Inter-generational responsibility II

Well, the NHS bill will pass and the one thing that made me proud of the UK will be dismembered. A brief moment in human history where people decided to put their shared humanity above profit is over.

My reaction to this in itself has not been of anger - just depression. Depressed that the ideology of greed has won out, again. Depressed that all the evidence relating to efficacy and efficiency has been ignored by our lords and masters so that they can impose this ideology on everyone else, again. (And make a tidy profit, naturally). Depressed that the vast majority of my fellow citizens couldn't give a shit, again.

What has made me angry is that all of this is being forced upon younger people by a group that enjoyed all the benefits of the things that they are gleefully taking away from us. They had the free and comprehensive healthcare; they had the free education from nursery to post-graduate level; they had the rail system that had reasonable fares; they had the postal service that cost the same and gave the same service regardless of who you were or on what far-flung island you may have lived; they had the police service and forensic service that was dedicated to public service and not profit; they had a public library, whatever town they came from; they had a welfare safety-net that treated them somewhat like human-beings and not as defective work-drones to be vilified and abused; they had a pension system that would protect them from penury in old-age. All of this they had and all of this they have or will take away from those that have had the misfortune to have been born after them. They are loathsome.

Is that a foetus in your pocket?

The antics of a group calling themselves '40 Days for Life' has been flagged up a couple of times in the past few days - standing outside an abortion clinic and filming women going in*. A video of them doing this filming was then posted (how meta we all are!).

The thing that caught my attention in this latter video was the presentation case of model foetuses that one of the 40 Days people had, as it seemed to underscore a point about arguments that I find interesting**.

I think that pretty much everyone would agree that if your position in a debate has led to you possessing such a thing then your arguments for that position are not good ones***. You are going to convince no-one that your position is the correct one with them - you are merely going to convince them that you aren't quite right in the head.

This is an issue that applies across the political spectrum, however. If your arguments for gender equality rely on you describing the situation in the Western world as 'apartheid' then your argument is lost. If your argument against taxation of any sort is that it is 'slavery' then your argument is lost. If your argument against anthropogenic climate change is that it is a big socialist conspiracy then your argument is lost. If your argument for a government response to anthropogenic climate change is that the world is going to end then your argument is lost.

Yet cliques of people shout these positions at each other and at everyone else all the time. The already convinced get whipped up into states of even more fervent conviction and the unconvinced get pushed even further away from agreement. Nobody learns anything and the world becomes that little more an unpleasant place to live.

The point of an argument must surely be to convince those who don't currently agree with you that your position is the correct one. If the way that you chose to put your argument makes you look mental**** then nobody is going to be convinced of anything other than that you must be wrong. Yet a large slice of the political world (left and right) clamours for more extremism, more hyperbole, more stupid arguments. Will it ever clamour for more evidence, more logic, more polite debate? One can only wish.


* The filming of women going into an abortion clinic does strike me as intimidation. Standing with your placards is fine (although I think they should take a long hard look at themselves if they think that adding to the distress of already distressed women is the right thing to do), but sticking a camera in someone's face seems to cross a boundary into the criminal. That applies to anyone sticking a camera into someone's face without good reason, of course.
** It also added something to the list of products that make one marvel at human variety (along with things like the realistic horse penis dildo (life size), 'cheese product', and pretty much everything in Japan). Somewhere out there is a businessman who spotted a gap in the market for a presentation case filled with model fetuses. And somewhere out there (well, in China) is a factory filled with baffled people working their grinding 14hr shifts making them. It also gives a nice example of the commoditisation of life - even religious nut-jobbery can be packaged and sold.
*** Which is not to say that there aren't good arguments against abortion - it's an issue that has been debated in the philosophical literature for decades - just that these people aren't making them (do they even know of them?).
**** I use the term advisedly and as someone who is on the continuum side of 'mental illness'. The arguments that I cite do all have elements of what are classed as mental disorders in them - paranoia, narcissism, delusion. I see no more reason for calling someone who believes that aliens are controlling things ill than I do for calling someone who believes that CO2 is a socialist conspiracy ill, for example.

The NHS bill - MPs must vote against it, so help them make up their minds

The NHS bill is to be debated again in parliament very soon. The effect of this bill would be to alter then nature of our health system utterly. Please email your MP to ask them to attend the debate and vote against the bill.

You can find out who your MP is and send them a message at www.theyworkforyou.com. It only takes two minutes and could make your life, and the life of everyone else, better for decades to come.

To me the NHS is probably the best thing about our silly little country, a view reinforced by living in several countries where there is not the same provision in place. Just quite wonderful the NHS is doesn't sink in until you have had to muddle through with an unattended broken arm because someone made a mistake with your insurance forms.

If you are undecided as to whether or not you think the bill should be rejected, here are a few points to note:

The NHS as it is consistently comes out of academic studies as one of the best and most efficient healthcare systems in the world (e.g., http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42050/1/How_the_NHS_measures_up_to_other_health_systems_(LSERO).pdf).

The people who actually work in the NHS have resoundingly rejected the bill. The length of the list of professional bodies that have said they don't support it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic (http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/what-do-doctors-nurses-say-about-the-nhsbill).

The government's arguments about the bill being needed because of things such as poor cancer survival rates or steeply rising drug costs are based on lies or misrepresentations (e.g. http://justanotherbleedingblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-case-for-change.html). Similarly, their arguments based on falling productivity are false (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/13/nhs-productivity-risen-lansley-study).

Many of the MPs and Lords voting on the bill stand to profit directly from it through links with private healthcare and health insurance companies – 80 in the House of Lords alone (http://socialinvestigations.blogspot.com/2012/02/nhs-privatisation-compilation-of.html). These links have often gone less than honestly disclosed (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/29/lansley-ally-shareholding-lobby-firm). The political parties putting forward the bill also received hundreds of thousands of pounds from firms that will profit from the bill (see first link).

The bill, by opening up the NHS to competition, makes it subject to EU competition laws. This means that the currently primary responsibility of the Secretary of State to provide free and comprehensive healthcare to all will be superseded by the legal duty to go for the lowest bidder (http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/ldconf/).

The bill has been drafted in conjunction with those who are going to profit directly from it, including McKinsey, the company that consulted on the privatisation of the railways that we all know and love (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2099940/NHS-health-reforms-Extent-McKinsey--Companys-role-Andrew-Lansleys-proposals.html).

The government's whole approach to the issue has been dishonest and arrogant. (Inviting only the people that support you to meetings on the issue? Classy. http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/who-is-and-is-not-invited-to-camerons-emergen)

The bill is around 650 pages long and, in the words of Liberal Democrat, Simon Hughes, “badly written” – you would have to have a far greater faith in humanity than I to believe that there aren't some unintended (or indeed intended) bad consequences amongst all that bureaucratise. Remember the 'terrorism' laws that were written in such a way as to allow councils to spy on people's bin usage or for police to stop and search thousands of people for no reason?

The changes put forward in the bill were not in the election manifesto of any party. Nobody voted for this. Almost everything David Cameron said about the NHS before the election was a lie (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-camerons-top-ten-lies-692469).

So, make up your own mind and if you think that something should be done to preserve one of our finest institutions then...do something.

Inter-generational responsibility

I used to quite like Shirley Williams, based entirely on her usually sensible and interesting appearances on various BBC discussion programmes. My opinion of her has been utterly changed by her actions at the Lib Dem conference, with her working to preserve the NHS bill.

Having heard of that, I started going through this, becoming increasingly horrified as I did so. The point concerning competition law in relation to the proposed changes is not one that I had considered before - by changing the NHS from a state system to one that includes outside providers then it becomes liable to EU regulations on competition and government tendering. This then utterly changes the structure of the system - the responsibilities of the government become not to provide good quality health care to all but instead to get the lowest bidder and comply with the competition regulations. The result of this change will be to stop the NHS being the NHS.

A little question I want to raise, then, is the justice of this woman acting in a way that is entirely politically motivated but which will have huge detrimental effects for proceeding generations (and, indeed, those of us with hopefully quite a few decades left in us). As a matter of biology she will be dead in the not too distant future and so will not have to live with the effects of her short-term political posturing (not that someone as rich as her would anyway...) - surely such actions must be immoral, not to say shameful?

The Falklands - some silliness within the silliness

To paraphrase the author of this article on the Falklands in the London Review of Books, I can't say that I have ever had a strong opinion about said islands. The article (by Jenny Diski) did have two aspects that I found notable, however.

The first of these was the author's referencing of the manner in which Mrs Thatcher exploited the Falklands War in order to boost her re-election chances in '83. The jingoistic use of the islands in '83 is (as I read it) put forward as a debating point to reinforce the correctness of the current Argentine position – what is not considered, it seems, is the possibility that Mrs Kirchner is using the islands in an equally exploitative manner. The Argentine economic situation is not wholly rosy, with falling growth and rising inflation (up to 25% by some estimates) which the government has had to pull some dubious tricks in order to keep on top of (nationalising private pensions, allegedly cooking the inflation statistics, and so on). Conditions, then, not dissimilar to those faced by the Tories thirty years ago (or, indeed, by the Argentinian Junta at that time also). The use of international issues to gloss over the domestic is a classic political move - why only pick up on one side's use of it though? (Particularly if, as the author does, you are going to propose a potential, but very unlikely, use in the future by one side (i.e., Cameron doing a Thatcher) whilst ignoring the actual ongoing use by the other.) To do so marks one out as rather parochial to my eyes.

The second point is the credulous acceptance of the Argentinian position that the sea around the Falklands (i.e., the South Atlantic) are 'their shores'. This was interesting to me not so much because of the political particulars of this case but because of the presupposition of what could be described as nationalist essentialism.

Under international law the Falklands are not in Argentinian waters - to propose that they are, then, requires the idea that the boundaries of countries are somehow natural. The Falklands are closest to Argentina therefore they are a natural part of the entity that is 'Argentina', and that the distance makes them an unnatural part of 'Britain' (the islands forming Britain presumably being the natural extent of the latter entity).

However, nations are not natural entities - they are man-made constructs, the boundaries of which are entirely arbitrary. Thus a country that includes some islands thousands of miles away is no less unnatural or absurd than a country that stops at this river rather than that one (for example). This should be especially obvious in South America where all of the countries are fairly recent constructs of some cartographer's pen. The idea that nations are somehow natural entities is where nationalism in part stems from, and that dangerous ideology should be avoided as much as possible.

This is all not to say that there aren't arguments for the transfer of the Falklands to Argentina, just that they aren't based on silly things like the perceived righteousnesses of one party or the idea of national essences.

The Commonwealth - a charter for what?

I was asked to give my opinion on the proposed Charter for the Commonwealth this week (amusingly and inaccurately as a representative of 'the youth').

The first thing that strikes one about the whole thing is the utter ghastliness of the language and structure used - just the preamble reads like a cross between a child's acrostic and a PR man's wet-dream. An aesthetic insult, but also an unneeded signpost to the tensions inherent within the whole project. A couple of sentences of essentially inarguable content would seem far more sensible than the paragraph after paragraph of questionable drivel that they have gone for.

The body of the whole thing suffers from similar problems. Written in classic bureaucrat-ese, it lies somewhere between a political document intended to rouse and unite people towards a cause and a legal text. It seems to want to do both, and fails at each. The quasi-legalistic formulation makes it unreadable and irrelevant to a normal human being - not great qualities in a document defining an organisation already struggling for relevance. As a legal document it is a nightmare given the poor drafting and vague concepts asserted (some of which, such as 'cultural rights' are outright dangerous). To quote Lord Bingham, the rule of law requires that "the law be clear, accessible, and intelligible".

Of course, the sad elephant in the room of the legalistic formulation is that every word in the thing is utterly unenforceable as the Commonwealth is toothless (tusk-less?). That's a reality I wouldn't particularly wish to highlight were I writing the thing. Instead of following the established way of doing things - a way that appeals only those already within the political system - why do the drafters not go a bit freestyle? Write something short and simple that will make sense to anybody and which will allow most people to see why the ideas put forward may be relevant to them.

A further problem arises for the document out of the quasi-legal structure, namely the order of the points made. The numbering of the points is, I'm sure, not meant to reflect their importance, but in a symbolic document symbolism is probably pretty important. The rule of law, freedom of speech, these all come in at the double digits - economic development though, that's number two. I would be the last to discount the importance of economic development for the wellbeing of people; I would just argue that perhaps the rule of law and freedom of expression underly said development and, more importantly, are greater aims for humanity to at least give lip-service to.

On a slightly more political note, the formulation of said point two is really quite an unpleasant one. It prescribes economic development unrestrained by any principles. Is that really what they want the Commonwealth to stand for? China has had fantastic economic development, but does that trump the the obscene inequality in where the proceeds of that development have been concentrated, the organs farmed from prisoners, the homeless peasants, the burning monks? Economic growth that furthers the interests of the poor and the weak, that I can support. Or are we all still pretending to believe in trickle-down economics and the ability of bits of paper filled with 'rights' and 'aspirations' but backed up by no action to protect the downtrodden from the powerful?

That, though, is one of the major problems with the Commonwealth. There is an argument for it being a useful organisation by championing the common people of its member states, providing support and opportunities for them and protecting them by actively working to enforce the rule of law. As it is, though, I can't see it as anything more than a talking shop for powerful people to carve up their exploitation opportunities (with a few nice bits, like scholarships, stuck on the side). Point two highlights this as it provides an excuse for all the wicked things that the politicians and businessmen would like to do. "Sure we are abusing our people a little, but it is necessary so that we can have economic development..." (But I'm sure that never crossed the minds of the nice politicians and businessmen that drafted the thing even once.)

For all the talk of rights and rule of law in the Charter, until that talk is backed up by genuine action to make sure that every man and woman living within the Commonwealth is equal before the law then the thing is not even worth the paper it is written on.

On misogyny and the translation of swearing

Some years ago I helped my Polish flatmate a little to prepare for one of her English exams. In doing this I came across a marvellous worksheet detailing the usage of the word “fuck”. Until one sees this presented to someone trying to learn the language, one never quite realises the variety and complexity of this superficially simple word’s usage. Those four letters can have good meanings, bad meanings, erotic meanings, violent meanings, no meaning beyond quasi-punctuation (if you are from Glasgow anyway), mean excitement, mean fear...the list goes on. Then, at the end of the worksheet was the sage advice – “If you are not entirely certain that you usage of the word is correct, do not use it.”

This worksheet was brought to mind today as I read an article that has within it the use of the word “cunt”. In the article the author highlights her being called this as an obvious example of misogyny. Now, in the particular case that she describes it may well be, but this assertion that any calling of a woman a cunt is proof positive of the insulter’s hatred of women interested me as this word has been something of an issue for me following my moving to the other side of the Atlantic.

In Glasgow (at least amongst my contemporaries – my Gran wouldn’t have fitted into the following generalisation, for instance) the word “cunt” has similarly varied usage as the word “fuck”. It is not uncommon to hear it used in a friendly greeting (“alright, what yoose cunts up’tae?”), is quite often used in the course of the telling of a humorous story (“so there I was wi all these cunts looking at me wi just ma pants on”), and has made the transition to verb (to cunt something up). Importantly, the word, as I have experienced it, is essentially gender neutral. If anything I would say that it is used far more in reference to males (or mixed groups) than to females – I can’t really think of many times where I have heard it used in an angry context towards a woman. If someone is described as a cunt then one knows that they are an unpleasant individual, but my assumption would be likely to be that they were male.

Shifting to North America I discovered that, just as my flatmate had a learning curve to mount with “fuck”, so too did I with the now seemingly foreign “cunt”. Carrying on speaking as I would with friends at home, my use of “fuck” as a punctuation mark raised a few metaphorical murmurs, but my laissez faire use of “cunt” produced actual overt reactions from people. I quickly learned that there are none of the sophistications in usage over here, none of the contextual subtleties – it’s a bad word that is used to be bad, and, importantly, is used with far more specificity towards females. 

All well and good – I’ve tried to not use it and get far fewer dirty looks as a result (for that sin anyway). What really interested me though was my reaction when I first heard someone use it in anger towards a woman with the specific meaning that they were female and bad. Never in my life can I remember being shocked by language, but when I heard this there was indeed an element of the shocking to it – what was a perfectly normal word to me in the contexts that I experienced its usage had become extremely ugly in the context that it is used over here. 

Going back to the article, the author refers to an occasion where she is referred to as a cunt. She interprets this as an obvious example of misogyny – the person has called her a cunt therefore they hate women. In my Glasgow context I could never have understood how she could even begin to reach that conclusion (remembering that cunt is a widely used and essentially gender neutral term there). Having now understood the North American context a little better, the leap that she makes is somewhat less baffling – the word really is used to insult women specifically here. What could be described as my contextual empathy helped me see where she was coming from a little more (if not agree with her). 

Reading the comments on the article, though, I saw a need for some contextual empathy in the opposite direction. The necessary connection with using the word cunt and the user’s hatred of women was argued for strongly and seemed to be the default position of many of those commenting. From my Glasgow perspective, however, that assertion is simply nonsensical. The word has many meanings and many uses. One of these will no doubt be by a woman-hater to abuse a woman, but more far more likely is that it will be someone greeting their friends or telling a story in a pub. 

The groundbreaking conclusion, then, is that context is everything. Language is not rigid and words cannot be used as some sort of essentialist discriminator for people. Similarly, words in and of themselves are not ontologically simple – they cannot just be categorised as good or bad, hating or loving. The person calling someone a cunt may in fact be being affectionate towards them – their usage of the word does not define them as one thing or another (other than as either somewhat foul-mouthed or Glaswegian, perhaps). Similarly, they may indeed be insulting someone, but there is no necessary link between them using the term and their insults being motivated by that person’s ovaries. And then there are, sadly, those pathetic individuals who are using the word against women because they are women. Sorting these out from each other requires this contextual empathy, just as understanding a North American feminist’s reaction to the word does for me.