaim the F-word. Feminism in the 21st century does not have to mean an exhibition of radical views and bra burning. Women still need the movement and they still need the politics of feminism, to continue to fight for equal representation. Yes, her views are radical – but this gives ‘The Female Eunuch’ enough punch to provide the inspiration needed by today’s women in the ongoing struggle for full equality.

Copyright © 2004–2009. All rights reserved.

RSS Feed. This blog is proudly powered by Wordpress and is derived from Modern Clix, a theme by Rodrigo Galindez.