Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

As a hippie leftie, my newspaper of choice is usually The Guardian. With its engaging content and unofficial mission to counteract the hate spewed out by the Murdock empire, it, along with the BBC, makes an excellent choice for me to consume the little news I read.

There is one area however, where I read The Telegraph. That, is a Telegraph Men.

The problem with being on the left these days is that as a straight white cis male, I am basically the enemy. My boat automatically rises high on the sea of privilege that propels it up towards the heavens. I don’t dispute this. I think the evidence shows that being a white man actually does grant me privilege. Whether it compares to the privilege differences between classes remains to be seen, but there is definitely a benefit.

Given that this benefit does exist, the left, committed to empowering everyone, cannot tolerate any further benefit coming my way. Again, I am not even going to suggest this is a bad thing. When International Men’s Day rolls around, there is a backlash from the left, insisting that it is a stupid idea. The arguments are long. “What if it was men’s health day?” sympathetic advocates say. The idea that we should be able to talk about men being three times more likely to kill themselves is a touchy subject.

Once again, I want to state that, in this post, I am not complaining about this. Perhaps it is fair to take that point of view.

The end result of this seems to be that the idea of devoting column inches to men seems unpalatable to Guardian readers. They have a men’s health section. Of which, at time of writing, the second story on the page is:

My husband has turned into a fitness fanatic. What can I do?

I’m not interested in this. It does not appeal to me.

Telegraph Men on the other hand, has no such problems. They write engaging content that does appeal to me as a liberal progressive modern-man. They write about men taking shared parental leave, men who choose a career in midwifery and whether veganism is a good dietary choice. It is both interesting and relevant to me to read about a father writing about raising an autistic son.

Nor does it take itself too seriously. Amusing articles about photoshopping and a Twitter account description that reads…

Advice, opinions, expertise and experiences. For men. And women. But mostly men.

…shows an playful sense of humour. I am not sure you could do this in a left-leaning media outlet. The idea that as a straight white man I might have something to contribute to the gender equality debate is not a welcome opinion. The idea that you could do any of this without a completely serious look on your face is even more out there.

Therefore, ironically perhaps, it is the right-leaning media, without such gender-political baggage, that can write about being a stay-at-home dad or breaking down stereotypes in traditionally female careers.

Of course, I am fully aware that I am reading The Torygraph. The paper that was fined £30,000 for telling people to vote Conservative. My own charity work has been the victim of their right-wing attacks.

However, in Telegraph Men, I have found interesting, engaging and relevant content that the media of the left does not seem to be able to replicate. As a father-to-be who aspires to a more liberal, equal and open society, it is, surprisingly, The Telegraph, that is leading the way.

When I did the political compass test in 2013, I posted the result on my blog. The idea was that years later I could re-do the test and see how things had changed.

Three years have now passed, and here is my new result:

I’m slightly less libertarian than I used to be, but not by much. The big swing is from a very centre position to a mid-left position. I’m actually surprised that I haven’t lost more libertarian points since I embraced the nanny state, but apparently, it is possible to be a social libertarian.

Chavs is the second book I have read by Owen Jones. The other being The Establishment.

In Chavs, Jones rails against the lens that working class people have been put under. Led by politicians, and then the media, society has been encouraged to demonise the poor as benefits-claiming jobless scroungers.

Who exactly are the working class? Neil Kinnock offers Karl Marx’s definition.

People who have no means of sustenance other than the sale of labour, are working class

This seems a very workable definition. I would include myself in the working class. I own no business of any value, nor any property, and have to sell my labour to pay the bills.

Before Thatcher took a sledgehammer to British industry in the 80’s, being working class was something to be proud of. As industry disappeared, entire communities were left without jobs and without hope. By 2010 there were two and a half million people unemployed, and less than a million job openings. There simply were not enough to go round. What sympathy do such communities receive? None. They are told to get on the bus and go chase a non-existent job. So Jones contests.

The argument in support of letting industry go was that it needed modernising and could not be propped up by the state. As we now know though, this isn’t the case. We managed to put together a multi-billion pound bailout for banking after all. So bailing out an entire industry is entirely possible.

The ultimate betrayal of the working class was the creation of New Labour. Thatcher’s greatest victory. No longer did Labour aim to help the working class improve their quality of life, but merely to encourage them to escape into the middle class. Thus, if they remained poor, it was their own fault.

This created a climate that you were either middle-class of a benefits scrounger, and there was no in between. Jones quotes Simon Heffer saying so. That feels ironic given I have just read Heffer’s book. No doubt he would wince at the ‘z’ in ‘Demonization’ too.

Society became outraged at the £1 billion we were losing on benefit fraud. Never mind that over £2 billion of eligible benefit is not claimed and that if everyone got exactly what we deserve the state would be less well off. And especially forget the £70 billion per year big business avoids in tax. A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that many people doing cash-in-hand jobs on the side do to to pay for basics like food, heating, or debt. Those are the people to blame.

The media jumped on the bandwagon too. The Sun was outraged when people went to the local shop in their pyjamas at lunchtime. Yet a quick visit to any area full of middle-class students, such as Bodington Hall, would offer a similar sight.

This allowed the government to cut into the working class. Between Thatcher taking power and Blair outing them, the tax burdeon on the working class increased from 31.1% to 37.7%.

Jones comes to the support of Jade Goody. She, after all, is a member of the demonised working class. He makes a good case. He attacks Little Britain, which he correctly identifies as being incredibly offensive, with it’s bad stereotypes of gays, transgender people and the poor.

He also suggests Wife Swap would be better-labelled class swap. From the few episodes I have seen of the show it does seem to come down to that. Far from being an attack on the working class though, it always seemed like comparing the loving family environment of the working class to the cold materialistic stand-off-ish attitude of the middle class.

I take exception to his accusation that there have been no working class bands since Oasis though. While Kaiser Chiefs lyrics may not always reflect well on the working class, such claims could not be made against the also-very-popular Arctic Monkeys.

Back onto the real subject matter, the argument about environment is less clear. Jones claims that the middle class are better able to provide for their children because they can get them an advantage in education and jobs. This is simpler to the case Gladwell makes in Outliers. Things are not that simple though. As Pinker points out, parenting has little effect on a child’s personality or intelligence, so the value on focusing on education is unclear.

It also appears not to the case that the middle class are better at managing their money. As Chris Tapp, director of debt advice charity Credit Action, says, poor people are actually excellent at managing money – one has to be to get by.

On reducing council tenancy from lifetime to 5 or 10 years, I’m torn. As my friend Chris points out, those of us in the private renting market enjoy 6 months at best. And when I advocated building more council housing my friend Helene elaborated on the issues of lifetime tenancy in The Netherlands. However, a few hundred pounds in moving bills wouldn’t actually trouble me. I would be very annoyed, but I could easily get such a sum out of my savings. Whereas I imagine many council tenants do not have a savings account.

One thing that put me off was that at least one of the facts in the book appears to the incorrect. For example, when discussing the 2011 riots, he describes them as spreading to northern cities including Leeds. But they didn’t. There was no rioting in Leeds during that period.

The take-home message for me is that there will always be a working class and it is important to have one, so we should focus on making their (our) lives better rather than offering an escape. This seems a difficult proposition to take fault with.

Last year I argued that there is little difference between having and not having university tuition fees. The arguments placed against it were largely insubstantial and I have yet to have a decisive point against tuition fees.

However, in this article I will offer some arguments that could be used to defeat the idea.

Putting poorer students off

There has been a decline in university applications since the rise in tuition fees. According the BBC, the number of applicants dropped nearly 10%.

This is in itself not a problem. When people realise the full cost of university, perhaps people decide that it is not worth it. Which could legitimately be the case. Wages are market-driven thus the skills we need could continue to attract applicants while those we don’t could see a drop-off, and this would be the system working.

It would, however, be a problem if it turned out that there was a substantial drop in applicants from poorer backgrounds while wealthier backgrounds did not see such a drop as this would suggest we are creating a less egalitarian society.

However, this is not the case, and thus this argument falls down. According to the UCAS figure discussed in the previously mentioned BBC article, applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds dropped only 0.2%, while those from privileged backgrounds dropped 2.5%.

Supply and demand

In theory you might expect tuition fees to better match the demand for labour. This is because people might be more inclined to choose professions such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc, that give them a chance to pay off their loan. Whereas my guess (and it is a guess, I have no figures to back this up) is that people who study English or contemporary art, will be less likely to pay the loans off.

This does not necessarily follow though. If you are going to be a penniless artist you do not need to worry about paying your loan off because it is income dependent.

Also this assumes that people pick their courses both rationally and with financial ends in mind, neither of which may be true.

An alternative system that better match skills shortages to labour is a system such as Finland operate. In Finland, it’s free to go to university. You get like five years free, including a maintenance grant, which is enough time to do a bachelors and a masters. It’s open to all EU citizens for free too!

The catch is that there is a cap. They only take so many people, so if you want to go study sports science for example, there may be say 50 places per year and if you don’t make the cut, you don’t be doing that subject (or any subject).

This system means that people could potentially miss out on higher education. Though more likely they will just switch onto an under-subscribed course. However it does do a good job of making sure that the best people are fulfilling the countries labour needs.

Long term equality

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty suggests there is evidence that a more highly educated population leads to higher levels of equality in the long term, as shown by the Nordics.

Therefore we may decide that as tuition fees put people off attending university (this point is debatable, though applications have gone down in the short term), we may want to pay for as many people to go to university so that in the long term we create a better, more equal society.

When I was a kid, working out what class you were was simple. If you brought TV Times you were working class, if you bought Radio Times you were middle class and if you had a man to read the TV listings to you, you were upper class.

As I have grown older though, I have begin to wonder whether it might be slightly more nuanced than that.

A traditional British view might divide people into the aristocracy, the lords and ladies, the middle or ownership class, who own factories and businesses, and the working class, who work in them. I use traditional in a loose sense here because that has only been the case since the industrial revolution. This view fits with the wider social description of the class “between” the peasants and the nobility.

In more recent times, many new definitions have been brought forward. Some of which may have been promoted by governments in an attempt to create an aspiration. The advantage of this being that people will make sacrifices in order to achieve it, thus suppressing criticism of their policies.

Further education being a good example. Did you parents go to university? Or enjoy a high-prestige job such as a doctor or lawyer? Under some definitions this would categorise you as middle class.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty divides society up into the top 10%, the middle 40% and the bottom 50%. Though he does this with the explicit statement that these are arbitary boundaries that are useful for statistical comparisons across states and not meant to be taken as definitions.

He does note however that one of the major changes of the last century was a shift away from a 10% owning everything, to 10% owning most things, while the 40% managed to gain a house (the bottom 50% still owning nothing). Home ownership could therefore be considered the qualification for middle class.

Ultimately then it would seem there is no agreed definition of what the middle class actually is. It would therefore seem wise to define it in the context of any debate being had.

Why do people maintain their bigoted beliefs even when it works against their own immediate interests? Bakers and hotel owners not selling to gay people or atheists for example.

In a recent blog post entitled “Why Are People Bigoted, Even When It Costs Them Money?” Greta Christina proposes that people act this way because it is of overall benefit to maintain their white/straight/male privilege than it is to reap the immediate benefit.

According to the theory, maintaining privilege is profitable, even when factoring in the short-term loses.

Unfortunately, I believe the blog post is short on both evidence or further explanation.

Presumably, a secret cabal designed to maintain each privilege is not being suggested. Especially as she herself would presumably be included in the while cabal, but not the male cabal, and therefore be able to see both sides of the situation. If that is not the case though, it is difficult to explain why such a system does not fall foul of the tragedy of the commons.

More importantly, though, there is a lack of evidence for the hypothesis while far simpler explanations can easily fill the gap. Occam’s razor must come slicing in.

Firstly, there is an assumption that people do things for rational reasons. We know that people don’t. Arguably, people never do.

Why won’t a baker sell a wedding cake to a gay people? Because he irrationally believes that there is a giant man in the sky who hates gay people.

When it comes to perpetuating male privilege, perhaps it is because we subconsciously favour people similar to ourselves, as Steven Pinker and Noreena Hurtz both point out. In the hunter-gather tribe environment that our brains evolved in, it probably did pay to be a racist. Even if things have changed, and I think they have, evolution has not had time to catch up.

That is not to say that these things are good things of course. That would be the naturalistic fallacy. But if we want to address issues such as gender discrimination in academia, we need to be able to tackle the root cause of the issue and for that we need evidence-based solutions.

We fought a hard campaign and did our best. Well, I say “we”, I mean “I”. And by “fought hard” I mean I answered a couple of questions for South Leeds Life and did not really do anything else.

But I was there, to provide people with a true alternative. In the end Patrick Davey took a comfortable victory for Labour. However, at 104 votes I was close behind him, and the other four candidates in my ward.

I also met Green Party candidate Ed Carlisle at the count. He is a really nice guy and genuinely did fight a hard campaign, so it was a shame to see him finish so far behind Labour. Though at least he did push the Tories down into third! He also actually lives in the ward, unlike Davey, who lives in Bramhope.

The count was pretty funny. One of the tables counting our ward had too old ladies on it constantly joking to each other any time they got a Loony vote “oh look, another one that’s been smoking the wacky backy!” They were quite embarrassed when Ed pointed out I was stood right in front of them, though I found it absolutely hilarious.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t pick up the booby prize for the least number of votes, but some of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates got down to single figures. As Trevor pointed out, it’s not a good time to have the word “coalition” in your party name.

Elsewhere in the country Loonies did well. We fielded 16 Parliamentary candidates. Our glorious leader Howling Laud Hope smashed rival candidate Lord Toby Jug (who has formed a splinter party) with 72 votes to 50. We have won at least four local government elections too, as four of our candidates were running unopposed.

I was pretty fired up afterwards, indeed, I’m already planning my 2020 campaign. Next stop, Parliament!

Well, that was unexpected.

Red Ed stood up for working-class people, promising to tax the rich and break big businesses strangle hold on the media. And the people of England said “no thanks”.

I eventually came down on the side of no for the Scottish independence referendum, mostly because without Scotland Labour would be crippled and we would end up with a Tory majority government. What a waste of time that turned out to be.

It’s a shame to see not a single independent won a seat on the British mainland.

On the plus side though, my buffet went quite well. Freshly baked bread, crisps, twice-baked potatoes, Sniff’s favourite meatballs (a Moomin recipe), chicken wings and Devil’s food cake meant that we were able to eat solidly from 10pm to 4am and still have plenty for breakfast.

I wanted to document some of the challenges I had had registering myself as a candidate. It’s not impossible, but if you haven’t done it before, there are definitely some things you need to be aware of.

You do not have much time between the election starting and getting your forms in. Leeds City Council opened submissions on 1 April and closed them on the 9th. However, this was over the Easter weekend, so you actually only had 5 working days to submit them.

I downloaded the forms from their website and then went to the town hall to hand them in. The man on the front desk said I could give them to him and he would pass them on. However, the next day the elections office phoned me back saying that I had filled out the wrong forms and I had to submit them in person.

This was on the 2nd, and on the 3rd they closed for Easter, so I had to go down on the 7th and get the forms back and make an appointment for the 8th to submit them. This left me only the evening on the 8th to get them all filled out.

This is all doable, though it is very difficult if you have a job. They are only open 10am to 4pm and because they are busy during elections, you have to go down and speak to them if you want a response. When I tried to phone them back on the number they had called me on I got an automated message saying that the number was Leeds City Council, but you had to phone the “published number” and then hung up on me. The problem is they do not publish any numbers. I had to go onto their live chat to get their number, and then the number said it was going to be over 20 minutes before they answered it.

Again, none of this is impossible. However, it is difficult if you have a job. I am quite lucky that I work in Leeds and my current client is fairly flexible. However, there is clearly a lot more that could be done to make the democratic process open to ordinary working class people.

I am a proponent on the free market. That doesn’t mean I am a hardcore economic libertarian that thinks the state should keep its nose out. Far from it. I think the free market works best well in a strongly regulated environment that forces companies to provide a high level of service and prevents them from gaining a monopoly.

Housing is a tough one though. House prices continue to go up. Why? One answer is, that people keep buying them. Getting into more and more debt. Which, as we saw in 2008, can only go so far. Yet the property market continues. While the rest of the world burned, house prices never really dropped that much.

Another reason is that the government know that home-owners vote, and so continue to push out policies that prop up house prices. As I have written about before, any consideration of the help to buy scheme quickly reveals it as a trick to help the middle class. Rather than forcing home-owners to lower prices to those affordable to first-time buyers, it forces young people to take on even more government-sponsored debt while allowing the home-owning class to extract their silver.

The problem with the housing market though, is that there is no opt-out. With consumer goods, if they are ludicrously expensive, you just buy something else with your money. Housing is not like that. You need somewhere to live. While house prices may be irrationally high but we face the same problem that those who said they knew the 2008 financial crash was coming. Just because you know it to be the case, does not mean you can stay solvent longer than the market can remain irrational.

Another reason that the free market fails with regards to house prices is that people have stronger non-financial considerations. They want to live near their friends and families for example and have jobs tying them down to locations. In a free market, everyone would move to Darlington to enjoy cheap, spacious houses. Yet people continue to rent hovels in London for £2,000 a month because their connections keep them there. They are trapped in a restricted market.

In contrast, an increased investment in council houses could help fix the market. Having council houses with reasonable rents could provide a genuine alternative to buying or renting from private landlords, forcing the private housing market to compete for customers on a truly free market.