Pie Fight

Welcome to the schmuck of the day club

Today's schmuck of the day club inductee is medical student Alex Thomas, who whines

The constant analysis of GPs' salaries is really starting to irritate me. If the public think it is such an easy ride being a GP, why aren't there more of them applying for the job themselves?

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in addition to A grades in chemistry and biology, applicants may have to be able to discuss Proust or be almost fluent in Spanish or be able to quote extensively from Chaucer, in the original Middle English.

Does this sound easy so far?

Erm, do you sound like a twat so far, Mr Proust Discusser?

So irksome did I find Mr Thomas that I: a) launched the Schmuck of the day club; B) started blogging again; and C) overcame my usual lethargy and wrote a letter to the (Guardian) editor. Well done, Alex - just the cure! Here's that letter:

Let’s hope that medical student Alex Thomas ( Fancy becoming another one of those overpaid GPs?, 17 August) is better at reading patients’ symptoms than he is at plain old reading. In complaining that the public believes that GPs are overpaid and that their job is easy, he is erecting a straw man: the vast majority of the public don’t think being a GP is easy. We do, however, think they are getting a jammy deal. Just because a job is hard and demands great commitment doesn’t mean it should command a six-figure salary, particularly when nurses, whose job is at least as hard as a GPs, are so poorly remunerated.

Middle class myopia about the socio-economics of food

UPDATE: While my criticism of Blythman's article focused on the idiocy of her belief that public health policy can be based on middle class behaviour and assumptions, the article also deserved a right royal bollocking for its dodgy use of research. Adopting the faux objectivity characteristic of so much of the American press, it pretended to present two sides of the story by: A) offering accepted scientific evidence, then B) providing oppositional critiques of the mainstream science. See the trick here? It presents two sides of teh argument, but only lets one side critique the other. Thankfully, wiser men than me have called her on it. The best bit is the second letter, which points out that one of her key critics of putting folic acid in bread runs an online health food shop that sells - you guessed it - folic acid. Joanna, you got played.

This is one of the most egregious, up its own ass articles I've ever read. Joanna Blythman's normally pretty good, but in this piece she seems to be willfully myopic about the ways that socio-economic realities and the diets of the poor. Eg, she quotes, approvingly, this guy:

"It is noticeable that the FSA isn't proposing adding it to wholemeal bread because it already contains it. Why doesn't the FSA just tell people to eat more wholemeal bread?"

Um, because that wouldn't work, especially not with the mums who need this. (Hint: they don't have the same approach to food as you.)

Ok, that's one stupid question answered; how about another one?

The other main objection is that fortification is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The estimate is that adding folic acid to bread will save 120 babies in the UK every year from spina bifida, but for every baby saved, half a million people, male and female, will have to take the added folic acid. "Why not target potential young mothers rather than mass-supplementing the population at large ?" asks Holford.

Hey, toughie! How about 'Because the young mothers who need this don't respond to government messages on health and diet?' You do; they don't - wishing ain't gonna change that. Or maybe the poor all quit smoking when I wasn't looking.

Pathetic.

Via Ezra Klein, here's an american example of the genre, in which well-off journalists who work from home bash those who don't make the time to cook proper meals after a 10-hour day.

Minimum wage

A good letter to the Guardian re the min wage. I'm most interested in his notation that more than half of the children in poverty ae growing up in working households.

If Alan Johnson, the trade and industry secretary, thinks that the minimum wage at £5.35 an hour may now be "close to the right level" (Report, March 21) he has not taken into account the implications of the government's emphasis on the social contract, conditionality and responsibility in the income maintenance system, let alone international conventions. The social contract requires that responsible citizenship is matched by entitlements to social protection. If someone exercises their responsibility by working for a full week, then reciprocal conditionality demands that they be paid a living wage that lifts them out of poverty.

 

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A year ago the Greater London Authority reported that the hourly rate for a living wage there would have to be between £6.70 and £8.10, so it is not likely to be less than £7 an hour later in 2006.

Furthermore, the government is a signatory to the Council of Europe's social charter, which requires pay rates at no less than 60% of national net average earnings, and previous UK governments have been criticised for failing to implement these minimum standards.

At a time when more than half of all the children in poverty by the government's standards live in working households, the right level of the minimum wage will only be achieved when no one earning it remains in poverty.
Prof John Veit-Wilson
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Anti-natalism

Madeleine Bunting has a strongly worded article on what she calls anti-natalism. It's powerfully written, but sadly, her conclusion is cliched: it's all consumer capitalism's fault, and choice is bad, bad, bad. Her examples are also overblown: eg, the woman, seven months pregnant, who has not had one person say she was lucky to be expecting. Whoever these people are, they don't live in my universe. And how can she write this whole article without mentioning the positive steps that Britain has taken over the last eight years? Still, she writes a good polemic.

Meanwhile, in letters, someone points out that while she doesn't personally like McDonald's, when her kids were growing up, it was the only restaurant that made them feel welcome.

Those dastardly Danes

Ain't it so often teh way? Govt denies special treatment to a group, and the next thing you know we're hearing distortions about discrimination (not that there isn't a lot of genuine discrimination out there). Here's one from the naion du jour, Denmark:

Kiku Day writes (Denmark's new values, February 15) that "the 200,000 Muslims living in Denmark have been denied a permit to build a mosque in Copenhagen". But Muslims have never applied for a permit for a central mosque. They must pay for it as the Danish state does not give financial help for the building of churches, mosques, synagogues or other religious temples. There are 19 different state-recognised Muslim communities and they have not been able to reach an agreement on how to raise money for a central mosque or how to run it.

But Copenhagen's local authorities are working actively in trying to find affordable land for a mosque. It was one of the main themes in the recent local elections and an ambitious architectural project that includes a mosque was presented last week. Even so, there are around 200 well-attended mosques in Denmark, though most of them were originally built as warehouses, factories and apartment buildings. And land has already been found near Copenhagen for what will be the first Muslim-only cemetery in the country - many cemeteries in Denmark already include special Muslim sections.
Pedro Poza
Copenhagen

The beat goes on

They get letters. One throuhg three offer particularly excellent points, I think. In order, it's almost impossible to say that academy schools per se make the difference, when those schools are getting far more money than regular state schools do; even if you believe what I just said, it's outrageously unfair to present academies statistics without including the context of the results of the schools they replaced; and the middle class doesn't actually need to be brought back into the state system - almost all are still there, just concentrated in the best schools.

The struggle for decent schools

Friday January 27, 2006
The Guardian

In one respect Andrew Adonis (Letters, January 24) is correct. If you provide state-of-the-art facilities plus a significant state-provided increment on the school budget, you will usually achieve better examination results. Who could ever have expected such an outcome?

In order to prove his case - or otherwise - I would be willing to sanction an experiment in Liverpool whereby several of our secondary schools in old building with poor facilities would have their facilities replaced at £30m a time and annual extra per pupil funding - without becoming academies. Then after a few years we will be able to gauge whether or not it is academy status and private sector sponsor involvement per se which is the determining factor for improved results.
Paul Clein
Executive member for children's services, Liverpool city council

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Your attack on academy schools was unfair and missed the point (Academies among worst exam performers', January 19). Academies are replacing some of the worst schools in the country. Many of the students who took their GCSEs in the summer had been educated at failing schools for many years, before transferring to their academy with only a year or two left of secondary education.

At the Business Academy Bexley, we have come in for much criticism for "poor" results this year: 29% of our students received 5 or more A*- C grades, but that is only half a story. In the year before the academy was founded, just 6% of students achieved the same level of results at our predecessor school. We have made great strides in just three years. Along with the other academies, we should not be judged on one year's bald statistics, but on how well we provide a steady and lasting step-change in educational standards.
Robert Burton
The Business Academy, Bexley

David Hill suggests that one of the major aims of the government's education white paper is to bring middle-class children back into the state sector (Letters, January 19). The vast majority of them never left. Instead, these children attend the best-resourced state schools in their area, this made possible by the greater mobility afforded by their parent's greater income. These better-resourced schools are those which stand to gain the most from the government's proposals, particularly in regard to admissions policy, further widening the gap between those schools attended by the rich and those attended by the poor.
Richard Gough Thomas
Sheffield

David Hill states that everything Labour does is geared towards enticing middle-class parents back to state schools. I wonder what the majority of Labour's working-class supporters would think of such an admission.

With the recent education white paper it looks like Labour is trying to entice the middle classes by destroying the comprehensive system, creating a many-tiered schools system based on selection and a situation where more schools end up in private hands. Rather than winning people over to the notion of a decent state education, it looks like the middle classes have won Labour over to the idea of destroying state education as we know it.
Joe Hartney
Edinburgh

Simon Jenkins is fooling himself if he thinks there are two equitable ways of admitting pupils to schools (Blair and Adonis are taking our schools back to the 30s, January 25). The evidence from Buckinghamshire, where the 11-plus never went away, is that selection entrenches social divisions.

The pass rate for Bucks county primary school children was 23% in 2005. The pass rate for children whose parents could afford to send them to independent preparatory schools in the county was 59%. There is nothing fair or class-blind about the 11-plus.

As Jenkins puts it, the only equitable way of admitting pupils to schools is central to the comprehensive principle, "entry [should] be open to all in the local community as determined by catchment area, warts and all. The task of the state is to make that school as good as can be".
Ian Scoones
Secretary, Bucks Parents for Comprehensive Education

Quality, full stop

From today's Guardian:

A former headteacher of mine used to tell a story about an English family who went to live in Denmark. When they asked at the education office which was the best local school, the official's response was that he did not understand the question, as any school that failed to meet the desired standard was given the support and resources to bring it to the same level as other schools.

In the current education "market", it now seems to be widely accepted that it is the parent, not the child, who is the "customer". It is a view that reflects the influence of the private sector, and its central tenet of parental "choice" can only be damaging to the schools that are not "chosen". If local authorities are effectively neutered, who is going to look after the interests of those children who do not have articulate middle-class parents to fight their corner? Certainly not the headteachers and governors of schools with a favoured pupil intake, whose primary concern is how their GCSE scores compare with the school down the road.
John Jordan
Gosport

The good old days (when women knew their place)

Sepia-tinted eulogies of the good old days tend to gloss over the fact that much of the social structure of those days was underpinned by the subservience of women. (And they weren't as coherent and simple as we remember them anyway.) It's a new world now, with free-er women, and that genie ain't going back in the bottle. We need new policies for new realities.

Letters:

Saturday  January   21, 2006
The Guardian

   

Goodbye to all that (Society Guardian, January 18) is a disturbing potpourri of arguments that romanticise life in the 1950s and conflates recent and long-standing changes dangerously. Bethnal Green, taken as typical of the 50s working class, was even then unusual. The East End itself was, of course, far from homogeneous or cosy but was widely feared as a breeding ground for crime and violence. The close-knit always has a double edge. We need to accept that it can be parochial and even racist. To eulogise "traditional" white communities while expressing fear of close, cross-generational ties among non-white communities is highly problematic.

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Nor is it true that women are no longer the mainstays of the local community, nor that working women cannot bridge communities of home and work - remember the Indian Gate Gourmet strikers in 2005. Nor can working women be held responsible for local differences in visiting patterns within working-class families; these were noted back in the 1950s by the Institute of Community Studies, when few married women had outside jobs anywhere.

The problem, which goes back well into the early 20th century, is that the promotion of individual opportunity, of geographical mobility and flexibility, continually undermines traditional community ties. These tend to get remade on a different basis, but not without trauma and cost. Behind the loss of the local - the shop, the post office, the school, the hospital, public space - is a logic of globalising capital and the denigration of the public service ethic. It is not a question of moving attention "from the economic" to the social, but of constructing the economy to serve our values, not the other way round.
Prof Irene Bruegel
Dr Anne Gray
London South Bank University

Goodbye to all that paints a picture of a cohesive society in Britain in the 1950s. While I agree with much of the analysis, the authors fail to point out the negative side of what reads like a mythical golden decade.

The lives of most women, apart from the few wealthier ones who could afford domestic help, were drudgery; cohorts of intelligent girls were uneducated beyond the age of 15 because of lack of opportunity and negative social attitudes to the idea of educated career-aspiring women; birth control was unreliable and many women became worn out with repeated childbirth and childcare; unmarried girls who fell pregnant were rejected and vilified. Most of all, domestic violence was suffered in shame and silence, and for most women who suffered there was no means of escape.
Marianne Lederman
Hitchin, Herts

Labour just a bunch of Tories blah blah

Someone must have dipped his pen into a wee bottle of perspective this morning:

I am tired of the liberal elite fantasy that the Lib Dems are to the left of Labour (Letters, December 19). Labour has been so adept at covering up its own progressive achievements in government in order to secure the middle-class vote, and the Lib Dems have become so skilful at pretending that they are centre-left social democrats rather than the opportunistic, rootless right-wingers that all Labour and Tory political activists know them to be, that misinformed ignoramuses of the middle class, who have no sense of political realities, spread misinformation of the most laughable kind.

If anyone really thinks that the current government is a Tory one, they should cast their mind back 20 years to when we had an actual Tory government.
George Owers
Chelmsford, Essex

A nice antidote to the ever tiresome notion that because Labour doesn't do everything the left wants it to do, it's analogous to the Tory party. Grow up.

EU democracy, reducing child poverty

Guardian letters:

Wednesday October 5, 2005
The Guardian

Despite their global renown as sociologists, Professors Beck and Giddens (Comment, October 4) appear to have abdicated the critical virtues which mark their discipline at its best. Parroting familiar neoliberal euphemisms, they tell us that if it is to succeed as "a new type of cosmopolitan project", "Europe simply must gear up for change". Many Europeans have realised that behind these vapid exhortations and the idols of growth rates and reform there lies a commitment to a market-driven agenda at odds with the idea of "a Europe which is fair and socially just".

French resistance to the EU constitution was not fuelled in the main by a nationalist desire for isolation, nor by the racism seen elsewhere. It stemmed from the conviction that the constitution is not merely "lengthy and inelegant" but that it subordinates the demand for social justice to an economic creed proven to exacerbate inequality and erode solidarity.

Most importantly, the French campaign against the constitution showed the strength of one of the few values Europeans can be proud of: democratic participation and activism. The true pro-Europeans and cosmopolitans will be those capable of renovating the continent's radical democratic tradition, not the latter-day courtiers and experts.
Alberto Toscano
Goldsmiths College, London

The government has an uphill task in its tough second stage of reducing child poverty because, as Larry Elliott concludes (Economics, October 3), the entry of hundreds of millions in China and India into the global market is intensifying the downward pressure on wages in the tradable sectors of the economy. In its domestic policies, the government will have to run much harder to stay in the same place. And that is unlikely to bring success. Justice for children can only be achieved by linking national with international policies more emphatically.

The US former union chief Thomas Palley is quoted as favouring "a global system of core labour standards and worker rights". That is only part of the story. The separate, as well as family, economic and social rights of children have to be addressed. The chancellor has spoken of child benefit and child tax credits as the "twin foundations" of UK anti-poverty strategy. Since 1997 the government has concentrated on the credits. But there are serious problems of coverage, entitlement, incentives, social integration and administrative cost.

The new priority should be child benefit - more easily linked to the fulfilment of rights in the UK, but also in Europe and the developing world. A universal allowance helps in establishing fairness among taxpayers in different types of family and is simple to operate, and increased investment in children can be financed by acceptable new taxes - like Tobin's international currency-transactions tax.
Peter Townsend
Professor of international social policy, LSE