Britain

Blighty

  • Polling

    February's MORI Index

    Feb 26th 2011, 15:02 by T.C. | LONDON

    THE February edition of the Economist / IPSOS-MORI Issues Index is out. The poll, which has been run by MORI for decades, asks respondents what they think are the most important issues facing the country.

    Unsurprisingly, the economy still causes the most sleepless nights: 60% of respondents cite it as a worry. A closely-related issue, unemployment, is mentioned by another 28%. The next three big worries - race and immigration, crime, and the NHS - rate mentions from just 25%, 23% and 19% of respondents respectively. That is a welcome reminder that regardless of this government's big plans for cracking the state sector open to private competition (about which more in this week's paper), it will probably live and die by its economic record.

    It is hard to overstate just how finely balanced things are on that front. The terrible GDP figures that were released last month were revised downwards last week, with the conclusion being that GDP dropped by 0.6% in the final quarter of 2010, and that the snow does not explain all of it. Meanwhile inflation is soaring, businesses are reporting weak sales, one in five people under the age of 25 cannot get a job and the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee seems not to know whether it's coming or going. It is worth remembering that if Britain's experiment in cutting its way to prosperity starts to look like it is in serious trouble, everything from NHS reform to free schools will quickly fade into the background.

    MORI have broken down the responses to this month's poll according to whether the respondents lived in rural or urban areas (see below). A few differences stand out: city-dwellers seem much more sanguine about immigration than their rural cousins. Is that down to the fact that respondents from cities are more likely to be migrants themselves (although recent migrants are often surprisingly hawkish on allowing any more people in)? Or perhaps it's just a sense of comfort arising from familiarity. Worries about education rise as you move out from the city centre, which would fit with the stereotypical pattern of couples with children abandoning the metropolis for cheaper dwellings in the suburbs or villages.

    Some of the differences are less easily explained. Rural folk seem much less ruffled by high inflation, which sounds a little odd given their higher dependence on cars and the recent behaviour of petrol prices. And suburbanites are less worried about unemployment than either city-centre dwellers or those living in the country. Suggestions are welcome!

  • The Tory grandees of the 1990s

    What became of the big beasts?

    Feb 25th 2011, 12:06 by J.G. | LONDON

    SOME governments are dominated by the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer, such as New Labour and the current coalition. In other administrations, the prime minister is merely the chairman of a group of talented, independent-minded cabinet members, each with their own power base. Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government was one example of this, and so was John Major's seven-year premiership. The oligopoly of cabinet ministers that toiled and often squabbled under the latter's watch were known as "the big beasts", a term frequently revived in Westminster discourse to bemoan the supposed dearth of such creatures today.

    The impending appointment of one of these big beasts, Chris Patten, to the chairmanship of the BBC Trust, got me thinking about what has happened to the others, and why some have carved out an enduring role for themselves beyond their 1990s cabinet careers, while others, perhaps to the loss of their party and their country, have not.

    Mr Patten, who went on to govern Hong Kong after losing his parliamentary seat in 1992 and who is still the chancellor of Oxford University, has successfully retained a prominent role in public life. Ken Clarke, a fellow One Nation Conservative (which means a member of the party's ideological left, for those not versed in Tory sectarianism), wields even more power as a current cabinet member. But most of their peers from the Major era are keeping their talents dormant.

    One example, Michael Heseltine, is easy to understand. He was a politician of enormous significance: a bold environment secretary, the author of the stunning regeneration of east London, a deputy prime minister who was not alone in thinking that job title was one word too long for him. But he is 77 and has suffered bouts of serious ill health.

    But what about Michael Howard? It is hard to think of a post-war politician who was not either prime minister or chancellor who had more of an impact on the nation than Mr Howard did as home secretary. Many on the right credit his reforms (mandatory sentences, expanded prisons) for the mid-1990s fall in crime that continues to this day. Even those who loathe him concede his enduring influence; all home secretaries since Mr Howard have been in his image, rather than in the patrician mould of Douglas Hurd and other former occupants of the office. Yet Mr Howard, or Lord Howard as he is now, is now only nominally involved in public life as a member of the second chamber. Many Tories want him to replace Mr Clarke as justice secretary but that seems a remote prospect.

    Then there is Michael Portillo, the right-wing thorn in Mr Major's side who went on to become the original moderniser. Since his failed bid to become leader in 2001, he has had a prominent role in the media and been involved with various charities. But he is not running any major public institution. Neither is he serving as the wise elder of Tory modernisation; he has never been close to the current party leadership, and seems not to be bothered by that. 

    Peter Lilley is another example. He, too, was a Thatcherite hate-figure during the Major years who quickly understood, after the party's electoral evisceration in 1997, that the Tories would have to change to win again. It is easily forgotten that he was the first shadow chancellor that Gordon Brown faced when he took over at the Treasury (not counting Mr Clarke's month-long stint while the Tories were choosing a new leader). In that role, Mr Lilley alienated many of his colleagues by arguing that the Tories needed to develop a political economy that looked beyond Thatcherism. He also called for the legalisation of cannabis. Aside from chairing one of the policy reviews that David Cameron launched when he became leader five years ago, he remains a circumspect backbencher.

    Of course, the willingness of these former cabinet members to let their successors get on with it reflects well on them. But their talents and experience are still of use, especially to Mr Cameron. In retrospect, the Major government, loathed at the time, was an impressive reforming administration given the hellish political context it laboured in. Despite a paper-thin majority in parliament, and a deeply divided party, it pioneered reforms in healthcare that have been taken further since, it oversaw an economic recovery and boom, it followed a policy on the European Union that kept Britain out of the euro while persuing the strategic goal of eastern enlargement, and it presided over that historic fall in crime. These achievements were possible because of the big beasts (and because Mr Major was a far more effective prime minister, albeit in the chairman mould, that he is given credit for). They have reservoirs of wisdom on public sector reform and the myraid obstacles to it. Mr Cameron's willingness to revive some of the big beasts from their slumber should not stop with Mr Patten and Mr Clarke.

  • Under the Knife

    Under the Knife: 10ccs of televisual realism, stat

    Feb 22nd 2011, 13:34 by Under the Knife

    WHEN people hear I work in a hospital, often they'll ask me something like, “so is that anything like Scrubs, then?” While it's always really tempting to say yes, I'm unfortunately cursed with a crippling disposition to honesty, so I generally explain that it's actually pretty rare for junior doctors to slip into surreal unicorn-themed reveries while they're on duty, and barely any more common for their more senior medical colleagues to give their erring subordinates public dressings-down for the edification of themselves and those around them. Nor, perhaps more unfortunately, is hospital life much like House. Doctors are generally intelligent people, but I've yet to meet one who'd really qualify as that sort of cantankerous genius, and much as I'm sure the hospital would love to assign four dashingly good-looking doctors to each patient lucky enough to be admitted with slightly odd symptoms, that really isn't likely to be feasible for any NHS hospital in the foreseeable future.

    Of course, Scrubs and House aren't trying to be true-to-life. But even if they were, glossy American productions full of beautiful people and sharp dialogue aren't really the ideal format for realistic portrayals of life in hospitals; they just aren't glamorous places. It's in large part because of this, I think, that low-budget BBC sitcom Getting On works so well. It's been around for a while now – it was first broadcast in July 2009 – but as it was on a rather obscure channel it remained more or less under my radar (by which I mean I completely missed it) when it first came out. Happily, though, series one is being repeated at the moment, so there's another chance to catch it.

    Even if you don't have any particular interest in healthcare it's a wonderful absurdist black comedy, but if you want to get an idea of everyday life behind the scenes in a hospital, then Getting On can provide that at least as well as anything I've written on this blog. It's not that everything in it is strictly true-to life – as far as I'm aware nurses aren't actually in the habit of eating the birthday cakes of recently-deceased patients or putting condoms on smoke detectors so they can sneak a cigarette in the toilets, for example. But plenty of the humour comes from situations that are uncomfortably plausible. I'll admit I've never actually heard of a doctor calling for a morgue porter in anticipation of a patient dying only to have to send them away once the patient's health picks up again, but given my experience of how long it can take for overworked porters to get to a ward after they're called, it's just morbid enough to be believable.

    What Getting On does really well, far better than any other hospital-based comedy I've ever seen, is simply to convey the feeling of what working in a hospital is actually like. (The fact that lead actor and co-writer Jo Brand is herself a former nurse probably has a lot to do with this.) From the awkward, agonisingly polite power struggles that can break out between doctors and senior nurses over the most trivial of disagreements to the way situations can switch from tedium to a matter of life and death in seconds, all the way down to the wearied bewilderment of long-serving staff when faced with the latest batch of new regulations from on high, the whole programme is near-pitch perfect. I can't recommend it enough.

    Readers from the UK can still watch the second episode of Getting On here; anyone wanting to catch up or trying to watch from outside the UK can probably find digital copies elsewhere on the Web without too much effort.

  • The royals abroad

    The empire strikes back

    Feb 21st 2011, 11:14 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

    I HAD an unusual appointment on Saturday at a tent outside the British embassy in Mexico City. Estíbalis Chávez, a 19-year-old Mexican schoolgirl, had been camped on a street corner outside the compound for ten days, foregoing food. Her ongoing hunger strike is designed to persuade the British government to give her a ticket to the April wedding of “Príncipe Guillermo” and Kate Middleton. The ambassador, Judith Miller, has sent her a letter gently telling her that it’s not going to happen. “But I still have hope,” says Ms Chávez, who is very faint after ten days without food but has vowed to stay outside the embassy until her health gives way—or the wedding planners give in.

    Just as many Americans secretly wish Jed Bartlet were their president, I would be quite happy if Britain ditched the royal family and installed Colin Firth and Helen Mirren in their place. But the popularity of the Windsors abroad is formidable. The royal engagement made the front page of many newspapers here; the doorman in our building has so far congratulated me on the news three times. Many people, including Ms Chávez, are especially devoted to the memory of Lady Di (here pronounced lady dee). The Duke of Edinburgh remains the prime suspect in her death.

    By no means everyone in Britain shares my republicanism. Guillermo’s wedding day is likely to be celebrated with street parties, weather permitting. But it does seem that the royal family may have joined the curious class of brands and individuals who go down better overseas than at home. Given the occasional flare-up of international controversies, it’s handy for Brits abroad to be able to fall back on something that everyone seems to love. Last year I was ordered out of my car at an army checkpoint by a soldier who said he wanted to ask me some questions. The interrogation? “How is la Reina Isabel?”

  • Divorce and marriage

    Less than there used to be

    Feb 17th 2011, 16:19 by M.S. | LONDON

    Marriage and divorce in declineIF MARRIAGE has become so unpopular, why are fewer people choosing to leave their spouses? According to the statistics from the Office for National Statistics on February 17th, the number of divorces in England and Wales fell again in 2009, by 6.4% from the previous year. This is the sixth year in a row that they have dropped, leaving the figure-113,949-at its lowest since 1974.

    The divorce rate declined too: to 10.5 divorcing people out of 1,000 married ones, its lowest since 1977.  The greatest number of break-ups was among people in their early 40s, the highest rate among those in their late 20s. Just under 100,000 children saw their parents split up, down from almost 150,000 in 1999.

    Why are fewer people getting divorced, given all the economic stress and strain around? In part, because of that stress and strain: more redundancies and sagging house prices mean that it is not always possible financially to split into two households, even if you squabble unmercifully in one. The influx of immigrants from more traditional societies has helped, too, keeping divorce rates down and birth rates up. But the real reason is probably the decline of marriage.

    Far fewer people than before are getting married, as everyone knows and the chart shows vividly. This suggests that the brave remnant who do choose to enter that uncool estate are pretty committed to it. And the fact that the average age at which people first marry has drifted up-to just over 32 for men and just under 30 for women in 2008, about three years older for both than even a decade ago-may also damp down divorce, as older people, so far at least, have proved less prone to calling it quits.

    Statistics offer only the bare skeleton of the story; there are hundreds of thousands of personal reasons why people marry (or don’t) and divorce (or don’t). But they do suggest that attempts to cure social ills by chivvying people into marriage, as the Conservatives now in government have at times talked of doing, are wide of the mark  The more people marry, it could be argued, the higher divorce rates are likely to be.

  • Volunteering and profiteering

    Blood, not money

    Feb 16th 2011, 17:19 by A.G. | LONDON

    AS PUBLIC spending cuts start to bite and the government attempts to give away power by encouraging more ordinary people to wield the stuff, it is belatedly showing a certain deftness while tinkering with an existing service that relies on volunteers.

    The National Blood Service, which employs National Health Service (NHS) staff to collect blood from donors and distribute it to hospitals where it is transfused into patients or spun into other vital products, is being examined. The aim is to save money by outsourcing some of its activities to the private sector, according to a report in the Health Services Journal.

    Blood donors are stalwarts of the voluntary sector, and rich countries with advanced medical systems rely on them. Some 4% of the population gives blood in Britain, comparable to the levels in America, Australia and the rest of Europe, according to this map from the World Health Organisation.

    Blood donors are also unpaid, in Britain and elsewhere. A debate over whether or not they should be compensated for their efforts has raged for at least four decades. In a classic 1970 study called "The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy" Richard Titmuss compared the voluntary British system favourably with the American one in which payments were then widely made. Titmuss reckoned such a market was inefficient and wasteful, that it created shortages and surpluses, and led eventually to a contaminated product. 

    Although he was wrong, and such arguments have since been widely discredited, Americans mostly no longer receive payment for giving blood. Too many people in poor health lied about their medical histories in order to make a few bucks, endangering those who were to receive the blood. As the World Health Organisation notes, people who give blood voluntarily and for altruistic reasons have a lower prevalence of HIV, hepatitis viruses and other blood-borne infections than do those who seek monetary reward. Presumably that is because being rich is a great protection against disease.

    People who give blood without payment tend to give one of two reasons for their actions: either it is for the general good; or it is because they hope to benefit from the generosity of other donors at some future date. I started giving blood myself as a way of repaying what I perceived as being the family debt to the national blood bank when my grandfather began to need monthly transfusions to slow the progress of his leukaemia, and have continued to donate in the years following his death.

    I have seen first hand the inefficiencies in the system: limited space means long queues at busy lunchtime periods, and unused equipment and idle staff in the hush of midafternoon, for example. Subcontracting work to the private sector is common within the NHS, and is mostly accepted by its patients.

    But would British people would still donate blood if it were being taken by staff working for a profit-making company? As my colleague Bagehot discussed recently in relation to plans to privatise forests, volunteers are happy to contribute to the state but would be far more wary about giving to a private company. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, has acted deftly to avoid the pitfalls that have floored his counterpart in forestry. Only the outsourcing of the storage and distribution of blood will be considered; its collection will remain firmly within the NHS.

  • Downing Street's new strategist

    Andrew Cooper and the art of over-compensation

    Feb 16th 2011, 0:52 by J.G. | LONDON

    IT HAS been confirmed that Andrew Cooper, the former Conservative staffer and the founder of the polling company Populus, is to join Downing Street as head of strategy. Mr Cooper qualifies as what George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, once called (disparagingly) an "uber-moderniser". He was imploring the Tories to change their image and policies before most, and to a greater extent than almost anyone. He is thought to believe that the party failed to win the last election because it allowed its previously centrist message to become dominated by the theme of fiscal austerity in the nine months leading up to polling day. His appointment has several important implications.

    First, the Tory right, already very angry with David Cameron for his aloof leadership style, his failure to win what they regard as an eminently winnable general election and his various concessions to the Liberal Democrats, will be furious. Tim Montgomerie, the blogger and commentator who probably has a better claim to being the leader of the right than anyone in Parliament, is worried about the recruitment of a man he regards as an "uber-uber-moderniser". One of the right's grievances with Mr Cameron is that he retained all of the close advisers they blame for running such a lousy election campaign last year, while asking many Tory MPs to make way for Liberal Democrats in ministerial posts. For him to add another adviser, particularly one with a notoriously low opinion of the party's ideological orthodoxy, is certainly brave.

    Second, Tories of Mr Cooper's ilk now unambiguously rule Downing St and the adjacent Cabinet Office. The more right-wing Andy Coulson, the former director of communications, battled Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron's chief wonk and enforcer, for influence over the government's message for months, but he has gone. His replacement, Craig Oliver, is not expected to have much ideological input. Mr Hilton and Mr Cooper will agree on much. Cabinet Office ministers such as Francis Maude and Oliver Letwin, both on the liberal left of the Tory party, wield serious cross-departmental power despite their relatively low profiles.

    Third, the burden of providing the countervailing voice to all this modernising zeal will increasingly fall, in a wry historical twist, on the man who was probably the first Tory moderniser of them all: Mr Osborne. One of the neglected stories in Westminster has been the chancellor's emergence as the one senior figure in the coalition trusted by the Tory right. This is not because he has recanted his desire for the Tories to occupy the centre-ground, but because he has a different, some would say worldlier, take on how to do that. He is thought to be worried about the liberal noises the coalition has sent on crime and counter-terrorism (there are few votes in a gentle home affairs policy) and would prefer it if the government were selling a crisper and clearer political message to voters than the Big Society. Even in opposition, Mr Osborne provided the hard-headed balance to some of the more idealistic voices in the Tory camp.

    My verdict is that there is sound political thinking behind Mr Cooper's appointment. For all the analysis it attracts, political strategy and campaigning are essentially simple. Elections are won by occupying the centre ground, or at least being nearer to it than your opponent. Almost everything else is secondary, apart from perhaps perceptions of sheer competence.

    And judging by YouGov's left-right poll, which asks voters where they think politicians and parties are located on the ideological spectrum, the Tories have a challenge here. A rating of -100 denotes extremely left-wing, and +100 extremely right-wing. In 2009, Mr Cameron was seen as +28 (moderately to the right), and his party was rated at +37. The numbers are now +48 and +47 respectively: the prime minister is seen as quite right-wing indeed, and is no longer seen as a moderating influence on his party. Luckily for Mr Cameron, his opponent, Ed Miliband, is also struggling to shake-off his image as a left-winger. He is at -45, even further to the left than his Labour Party, which scores -39 (12 points to the left of where it was when it lost the last year's general election).

    It is precisely Mr Cooper's uber-modernising zeal that could help nudge Mr Cameron and his party back to a more centrist position. In politics, if you are perceived as right of centre and want to be seen as centrist, it is not enough to say and do centrist things. You must act left of centre. (The same is true, the other way round, for politicians trying to head to the centre from a left-wing position). In short, you must over-compensate. Voters pay so little attention to politics that subtle, nuanced, calculated shifts will not register. Only dramatic, surprising gestures are noticed. This is why Mr Miliband's Labour Party conference speech last autumn, with its carefully crafted difference-splitting between left and right, did not achieve the goal of evading the "Red Ed" charge.

    There is a story that Mr Cooper once thought that the Tories should advocate joining the euro, not because he thought the economic case for it was right, but simply because this internationalist gesture would help to change the party's brand. If so, the Tory right (and indeed not only the Tory right) are justified in viewing him warily. But it also suggests that Mr Cooper understands how brand-building and brand-fixing work in politics. Over-compensation is the key.

    Finally, back to that left-right survey by YouGov, can you guess where Tony Blair was rated by voters? +3. Almost dead centre. Mr Cameron may turn out to be the more effective prime minister but the notion that he or indeed anyone of his generation is the "heir to Blair", at least in terms of sheer political prowess, is laughable.

  • Inflation

    Bad but not shocking

    Feb 15th 2011, 12:23 by J.O.

    JANUARY'S inflation figures were bad but (unlike in previous months) were at least unsurprising. The headline rate, based on the consumer-price index, rose from 3.7% to 4%, in line with City forecasts. The two main factors pushing up inflation were last month’s increase in VAT and the feed-through from costlier crude oil to petrol prices, which reached a record £1.27 a litre.

    In principle, the effect of higher VAT ought to be a wash: last year’s increase dropped out of the inflation rate just as the effect of this year’s rise came through. In practice, though, businesses (notably the hotel trade and restaurants) were less willing to shelter their customers from tax increases than they were a year ago. Footwear retailing, where discounts in the January sales were quite steep, was an exception.  

    Inflation would have been higher but for a merciful reduction in prices from an unlikely source. The cost of banking services fell in January as several banks and building societies cut their overdraft charges—a small piece of good public relations for an industry that has seemed flagrantly lucrative. Just hours before the consumer-price data were released, Barclays reported that its operating profit had increased by almost a third last year.

    Higher inflation has had one immediate policy implication and it might soon have others. Mervyn King, the Bank of England’s governor, was obliged to write another open letter to the chancellor explaining why inflation had remained more than one percentage point higher than the 2% target. Mr King blamed temporary factors beyond his control. Without the VAT rise, the recent increase in oil and commodity prices and the continuing effect of the fall the pound in 2008, inflation would “probably have increased at a rate well below the 2% inflation target,” he wrote.

    He also repeated an earlier warning that inflation was likely to rise further to between 4% and 5% in the coming months, and noted the “real difference in view” among the Bank’s monetary-policy committee on what to do about it. The Bank’s quarterly Inflation Report, published tomorrow, will give some clues to how significant these differences are, and what they might means for the future path interest rates.

  • Contracting out advocacy

    A Big Society way of defending the Big Society

    Feb 14th 2011, 23:42 by J.G. | LONDON

    THE government has begun a systematic campaign to defend the Big Society after a torrid few weeks of setbacks and dismal media coverage. David Cameron gave a speech to an audience of social entreprenuers reaffirming his commitment to his signature project, and will give another major address on the topic next week. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, is enjoying (or perhaps, knowing him, enduring) ubiquity in the media as he tries to clarify the concept to a doubting nation. He and Nick Hurd, the minister for civil society, previewed the forthcoming Big Society Bank at an event held in JP Morgan's City offices this afternoon, where I was in attendance. Behind the scenes, various changes to the communications and strategy operations in Downing Street are at least partly designed to push the Big Society message more forcefully.

    All this will help to sell the Big Society, a bit. However, in general, the government are not the best salesmen for the Big Society. If they were, the idea would be held in higher esteem than it currently is, or at least be better understood. I can think of several people who are deft at explaining and selling the Big Society and none of them are ministers. Some are not politicians at all. Three examples are Matthew D'Ancona, the newspaper columnist whose piece in the Evening Standard last week is essential reading, Shaun Bailey, a community worker and former Tory parliamentary candidate who skillfully defined and defended the Big Society on the otherwise execrable Channel 4 politico-comedy show 10 O'Clock Live recently, and Nick Boles, a Tory MP who gave this neat explanation of the concept to a polling seminar at the end of last year.

    All three hone in on the crucial point about the Big Society: that it is first and foremost about decentralising public services (through free schools, police commissioners, NHS reforms and the like) and only secondarily about volunteering, which has somehow come to be seen as the be-all and end-all of the concept. Go back to the Tories' election manifesto of last year, "An invitation to join the government of Britain", and you won't find much about ordinary people being asked to take over their libraries, serve as volunteer firemen, or whatever. It is mainly a series of proposals for structural, Blair-style reforms to the public services.

    Another point that good advocates of the Big Society make is that, even if the concept is just about voluntarism and the "third sector", the idea that state funding of these activities is being slashed is nonsense. True, local government, which makes many payments to voluntary groups, is being cut. But huge government budgets, in areas such as welfare-to-work and public health, are to be opened up to any charity that wants to compete for them. Add up all the various funding streams, and the total potential supply of money to the little platoons in the coming years will be massive. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the vast majority of charities do not receive any public money at all (excluding favourable tax treatment). When did you last hear a minister point any of this out in simple terms?

    My point, in short, is that the Big Society's best advocates are not members of the government, who are astoundingly bad at defining what the problem is (a state that is almost uniquely centralised by Western standards), explaining simply what the solution is (giving power away) and citing the specific policy examples of this project (the right to set up a school or convert an existing one into an academy, the ability to vote for a local mayor or police comissioner, the chance to access masses of government data about things ranging from crime to spending, the opportunity for any charity or small business to bid for government contracts that are currently dominated by an oligopoly of huge companies, the prospect of public-sector workers being able to turn their services into co-operative ventures of their own, and so on).

    This is because they are too close to the Big Society, too involved with its granular detail on a day-to-day basis to take a step back and reduce it to its easily explained basics. Also, as a senior Liberal Democrat adviser told me today, one of the unanticipated consequences of coalition government is that members of the government spend more time and energy trying to reach agreement with each other than persuading the public. They have become masters of backroom negotiation, but novices at popular advocacy and strategic communication.

    An appropriately Big Society solution to all this would be to contract out the job of explaining the Big Society to people who are good at it. Mr Bailey, a prized Tory asset, is to have an enhanced role as an advocate of the idea. Mr Cameron should be scouring his backbenches, his local government nomenklatura and indeed any other source of talent for more like him. Because neither he nor his ministers are cutting it.

  • Posh universities and state school children

    The wrong target

    Feb 10th 2011, 13:35 by A.G. | LONDON

    SHOCKING, isn't it? A boy who studies at a fee-paying school is 55 times more likely to enrol at Oxford or Cambridge University than one who studies at a state school and comes from a family with a household income of less than £16,000, which entitles him to receive free school meals. The damning statistic was unearthed by the Sutton Trust, a charity that seeks to improve social mobility, in a report published before Christmas.

    Equally outrageous is the coalition government's response. This morning Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, and David Willetts, the Conservative minister for universities, sent a hectoring letter to Sir Martin Harris, director of the Office for Fair Access, telling him to ensure that universities make special efforts to recruit under-represented groups, particularly if they want to charge more than £6,000 in annual tuition fees.

    Now universities have been trying to attract the best candidates, wherever they come from, for many years, as my colleague Bagehot pointed out in his recent blog post. Moreover Sir Martin has approved "access arrangements"-anodyne pledges to improve matters (you can view Oxford University's paperwork here)-for every university and college since the maximum permitted tuition fee was tripled in 2004. Sir Martin could impose fines of up to £500,000, should he find any evidence of wrong doing. But he hasn't, because there is precious little of it going on.

    Admissions tutors want to chose candidates with the best potential. Steven Schwartz wrote a brilliant analysis of how this could be done when he led a review of admissions to higher education several years ago. It can be hard: an acquaintance of mine complains that schools without a history of sending pupils to his university write letters of recommendation saying that the candidate is "simply the best mathematician we have ever had", while those that have sent pupils previously write that the latest candidate is "not as good as Smith, who came to you in 2000, but better than Jones, whom you took in 2004". It is impossible to distinguish between the two candidates on paper alone.

    There are several reasons why so few youngsters from poor families gain access to the nation's most competitive universities. The first is the ferocity of the contest for a place. For starters, applicants need to study the right subjects, and poor advice from self-serving teachers who seek to boost their own rating by steering pupils into easy-to-pass subjects leaves many state school pupils without the right qualifications for entry to an elite institution. Then they need to pass those subjects with astonishingly good grades: straight As are no longer good enough, the top universities want the new A* ranking, usually in more than one subject.

    The second is that many students from poor families do not wish to leave the family home to study. The list compiled by the Sutton Trust (scroll down to the bottom of the report to see the proportion of students who were eligible for free school meals while at school at each of 25 selective universities) shows that institutions based in big cities such as London, Liverpool and Birmingham educate a higher proportion of students from poor families than do those based in smaller cities such as Durham, Exeter and Bristol. Blaming Oxford University for establishing itself in a provincial city is bizarre, particularly when the decision was made in 1096, six centruies before the rise of the modern state and nine centuries before the emergence of access agreements.

    Another consideration is that universities have been pushed into offering free money to certain groups of students when, it transpires, applicants mostly do not seek information on bursaries and fee-waivers until after they have been offered a place. The most competitive universities are usually the most generous: such institutions can afford the largesse because few students will qualify to receive it. Yet encouraging institutions to award such scholarships has done nothing to attract applicants from the poorest families.

    Instead universities need to keep running summer schools, open days, special entry routes and access programmes. Some send students and staff into schools to advise and teach pupils. That is commendable: rectifying deficiencies in the state school system while being barracked by the government for failing to attract state school pupils shows a steely determination.

  • Under the knife

    Under the knife: austerity bites

    Feb 8th 2011, 19:17 by Under the knife

    WE ARE, as the ancient Chinese curse may or may not have it, living in interesting times at the moment. Making life particularly interesting right now is the vexed question of how likely I am to hold on to my job as the austerity measures really kick in. Unlike most of the rest of the public sector the NHS isn't actually having its budget cut – even in real terms – but the trouble is the service's costs rise every year, so money will be short nevertheless. Combine that with the government's planned (and somewhat controversial) reorganisation that's just starting to get in gear right about now, and the future looks pretty uncertain, to say the least.

    Looking at things entirely selfishly, though, I have to admit they could be a lot worse. First, while the Trust I work for is very definitely looking to save money by cutting jobs (along with the usual much-vaunted 'efficiency savings', evidence of which is yet to materialise) there aren't – yet – any plans for compulsory redundancies. Second, even if this changes, I'm probably not that likely to be one of the ones getting P45'd on from a great height. Not because I'm an indispensable keystone without whom the hospital would grind to a halt, much as I'd like to believe that's the case, but simply because I don't earn enough to make it worth their while. Getting rid of one manager is probably going to be a lot less hassle than axing three or four junior admins like me, and it would save about the same amount of money. (If I were inclined to be cynical, I'd also suggest that the hospital could cope much better with fewer senior managers than it could with fewer admins, but to be honest I don't really know if that's actually true.)

    What the Trust is actually doing at the moment is pushing a big voluntary redundancy scheme, which seems sensible enough; the more people jump, the fewer are going to have to be pushed. The only problem is, the amount of money you get partly depends on how long you've been employed by the NHS. Since I've only been in the NHS a few years, it wouldn't be remotely worth my while to leave; the people who are most likely to take advantage of the package are inevitably going to be those who stand to make the biggest payout – those staff who've been employed the longest. Now, any significant reduction in staff numbers is pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of service the hospital offers regardless of who leaves, particularly as demand's always increasing. But even if you accept both that savings have to be made and that cutting staff numbers is the way to do it (and I have some cavils with both), you have to admit that a money-saving plan that involves paying the most experienced employees large amounts of money to stop working does seem a bit on the counter-intuitive side.

    I'm not saying it would be better if the Trust's management stopped playing nice and just fired all the youngest, least experienced staff instead – I don't think that would be an improvement, and not just because that's a plan that most definitely would put me in the firing line. But given that the departure of some of us (relative) newbies would probably be less of a loss to the hospital than an exodus of experienced people, surely it would make sense to provide us with a decent-ish  financial incentive to leave, rather than having a package that's only going to be of interest to the people who've been there forever?

  • The police crime map

    Motivational mapping

    Feb 5th 2011, 19:48 by M.S. | LONDON

    THE Home Office’s new crime map has settled down after its lame start on January 31st, it seems. The website, which lets viewers plug in postcodes in England and Wales to see how much crime and anti-social behaviour is going on in their neighbourhoods, collapsed on its launch under a hit rate that touched 18m an hour. Those who did manage to get on the site had criticisms: a surprising number of rather large population centres appeared to be unknown to the police, and some of the statistics pinpointing violent hotspots turned out to reflect somewhat schematic reporting of incidents.

    By February 4th, however, traffic was running at about 6,000 hits per hour, the Home Office says, and an attack on rogue statistics was in hand. Some of the data problems stemmed from attempts to meet the requirement of the Information Commisioner’s Office that people’s privacy be protected, and a lot of the rest from the varying success of the 43 police forces inputting data. Geocoding algorithms are famously tricky, and so is deciding just how specifically a violent assault, say, can be located without distressing the victim, but officials hope to see far fewer glitches this time next month.

    It is worth noting that the Los Angeles Police Department’s famous crime map, from which the current version in England and Wales drew much inspiration, also ran into operational snags (it is “currently undergoing technical renovations”). A precursor closer to home, the West Yorkshire police force’s Beatcrime map, launched in 2005, also took time to find its feet and its audience.

    But despite the snags, a monthly snapshot of crime and anti-social behaviour all over England and Wales is now available to the public, along with names and numbers of local bobbies on the beat, news of public meetings and so forth. Six police forces have been asked to try providing more information. Thames Valley, for example will be showing trends and outcomes on anti-social behaviour; Surrey will pioneer mobile-phone use of the crime data; Leicestershire is working on an online case-tracking system for victims.

    Will the crime map work? That depends on what its job is. At its most basic, knowing what ghastly stuff is going on near your child’s playground, for instance, could allow you to choose a safer school for him - if you have a choice, that is. Hans Rosling, a Swedish celebrity statistician, points out that providing data like this tends to benefit those who are capable of getting and interpreting them and taking informed action, which not everyone can.

    Another possible job is to make people feel more confidence in the police - something that broadly falling crime figures have failed to achieve. It could work - but many have said this week that knowing just how many houses were burgled on their street made them feel not so much empowered as nervous, mainly about house prices and insurance premiums. The National Policing Improvement Agency, which helped to develop the crime map, also did some public polling a little while ago on whether people felt better off, in various ways, to have more specific information about crime, including crime maps. Though a touch underwhelming, the broad conclusion was that people were happier to know more.

    The real goal, though, is broader than this: it is to change police culture. A modern-day Robert Peel would agree that you need an informed public to work with the police to reduce crime. You also need hot-under-the-collar residents to put pressure on the police to deliver. The crime map is part of a much broader attempt (including new elected Police and Crime Commissioners, coming in 2012) to make policemen more responsive to local communities.

  • This week in the print edition

    The capital and its creed

    Feb 3rd 2011, 16:53 by T.C. | LONDON

    ONE common observation made by visitors to England is the extent to which the dominance of London, one of the world's truly global cities, makes its south-eastern half feel like the hinterlands of a city-state. This week, we argue that London is so distinctive that it is beginning to evolve its own, unique political ideology, that is pro-finance, pro-immigration and hungry for investment. Elsewhere, we note yet another setback for Britain's endlessly-delayed new bribery law, ponder the post-Olympics fate of a big athletics stadium, and report on a growing Welsh appetite for self-governance.

  • University entrance qualifications

    Second rate or second chance?

    Feb 3rd 2011, 13:37 by A.G. | LONDON

    More and more people are beating on the doors of English universities, seeking admittance. Yet many are poorly qualified. Today the Russell Group of prestigious universities has published a guide to the subjects prospective students should chose if they seek a place at the country's most competitive institutions. 

    Traditional subjects feature highly on the list. Youngsters are advised to take GCSEs (the exams sat mostly at the age of 16) in desirable subjects such as maths, English, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography and modern or classical languages. When it comes to A-levels (the exams sat mostly at the age of 18), the subjects selected should include at least two from the list. Exams that are hard to pass are valued, at least by the nation's top universities, more highly than softer subjects.

    What I find shocking is the vast swathes of young people who have been poorly advised and steered away from academic subjects while at school. Part of the blame lies with the way in which some teachers have responded to league tables. Because official exchange rates value a GCSE in applied physical education as equivalent to one in Latin, and reckon a vocational qualification in beauty therapy is worth as much as a good pass at GCSE physics, teachers have steered pupils towards easy-to-pass subjects.

    Schools taking this approach have risen up the performance rankings just as their children's prospects have sunk into the mud. Hence the revelation last month that just 15% of students get five good GCSE passes in traditional subjects. Barely half of school-leavers pass the equivalent of any five GCSEs with adequate grades.

    Yet fully 45% of young people now enter higher education, and ever more people are clamouring for a place.

    There are many reasons for the increasing demand. Some youngsters seek to avoid the dole queue: youth unemployment is currently at its highest recorded level and experts predict that a million 16- to 24-year-olds could be jobless within the next few months.

    Population growth also has a role: the number of people celebrating their 18th birthday will peak this year. A further flurry of university applications has been made by people seeking to avoid paying higher tuition fees, which will be charged from September 2012.

    Demand is such that it now substantially outstrips supply. According to the Higher Education Policy Institute the proportion of applicants who were not offered a place has rocketed from 6% in 2003 to 10% in 2009 and 14% in 2010. Its analysis shows that most of these were poorly qualified.

    Yet astonishingly it also reveals the vast number of people enrolled at universities who hold few formal qualifications. Some 40% of full-time university students have entrance qualifications that are not even equivalent to two "E" grades at A-level.

    Some of these students will be people who dropped out of school but now wish to improve their life chances. That is to be applauded. Others will hold qualifications that, for whatever reason, have no formal equivalent. But I struggle to see how these two groups could together account for two-fifths of the full-time undergraduate population. Universities appear to be compensating for the failings of English secondary education.

  • Attitudes to immigration

    Rolling up the welcome mat

    Feb 3rd 2011, 13:25 by M.S. | LONDON

    THE latest annual survey by the German Marshall Fund (GMF) on international attitudes to immigration paints the British as a particularly mean-minded lot. They are more likely to see immigration as a problem than people in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, Canada or the United States - and indeed as their country’s biggest problem. A majority are convinced that immigrants take jobs away from native workers and lower wages. And the British are least inclined to think that immigration enriches national culture.

    It gets worse, as the chart shows, on entitlement to public services. Of the countries with state-sponsored health care, in Britain alone do a large majority of people think illegal immigrants should be denied treatment, and a quarter think even legal immigrants should make other arrangements. The picture is similar on schools.

    What is one to make of all this? Brits have been sceptical about the benefits of immigration since the GMF started polling on the matter three years ago. It’s tempting to think that this is because Britain has more immigrants than other countries. Not so. Census figures are woefully out of date now (they were last collected in 2001), but people born abroad make up about 11% of Britain’s population - not negligible, but less than Canada’s 20% or America’s 14%, and very similar to immigrants’ weight in Germany or Spain, for example. True, quite a lot have come in a lump recently, thanks to Britain’s flinging open its doors before other large countries to workers from the new member states of the European Union; and true, too, these often well-qualified and highly motivated Poles, Lithuanians and so forth do present stiff competition for native Brits in the job market. But overall unemployment in Britain is lower than in France or Italy, where most people did not think immigrants were snatching jobs from locals. 

    Three points are worth making. First, immigration is a highly party-political issue in Britain. In the January Economist/Ipsos MORI poll on issues facing Britain race relations and immigration was seen by respondents overall as the most important issue after the economy and unemployment, ahead of law and order, and of schools and health care. But while 37% of Conservative voters rated race and immigration as the country’s biggest issue, just 21% of Liberal Democrats and Labour supporters agreed. Back to the GMF data, the British were the most likely of all the Europeans surveyed to say that immigration policy would affect their vote.

    Secondly, the survey shows that people with immigrant contacts and friends are far likelier to view immigration positively than those without such links. Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, stirred up a hornet’s nest in 2005 when he suggested that for all its multicultural froth Britain was “sleepwalking into segregation”. Perhaps a lack of ethnic mixing is part of the issue?

    Finally, attitudes toward immigration are influenced by how prominent the issue is in the press.  The French, for example, are noticeably less keen on it this year than they were previously. Could this be related to much-publicised tussles over deporting gypsies and banning face-veils in public places? Britain has a hyperactive press, and many papers offer up an almost daily diet of articles that show immigrants in an unpleasant light.

  • Under the Knife

    The NHS hive mind

    Jan 31st 2011, 19:51 by Under the Knife

    ORGANISATIONS aren't people. This might sound pretty obvious (the knotty legal debate about corporate personhood notwithstanding) but people forget this a lot more often than you'd expect. How often, for example, have you developed a dislike for a company (or a shop, or your local council) because you had a bad experience with one of its employees? We all do it, however much we might realise it's unjustified on further reflection, and it's is as true for hospitals as for anything else – a single nurse who was a bit clumsy with a needle or whose bedside manner isn't quite what it could be can be enough for someone to decide the entire Health Service isn't fit for purpose.

    The version of this sort of forgetfulness which I come across most often, however, isn't as dramatic as this, though if anything it's even less explainable. It takes the form of an apparent belief that the hospital where I work is some kind of Borg-style hive mind. If someone who works at the hospital knows something, the thinking seemingly goes, then everyone who works there must know it. So I'll get patients who phone the department who'll generally open with an entirely sensible question which I'm able to answer. Then, out of the blue they'll say something like 'and I've been having this other problem...' then explain at some length about an  ailment (or sometimes just a random collection of symptoms) of theirs which is clearly causing them some degree of suffering but which has absolutely nothing to do with the conditions we deal with in my department.

    The thing is, most of the time when this happens it turns out that the patient who's doing this is already being seen by someone else in the hospital for their unrelated other malady. If they weren't it would be a bit more understandable; they might just be hoping I'd be able to put them through to the right department. But given that they already know that they're being dealt with by a different department, I do find myself wondering (only half-jokingly) whether they believe that the fact that someone in the hospital knows their medical history and can answer their question means that I should know it too simply because I'm working in the same building.

    Perhaps the worst part, though, is that it isn't just patients that do this kind of thing; doctors are guilty of it too. I've lost count of the number of times I've answered the phone to a doctor who'll spend five minutes giving me a potted clinical history of a patient they want to refer to us before I'm able to gently interrupt and point out as politely as I can that, not having any  medical training, I'm probably not the best person to be telling all this to, and that someone who knows the meaning of more than one word in four of what they just said to me might be of more use to them. Again, this behaviour is quite hard to make sense of unless the doctor who's phoning us presumes that our department possesses some kind of collective consciousness through which all our knowledge is pooled, so they might as well discuss the interesting and unusual symptoms of Mrs X in Intensive Care with me rather than bother the clinical staff. It's either that or they think that the hospital can afford to have senior doctors manning the phones instead of treating patients, which is probably not much less absurd than the idea of a departmental hive mind.

    It's not that I particularly object to fielding phone calls like this (unless I'm really busy) – I just find it a bit odd. All that happens is the person on the other end of the line wastes their time explaining whatever it is they want to get across to someone who can't help them, then has to repeat it once they get through to someone who can. Still, I suppose I should count my blessings when it happens; they could have decided to hate me because a nurse was a bit short with them once.

  • Medical statistics and the NHS

    Cancer and the NHS

    Jan 31st 2011, 8:31 by S.S. | LONDON

    DURING the run-up to the 2010 general election, David Cameron claimed during the televised debates that Britain’s death rate from cancer was worse than Bulgaria’s. A few weeks ago he reinforced his call for public sector reform by claiming that “our health outcomes lag behind the rest of Europe”. Comparing the NHS’s health outcomes to the rest of Europe or the Western world isn’t limited to Cameron and co: 72 point bold headlines decrying NHS failures in cancer care seem to be a staple of tabloid editors when they lack inspiration for the front page. Columnists across the political divide happily fall back onto criticising the NHS for not doing as well as the rest of the world whenever healthcare peaks in the political news-cycle.

    But much of what they say is nonsense. Last week John Appleby of the King’s Fund, a health think-tank, warned that comparing the survival rates the NHS achieves with those in other medical systems was “not straightforward”. His remarks were shrugged off by the coalition, but he is right, and the reasons he is right are interesting and illuminating. Health statistics are curious creatures, cancer statistics even more so. They’re deeply, heavily reliant on context to imbue them with meaning. Ripping them out of that context to use them in support of a political stance about the NHS robs them of meaning and therefore truth.

    For starters, cancer statistics live and die by the method of data collection. EUROCARE-4, the most recent publication of a Europe-wide cancer death registry, claims the UK has lower survival rates for the four most common cancers - lung, breast, colon and prostate - than the rest of Europe. But only 1% of German hospitals and 15% of French ones provided data to the EUROCARE registry. However nearly every British hospital submitted data thanks to the centralised registry run by the Department of Health. Suddenly the soundbite changes from “Britain worse than Europe for cancer survival” to “Britain worse than small proportion of Europe that bothers to submit data for cancer survival”. Bad sample sizes give bad data, which gives bad statistics when you don’t give their context.

    Next, cancer statistics depend on how the cancer was diagnosed, which varies geographically. The World Health Organisation’s  World Health Statistics report 2009 says the UK has a cancer mortality of 147 per 100,000 people. The same report says Namibia has 91 cancer deaths per 100,000 people, Bangladesh has 107 per 100,000 and North Korea 95 cancer deaths per 100,000 people.  Surely the NHS, one of Britain’s proudest state institutions, can’t possibly be worse than, of all countries, North Korea?

    Britain has the most equitable access to healthcare in the world, multiple different screening programs for various cancers and pre-cancerous conditions along with strong post-mortem requirements and a high skill-set among pathologist doing those post-mortems. North Korea and Bangladesh have none of those. Patients with cancer there may lack a doctor to diagnose them before dying at home at and being buried without a post-mortem providing the diagnosis. Inevitably, this means both countries look like they have better cancer survival rates than the UK, where cancers are found during screening programs, during routine consultations and at post mortem, which artificially inflates mortality rates in comparison to less developed countries. This leads to bad statistics when this background isn’t made clear.

    Cancer deaths are affected by other diseases too. The average life expectancy in Namibia is 60, whereas life expectancy in Britain is 80. Cancer is mostly a disease of old age; for example the average age at diagnosis for breast cancer is 65. In Namibia people simply don’t live long enough for cancer to become a leading cause of death, often dying at a younger age of preventable infections and trauma due to lack of access to care. Inevitably this means they appear to be “better” at surviving cancer than the Brits—unless, of course, you give the context.

    Next, cancer is not a universal disease. There is a huge difference in the survival rate for stomach cancer between Britain and Japan which, if presented alone, makes Britain look rather bad.  But stomach cancer has a much higher incidence in Japan (for poorly understood reasons), which means there is a strong nation-wide screening program to catch it early.  It’s a rarer cancer in the UK and a screening program wouldn’t be cost effective compared to screening for other cancers that are far more common. Many British patients with stomach cancer present too late to be cured compared with Japanese patients who are caught much earlier when screened.

    This runs us into the next rule: screening programs change everything for the better and for the worse. We’ve already seen how screening programs that exist in one country and not another can skew good international comparisons. America does cervical cancer screening every year, the UK does screening every 3 to 5 years, which means the Americans diagnose more cervical cancers. However not all cervical cancers found at screening will become fully cancerous and need treatment. There’s no way to tell through the screening program which are which, so many American women are having un-necessary treatment compared to Brits. When talking about cancer diagnosis and mortality, the details of screening programs must be given otherwise the statistics lose too much context to make sense.

    Finally, cancer statistics are by definition out of date by the time they’re published. The EUROCARE-4 statistics involve patients diagnosed with cancer between 1995 and 1999, who were followed through to 2002 before the data was published. But in 2000 the NHS Cancer Plan was published, changing the uncoordinated mess that was British cancer care at the time into a formal, structured system with a greater emphasis on screening and on preventative programs to stop cancers from developing in the first place.  The results of this plan will take years to be observed because of the time lag between a cancer first developing and eventually being diagnosed, making it meaningless to use statistics from before the plan was implemented to criticise the current system.

    In an ideal world everything would be put into context and statistics would be used honestly but, until that happy day, it’s wise to reflect critically whenever people make glib claims about NHS under-performance on cancer.

    S.S. is a final-year medical student

     

    When this article was first published, one of the links in the text was not working. It has now been fixed

  • The Economist / IPSOS MORI poll

    Perhaps we're not all in this together after all

    Jan 28th 2011, 19:30 by T.C. | LONDON

    AFTER the warm glow of Christmas comes the chilly reality check of January. Salaried employees have a long, six-week gap between payslips, and their battered finances have to cope with the seasonal excess. This year, with VAT rising on January 4th from 17.5% to 20%, the pain will have been worse than usual.

    The January issue of the Economist / IPSOS MORI Issues Index, which tracks what a sample of the public believes to be the most important issues facing Britain, shows that the economy remains the top concern, being mentioned by 60% of respondents (unemployment, a related concern, is mentioned by 27% of respondents). The polling was done shortly after the VAT rise; had it been done more recently, in the aftermath of the shockingly bad growth figures released earlier this week by the ONS, economic worries may have dominated even more than they did.

    But not everyone's worries are the same, and in fact they divide in interesting ways along party lines (see image, above). Although the economy is the top concern among voters for all three big parties, Labour voters seem to feel the effects most personally. They fret much less about the economy in abstract (54%) than supporters of either of the coalition parties (73% for Tory voters and 71% for Lib Dems). Instead, 35% percent of Labour voters mention unemployment as a worry, compared with only 14% of Tories and 27% of Lib Dem supporters. 

    The unemployment worries probably reflect the parties' relative strengths among public-sector employees, who have traditionally voted either Labour or Lib Dem. With big cuts looming in public spending, plenty of civil servants and local-government workers will be fearing for their jobs. The number of Labour supporters citing unemployment as a worry might be even higher were it not for the fact that, according to the ONS, manufacturing is one of the few sectors of the economy currently performing well.

    There are other interesting wrinkles. The Bank of England may take comfort in the fact that, despite inflation remaining far above its 2% target, few voters seem that bothered about rising prices, which supports other data suggesting that, as yet, calls for wage increaes remain subdued.

    Race and immigration remains the second-biggest concern for Tory voters (it would be fascinating, but alas probably impossible, to try to tease the two issues apart), The Lib Dems confirm their reputation for wonkishness by being most worried about public service reform, while Labour voters, who are probably most likely to come into contact with big public services such as the NHS or the benefits system on a regular basis, seem the most sanguine. That provides some neat indirect support for findings from other polls, which tend to show that perception of the NHS, for example, tend to be less favourable among people who haven't used it recently than among those who have - in other words people seem to think it is worse than it actually is.

  • Britain's public debt

    Chronicle of a debt foretold

    Jan 28th 2011, 11:17 by P.W. | London

    AN ODD thing occurred this week. Britain’s national debt jumped by £1.3 trillion, virtually 100% of GDP, and hardly anyone paid attention. The bad news was crowded out by the surprise 0.5% drop in national output in the last quarter of 2010.

    There was reason to this apparent insouciance. What happened was that the figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) finally caught up with the huge banking bail-outs of late 2008, when the government took effective control of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) by injecting big slugs of capital into them.

    Yet even if this was a chronicle of a debt foretold, it is worthy of note. Even in these troubled times it is not every day that the national statisticians of any country reveal a near trebling in debt. Before the banking rescues in October 2008 net public debt stood at £742 billion, equivalent to 52% of GDP. By the end of the year it had soared to £2,070 billion, worth 147% of GDP, according to the report published on January 25th.

    The ONS had already included in its previous public-debt figures Northern Rock, a mortgage lender that was eventually nationalised after suffering Britain’s first bank run for over a century. Together with Bradford & Bingley, another former building society that was rescued, that had added around £130 billion to the nation’s liabilities. But these mortgage banks were minnows compared with RBS and LBG, which put a further £1.3 trillion on to the public balance-sheet. Following its ill-fated takeover of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO, RBS had become the world’s biggest bank by size of balance-sheet while the shotgun wedding between relatively healthy Lloyds TSB and ailing HBOS during the banking crisis had created in LBG a domestic behemoth controlling around 30% of mortgage lending and current accounts.

    In some ways, the surprise in the figures (other than the lack of interest in them) was that they were smaller than had once been feared. Swollen by derivatives, RBS alone had a balance-sheet of £2.4 trillion when it was rescued. Under national-accounting rules, the ONS has slimmed these down, leaving out derivative positions, knocking off debt held by foreign subsidiaries and also excluding liquid assets in line with the definition of net public debt.

    Does it matter that Britain’s public debt – allowing for subsequent heavy government borrowing but some shrinkage of the banks’ balance-sheets – now stands at 155% of GDP? Not really since the government also controls the assets on the other side of the banks’ balance-sheets. Only if they turn sour will there be a genuine further call on taxpayers, other than the equity they have already ploughed into the businesses, together with a form of catastrophe insurance for RBS if its loans incur really serious losses. And if things work out better than expected, the taxpayer might even make a profit on these unwelcome emergency investments.

    The Treasury and the ONS publish another figure for net debt, which strips out most of the effects of the financial interventions on the grounds that they are temporary because the government intends returning the banks to the private sector. On this basis net public debt reached £889 billion, or 59.3% of GDP, at the end of 2010. On a gross basis (ie, not netting off liquid assets held by central government and local authorities) it has already reached £1 trillion. These are the figures to worry about.

  • This week's print edition

    The lean year

    Jan 27th 2011, 20:16 by T.C. | LONDON

    THE coalition started its political life buoyed by some unexpectedly good economic news, with rising GDP and falling unemployment. But that good cheer has evaporated over the past few months, with inflation rising remorselessly, unemployment beginning to rise and growth starting to slow. The grimmest bit of news so far came earlier this week, when the ONS announced that the economy actually shrank by 0.5% in the final quarter of 2010. In this week's print edition we analyse the numbers and conclude that a rocky, uneven, feel-bad recovery is about the best that can be hoped for. Elsewhere in the section, we say "Dosvidaniya, London" as the BBC World Service unveils big cuts to its foreign-language broadcasts, and note the return of the scandal around tabloid phone "hacking", as Andy Coulson resigns, the Metropolitan Police re-open their inquiry and News International changes its tune on the subject.

  • Public remembrance

    A minute's silence for the minute's silence

    Jan 27th 2011, 14:07 by B.R. | LONDON

    On a flight home from Spain in 2001, your correspondent did something embarrassing. It was shortly after the September 11th attacks and the captain called for a minute’s silence to remember the victims before take-off. Still filled with holiday spirit, my companions and I missed the announcement and noisily laughed and joked throughout, only clocking fellow passengers’ disgust a minute too late.

    Awkward, yes, but an innocent mistake. Still, I probably should have anticipated it. Britain was, at that time, in thrall to the minute’s silence. Nobody could rightly argue that 60 seconds’ quiet reflection wasn’t an appropriate response to the terrors of September 11th. But such silences used to be rare in this country, saved for Remembrance Day or the death of Diana. But at the turn of the century the call for them became almost fetishistic. It is probably a leap to describe it as a New Labour phenomenon. But it was in keeping with the feeling of the times, when, led by the fresh-faced young Tony Blair, we were all learning to be a bit more touchy-feely.

    The nadir was 2002. Perhaps, as a devoted Tottenham Hotspur fan and a regular at the club's football matches, I was more sensitive than most. But in that year it felt as if every fixture was preceded by players (and a comedy cockerel, the club’s mascot) standing around the centre circle, heads bowed, remembering the death of ever more obscure ex-players. Sometimes the player would have no connection with the club. At one match, it was not even a player—40,000 fans were asked to silently contemplate the life of the manager’s dad. Two murdered schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, also brought football stadiums to a hush. It wasn’t only at sporting events. That year, workplaces up and down the country (including The Economist) observed a minute for the anniversary of September 11th, for all its horror, an event that had happened a year ago in a foreign country.

    It is difficult not to sound churlish. Each event was a personal tragedy for someone. But the more personal the grief, the more it risks devaluation when it is taken  public. Supply can outstrip demand, as it were. 

    These days, the minute's silence seems to be going out of fashion again. But it is in danger of being replaced by something much worse. Last year, the football manager Bill Nicholson died. He was Tottenham Hotspur’s greatest coach, a man who in 1961 led the club to the “double” (ie coming top of the First Division and winning the FA Cup in the same season), thought by many at that time an impossible feat. He dedicated his entire life to Tottenham and never moved from his modest terraced house a few hundred yards from its ground. In other words a man who, for a few thousand fans in a football stadium in North London, deserved to be remembered. Instead of the traditional silence, though, he got a “minute’s applause” - a ghastly attempt at forced positivity that does not sit easily with the British psyche.

    Worst of all is the combination of the two. The other night fans of another club, Bolton Wanderers, remembered their hero, Nat Lofthouse, the “Lion of Vienna”. He did, mercifully, get the silence he deserved. Done well - and this was - a minute's silence can create real gravitas as a sudden, reflective stillness descends on thousands of people. But, confusingly, as the silence ended, it was announced that he would also get a minute’s applause, an act with no gravitas which only served to spoil the moment. It was as if the club felt it somehow had to dilute the one with the other. The result was tepid water.

    The prescription, in my mind, is simple. Minute’s silences are for national disasters, royal deaths and the passing of bona fide sporting heroes (the latter just to be observed locally). Applause should be reserved for great jazz solos and sliding tackles only.

  • The British economy

    That shrinking feeling

    Jan 25th 2011, 12:44 by T.C. | LONDON

    OUTSIDE of the City, economic forecasts are widely assumed to not be worth the paper they're written on. There's plenty of evidence to support this view, and the most recent addition to the pile is the shocking performance of the British economy in the final three months of 2010. Consensus among the cognoscenti was for subdued growth of between 0.2% and 0.6%. In the event, said the ONS, the economy shrank by 0.5%. The slide was led by the construction industry, business and financial services and the hotel and restaurant trade.

    Since two of those three depend strongly on the weather, the suspicion is that the coldest, snowiest December in decades must have been the reason for the poor performance. That is certainly the line that George Osborne, the chancellor, is putting about. The ONS agrees, but only up to a point: "The disruption caused by the bad weather in December is likely to have contributed to most of the 0.5 per cent decline, that is, if there had been no disruption, GDP would be showing a flattish picture rather than declining by 0.5 per cent," it reckons. In other words, strip out the bad weather, and the best case scenario is a stagnant economy - still below what forecasters had been expecting, and still not a cause for good cheer.

    Worse, the figures come mere months before the coalition's spending cuts begin to bite, and they add weight to the view that Britain's economy is too fragile to withstand the planned retrenchment. One of the few people who will see a silver lining in the numbers is Ed Balls, Labour's newly-installed shadow chancellor, who has been one of the most vigorous proponents of the view that the coalition's planned cuts are too much, too fast. Nor is criticism confined to the government's political opponents. Only yesterday Sir Richard Lambert, the outgoing head of the CBI, blasted the coalition for lacking any plan for economic growth, and for making cuts "apparently careless of the damage that they might do to business and to job creation". Today Sir Richard is looking pretty prescient.

    The chancellor insists that he will not be "blown off course" by the figures, and that the government will still swing its axe as planned. In reality, Mr Osborne has few options but to press on: slowing the pace of spending cuts would hand an important intellectual victory to Labour and make it hard for the coalition to sustain the accusation that Labour are reckless spending addicts who cannot be trusted with the economy. But policymakers are running out of buttons to push in their attempts to keep the recovery on track: another round of "quantitative easing" (a fancy electronic way to print money) looks unlikely with inflation running so far ahead of the Bank of England's target rate of 2%; calls are already growing for a raising of rates from their historically low levels of 0.5%. The chancellor might hope for a further slide in the value of the pound to boost exports, a traditional British remedy (and indeed Sterling was down 1.3% after the figures were released), but the imported inflation that would generate would simply add to the pressures for a rise in interest rates.

    A recession is defined as two successive quarters of negative growth. Mr Osborne must present the government's Budget to the House of Commons on March 23rd, almost exactly a month before the GDP figures for the first quarter of 2011 are due out. That will ratchet up the pressure: another contraction would vindicate the pessimists who predicted a double dip recession. For now, at least, that is still thought to be unlikely, although of course the people saying that are the same forecasters who got the present figures so wrong. Some impish economists are already dubbing Britain's situation "stagflation-lite", a reference to the toxic combination of a shrinking economy and rising inflation that hasn't been seen in Britain since the 1980s. The "lite" bit is important: inflation is far below the double-digit levels of the 1970s and 1980s, and as we argued last week, there seems to be no evidence yet of rising wage demands. But if you had to think of a perfect phrase for Mr Balls to beat the government with, it would be hard to do better than that. 

  • Andy Coulson's replacement

    The future of spinning

    Jan 24th 2011, 13:37 by J.G. | LONDON

    SPECULATION in Westminster has turned to who will replace Andy Coulson as David Cameron’s director of communications. The favourites are Guto Hari, a former BBC reporter who now spins for Boris Johnson, the London mayor; Ian Birrell, a print journalist with close personal and ideological links to Mr Cameron and Steve Hilton, his strategist; and Ben Brogan, the deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. Daniel Finkelstein, an editor and columnist at The Times who doubles-up as political soulmate to George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, is another mooted candidate.

    Were the job to go to someone with a broadcast background, it could be a seminal moment in how this country does political communications. Some people around Mr Cameron believe that Westminster has not yet adapted to the decline of print media. Newspapers are taken too seriously, they say. Sweating to shape the views of the "lobby", the parliamentary press corps, is all very 1990s. The era or Alastair Campbells and Andy Coulsons should have died some time ago.

    Instead, so this view goes, politicians should be concentrating on broadcast media. And this does not just mean preparing for the usual interview slots on Newsnight and the Sunday morning political shows, it means using moving images and sound more creatively to present a politician and his ideas in the best possible light. Nobody remembers what, if anything, Mr Cameron actually said on that glacier five years ago, but the image sticks. The little game of head tennis between Tony Blair and Kevin Keegan, then the manager of Newcastle United Football Club, is probably recalled more vividly by most voters than any speech he gave as leader of the opposition.

    There is huge potential to do much more of this. It is bizarre, for example, that party political broadcasts (the closest British politics gets to televised advertisements) still often take the form of a suited politicians talking into a camera from inside his office.

    Interestingly, Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne have slightly different takes on all this. The prime minister has always been more sceptical than the chancellor about the importance of print media, an attitude which probably owes something to his years working for Carlton Communications, which owned a major television station. It was Mr Osborne who assiduously cultivated newspaper editors in opposition, and indeed played the lead role in recruiting Mr Coulson. Mr Cameron, who sometimes struggled to disguise his disdain for Fleet Street, focused on getting his broadcast appearances right. The identity of Mr Coulson’s successor will depend in large part on which of these perspectives prevails.



  • CPI and RPI inflation compared

    The mystery of clothes inflation and the formula effect

    Jan 21st 2011, 18:02 by P.W. | London

     

    INFLATION surged in December to 3.7% and could rise above 4% in early 2011: that was this week’s big economic story. But it was based on the consumer-prices index (CPI), which is used not just for the government’s 2% target that the Bank of England is supposed to meet but also, from April, for uprating benefits and public-sector pensions. The retail-prices index (RPI), which is used by most company schemes to uprate pensions and as the basis for inflation-protected government bonds, told a rather different tale, a more modest rise but from an already much higher level, taking inflation up from 4.7% to 4.8%.

    The gap between the two indices arises from underlying differences in the way they are compiled, reflecting their different histories. The RPI is a home-grown measure dating back to the late 1940s, whereas the CPI conforms with a European template drawn up in the 1990s. They cover somewhat different populations: the CPI includes all households whereas the RPI leaves out the richest 4% and pensioners who rely on state benefits for at least 75% of their income. They monitor different items of expenditure: notoriously, the CPI excludes owner-occupier housing costs whereas the RPI includes them. That in turn means that the weights of the various spending items covered by the indices vary. And they deploy different averaging techniques to boil down 180,000 individual price quotes into some 650 individual item indices. The RPI uses arithmetic averages whereas the CPI generally uses the geometric mean, an approach that usually comes up with a smaller answer when working out inflation; the resulting difference is called the "formula effect".

    As a rule the RPI records higher inflation than the CPI, although this is not always the case. Most recently RPI inflation turned negative in 2009 thanks to plunging mortgage interest payments whereas the lowest that CPI inflation reached that year was 1.1%, in September, when the RPI recorded prices falling by 1.4%. But if the housing-costs element is the main reason why the gap varies, the much steadier formula effect has accounted for the bulk of the average difference since 1997, contributing 0.5 out of a total 0.85 percentage point.

    One of the surprises of 2010, however, was that the formula effect nearly doubled, to almost a full percentage point (0.94) in November; it fell back last month, but remained an unusually high 0.86. Intriguingly, this aberration can be traced almost entirely to just one category of spending: clothing, which now alone accounts for half a percentage point of the formula effect, up from a more typical 0.2. In December, the CPI recorded inflation of 2.1% for clothing, whereas the RPI reported 10.3% for clothing and footwear (the latter rising by only 3.2%); that was in fact lower than the 11.3% rate in November, the highest for 30 years.

    This disparity is eye-catching, as is the level of RPI clothing inflation especially for women’s garments, of 16% in November and 13.8% in December. Yet this is an economy where average earnings are rising by just 2.1% and the prices of essentials like food are shooting up (by close to 6% in December according to both indices). Are clothes retailers really managing to put up their prices at double-digit rates? Not according to the British Retail Consortium, whose shop-price index (calculated using geometric means) shows the prices of clothing and footwear falling by 1.9% in December.

    The Office for National Statistics (ONS) stands by its figures and says in a note published this week that they reflect better sampling of the price quotes for clothes, which enter both the CPI and RPI. That wider range of price quotes, it says, has statistically increased the formula effect.

    But that prompts the question: should the RPI still be compiled using arithmetic averages? The geometric mean is now widely used (for example in America as well as Europe) and is preferred on the grounds that it captures the behaviour of consumers who buy less of a product when it gets dearer; by contrast, the arithmetic mean assumes in effect that they do not respond this way. Moreover, the particular arithmetic averaging technique (the ONS uses two) that drives the formula effect is not permitted under European rules for the CPI on methodological grounds. In a paper published in 2003, the ONS said that very few countries used the technique, which can generate an upward bias known as "price bounce" when the index is chain-linked across years.

    Making big changes to price indices is tricky. The main defect of the CPI – its omission of owner-occupier housing costs – has long been recognised but there have been endless delays in forging a common European solution. As a result, the ONS is now developing on its own a version of the CPI that does include them, though along different lines from the way they are treated in the RPI. If the UK Statistics Authority, which oversees the ONS, gives the go-ahead to publishing such an additional index in two years’ time when it should be ready, it would still be up to George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, to decide whether or not to adopt this expanded CPI for the inflation target and uprating benefits.

    Altering the RPI is tricky in another way because it is the measure used for index-linked bonds issued by the government that provide protection against inflation. Any fundamental change in the index, such as altering the way it is calculated, would ultimately have to be decided by the chancellor if the Bank of England considered it would be detrimental to the interests of holders of such bonds. But the strange case of double-digit clothing inflation suggests at the very least that there is a strong argument for reviewing the averaging techniques used to compile the RPI.

  • David Cameron's spin doctor quits

    The inevitable resignation of Andy Coulson

    Jan 21st 2011, 12:39 by J.G. | LONDON

    YESTERDAY'S departure of Alan Johnson from the post of shadow chancellor was wholly unexpected. Today's resignation of Andy Coulson, Downing Street's director of communications and a hugely influential force in the government, has been coming for some time.

    Mr Coulson's troubles date back to his time as editor of the News of the World. Under his watch, investigative reporters at the Sunday tabloid newspaper had been exposed using techniques such as the hacking of voicemail messages to unearth stories about celebrities, politicians and even Royalty. He resigned over the revelations in 2007, but denied (and continues to deny) having any knowledge or complicity in these illegal journalistic practices.

    Many questioned the plausibility of those denials, and so suspicion has dogged him ever since. In December, the Crown Prosecution Service said that it did not have the evidence to pursue charges against Mr Coulson but pressure on him has barely relented. In short, he became the story, the cardinal sin for any spin doctor. "When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it is time to move on," his departing statement acknowledges.

    The resignation of Mr Coulson is damaging for the government in two ways. First, the judgement of David Cameron, the prime minister, has been brought into serious question. He recruited Mr Coulson to head the Conservatives' media operation even after his ignominious departure from the News of the World. He continued to back him until the very end. Many doubt that Mr Cameron, deep down, really believed that Mr Coulson could have been entirely oblivious of widespread phone-hacking taking place under his nose, and that therefore he was choosing to employ someone he knew to have done wrong. The same critics say this is part of a broader pattern of Mr Cameron being willing to sup with the allegedly unscrupulous, pointing to his long-time association with Lord Ashcroft, a controversial Tory donor.

    Secondly, Mr Coulson is very, very talented. Almost as soon as he joined the Tory operation in 2007, he expanded beyond mere media-management to exert huge influence on political strategy. He is, along with Steve Hilton (an increasingly bitter rival of late, and no doubt a quietly happy man today), Mr Cameron's closest backroom adviser. Of the coalition's frontline politicians, only George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Mr Cameron himself can be safely said to have more of a say on the government's direction and day-to-day running. Mr Coulson's personal style is, ironically, very un-tabloid. He is quietly, politely effective, and surprisingly popular with ministers and civil servants as a result. Thanks to his humble roots in Essex, he also gave the privileged Mr Cameron a feel for what ordinary lower-to-middle income voters in unfashionable parts of the country were thinking. His direct line to the upper echelons of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire, which owns some of Britain's most influential newspapers (including the News of the World), turned out to be less valued by the Tories than his general competence.

    Finding another canny, tough, well-connected media man (or woman) to replace Mr Coulson will not be hard. Indeed, his replacement, whoever that turns out to be, may be an improvement in some respects: Mr Coulson never bothered to cultivate the commentariat, leading to a distinct dearth of pro-Cameron voices in Britain's opinion and editorial pages. Finding someone who is as good at politics as at the media game will be the real challenge for the prime minister, along with hanging on to his reputation as what a predecessor might have called a "pretty straight kind of guy".

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On this blog, our correspondents ponder political, cultural, business and scientific developments in Britain, the spiritual and geographical home of The Economist. It takes its name from a fond but faintly derogatory name for the mother country often used among British expats.

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