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Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Diversion
Sunday, October 31st, 2010What you see is what you get
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010Something that I talked to many people about over the years is their sense of how “dense” (in terms of urban buildup) the country is. This is a subject that can readily spill out into hard political argument—for example, a favoured tactic of those who oppose immigration is to argue that the country is “full” and that there is physically no room for more building. This doesn’t seem to me to be the case at all.
One idea that seems to have promise in explaining this is considering the effect of different forms of transport on people’s perception of their environment. I usually travel by train, and this gives me a certain perspective on the density of the environment. For example, leaving from an inner London train station on an inter-city train I am out of the built up area in around 15 minutes. For most other cities, this time period is around 5 minutes. Furthermore, mainline trains rarely go close to smaller villages. As a result, a journey like London to Edinburgh is 4½ hours of essential rurality; 15 minutes to leave London, then a few periods of 5-10 minutes in the outskirts of a city. Overall, the majority of the journey is spent in open country.
Contrast this with a car or coach journey. It can easily take a road vehicle an hour to get out of London, and many other cities take 20-30 minutes to get in or out of. This makes a huge difference to the perception of people as to how much land those cities occupy. If have your journey is taken up with getting into and out of cities, then you could easily imagine that the country is very dense and urban.
I would argue that my country-centric view from the train is more accurate, as can be seen by studying a map. Despite the UK being a very built-up country, the only map page that looks predominantly urban is that displaying London. Most of the rest show towns and cities sitting in a predominantly green, rural context.
There is an interesting study to be done to see if this is borne out across a large sample; could we correlate people’s estimates of the density of the country against their predominant modes of transport?
Apologies, Politicians and Frog-boiling
Friday, September 10th, 2010One of the things that disappointed me about Vince Cable’s dismal speech about science funding on Wednesday was the lack of any sense of contrition or apology. This seems to have become a common feature of political talk in the last few decades, a sunny pseudo-optimism even in the face of bad news, reminiscent of the caricature of the bad manager: “to enhance your career development we have decided to make you redundant”.
It is easy to see why this kind of speechcraft has developed. Admitting to some kind of problem or apologising for what you are about to do clearly lays the speechmaker open to a direct criticism—by speaking like this you are instantly setting out a potential negative side of the proposed course of action, or else seeming uncertain or indecisive. Nonetheless, I wonder if the longer-term cumulative effect is worse. By couching everything in the same terms, regardless of whether it is good or bad news, the audience gradually loses interest and engagement over months or years. I notice that when I am reading a newspaper and I come across an article that has a politician’s byline, I (with a few exceptions) skip the article even if the headline is of interest.
This seems to be an example of the idea of “frog boiling” discussed in Charles Handy’s book The Age of Unreason(ISBN 978-0099548317). He notes that, according to folk wisdom, a live frog placed in a pan of water that is increased gradually in temperature will let itself be boiled alive—at no point will the change in temperature be significant enough on a short enough timescale for the frog to notice. Similarly, in this example it seems as though the cost of avoiding short-term criticisms is a long-term decline in credibility.
This has been around for a while. I opposed the Iraq War, and, whilst I cannot think of an argument that would have convinced me that it was a good idea, I would have been somewhat pacified had the argument been presented as “we have spent long and hard thinking about this and the alternatives, and, whilst the option of war is not something that we opt for lightly, having considered carefully the options we have decided that regrettably it is something that we must do, for the following reasons”. I still wouldn’t have agreed with the decision, but I would have felt somewhat listened to, and it would have probably influenced my voting behaviour. As it was, I felt utterly ignored, and as a result decided that, regardless of anything, I would hold off voting for Labour for the next couple of elections.
This also seems to be one of many examples where a single principle (in this case, “avoid offering a criticism or negative in your speech”) has become completely dominant, to the point where almost no-one ignores it or bothers to assess the negative consequences of the principle.
Social Mobility
Friday, August 27th, 2010The so-called “university admissions crisis” this summer has led to a decent amount of discussion in the media about the notion of social mobility. This is a complex concept with a number of possible interpretations, see for example the recent article by Stefan Collini in the Guardian, which presents three different models for social mobility.
One model for social mobility is the notion the idea of “raising aspirations”—the idea that people, regardless of background, should aspire to whatever job (or similar) that they are capable of doing. This is often simplified to the notion that working class students should aspire towards middle class jobs.
There is an important tacet notion here, which is that children from working class backgrounds have a concept of the middle classes. I would argue that this is not an obvious assumption at all. I would argue that this isn’t really true—for many working class children, the class structure consists of “normal people” and “posh people”. The gulf between these two groups seems vast. Interestingly, a similar notion applies the other way, with upper class aristocrats seeing anyone who works for a living as part of a general “working class”.
This massive perceived gulf makes aspirations towards social mobility harder than they ought to be. Working class children might well neither see it either as realistic or desirable to aspire towards being “posh” but don’t really have any notion of there being anything intermediate that could be a reasonable aspiration.
Just Beyond the Horizon (1)
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010I’d like to make a collection of ideas that are just beyond the horizon of current discourse; ideas that aren’t deeply futuristic, but which are solidly outwith the sort of things that people talk about.
First example: the idea of politicians standing for office in a different country from where they are normally based. This comes from an idea that was bandied about a couple of years ago; that if Barack Obama has lost the US election, his next move could be to become the next leader of the UK Labour Party. This would be regarded as incomprehensible by almost everyone, but perhaps in the medium-term future (whatever that might mean; perhaps “a generation or two”) this might seem normal. For example, my parents still have a moral conniption at the idea that a UK company could be led by someone from overseas, and with the idea of footballers not born in the UK playing for UK teams; both things which are normal to my generation. If you are good at your game, you want to move to a country where that game is played at the highest level: if this is true in sport or business, why not in politics, which might be the most important game of all?