December 20, 2019

Two Strategies for Getting out of Britain if you’re Young and Scared

Posted by faustusnotes under Education, Japan, Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: |
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The future of British youth

Are you young, British, and scared about where your country is headed? Want to get out before it all goes down? Are you worried about what’s going to happen after you leave the EU, and expect everything to come crashing down? Don’t think that the healthcare situation is going to get better or even stay as bad as it is? Come from an ethnic minority and are getting increasingly uncomfortable about how non-white British are being treated? Are you poor and doubt you’ll ever be able to get into a good university and make a decent career, but don’t want to be stuck in an Amazon warehouse the rest of your life because working class work no longer pays in the UK? Did you have a future plan that involved living and working in Europe, and now you need a completely new plan?

Do you need to get out? This post outlines two strategies for a simple and easy way to get out of the UK, for people aged 16-21 who are either finishing high school or finishing university, and not sure what to do next. If you’re confident that even if Labour win the next presidential election things still aren’t going to get better, you might want to consider one of these two strategies. Both involve leaving the UK for Japan, and this post is to tell you how.

Strategy 1: English Teacher

Lots of young people don’t know about this, but there are lots of private English teaching companies in Japan that are always looking for staff from native English speaking countries to work in them. To get a job at an English teaching company in Japan you need three basic qualifications: you need to be a native speaker, you need a bachelor’s degree, and you should still be in possession of a face[1]. Most of the big English teaching companies do recruitment tours in the UK, but they usually also have open recruitment on their websites. You can find them pretty easily on google. For a company like Aeon you will go to a day-long recruitment seminar that doubles as an interview, and usually you’ll get a job offer as a result. You just need to turn up looking presentable, act like you care, and be willing to work with kids. You do not need to be able to speak Japanese or have any knowledge of Japanese culture (though knowing more about Japan than “manga!” and “geisha!” would be helpful probably).

Once you get the job the English teaching company will place you in a random city in Japan, pay for your airfare, and organize an apartment for you. This may be a share house or it may be a one room. You’ll get paid probably 200-250k yen per month (about 1500 – 2000 GBP[2]) and will have to pay taxes and health insurance from that. Health insurance is affordable, and it covers everything – and unlike the NHS, there are no waiting times to get into most straightforward treatments, doctors are same day without an appointment, and your kids won’t get their pneumonia treatments on the floor. It starts from the day you arrive in the country. Usually the company will help you set up bank account, phone etc., so even if you don’t speak Japanese you’ll be good to go. Once you arrive and get settled you can save a bit of money and after a few months you’ll be in a position to move somewhere you like, or change companies to a better one. If you speak Japanese because you were lucky enough to study it at high school you can maybe shift to a better job. But the key thing is you’ve landed in civilization, and you’ll be safe.

The salary isn’t great but it’s enough to save money if you don’t do dumb-arsed things, and you will be able to make occasional short trips in Asia on that salary. Japan is not an expensive country and especially if you aren’t in Tokyo or Osaka it’s a super cheap place to live. The working conditions at teaching companies aren’t great (typically some evening and weekend work, and your days off may not be guaranteed to be Saturday and Sunday) but they don’t have at-will firing over here and even though you’re foreign you have all the employment rights of a local, including unemployment benefits after a minimum period of time in the job. English teachers are generally considered to be the lowest of the low among foreigners living in Japan, for reasons you’ll understand within minutes of meeting your colleagues, but it’s better to be the lowest of the low in Japan than to be poor in modern Britain. So do it!

If you’re a high school student this option isn’t open to you (these companies require a bachelor’s degree) but you can aim for it: they don’t care where your degree is from so you can attend any university in the UK and still get accepted when you graduate. See my special notes for high school students below.

There are also similar companies in China and Korea (see my notes on other Asian countries below). There is also an Assistant Language Teacher program where you work in schools, which is apparently a little more demanding to get into. Google is your best friend here!

Strategy 2: Japan government scholarship

The Japanese government runs a large scholarship program for students from overseas, called the Japan Government Scholarship, also known as the MEXT scholarship or Monbusho scholarship. This is available for all education levels: undergraduate, masters or PhD. You apply through your embassy (the US website is here) about now. The scholarship pays your university fees, a monthly living allowance, and a return airfare. You can apply for this for your undergraduate studies, so you apply from high school and go straight to university study in Japan. Unless you are planning on studying certain topics (e.g. Japanese literature) you don’t need to be able to speak or read Japanese: they set a Japanese test during the application process but this is used to determine what level of training you need, not to screen you out. The amazing thing about MEXT scholarships is that they’re not very competitive – not many people know about them and not many people want to move to study in Japan – so even if you don’t have a stellar record you still have a chance. Also they don’t discriminate on race or economic background, as far as I know, and it’s a straight-up merit-based application. The allowance is not great – I think about 100k yen for undergrads and about 150k for postgrads – but you’ll get subsidized uni accommodation and won’t pay tax, so it’s perfectly viable. If you go for Masters you need to find a supervisor who teaches in English and isn’t an arsehole – this is a big challenge – but you can do it if you try. One big benefit of the MEXT scholarship at postgrad is you get a year as a “research student” during which you don’t study in the department you’ve chosen but instead just learn Japanese. You can get really good at Japanese this way if you pay attention. Another great thing is that once you’re in the MEXT program it’s easier to go to the next step – so you can go from undergraduate to masters to PhD. Theoretically you could go from 1st year undergraduate to the end of a post-doc on Japan government money, which would put you in Japan for 11 years and probably stand you in a good position for a permanent faculty position, which are like hens’ teeth in many western countries but quite common here. Also, if you do undergraduate study here you have a very good chance of being able to get a job in a Japanese company when you graduate, probably quite a good one, and build a career here.

The application period is usually about now so get busy!

An example: Oliver Greenstar’s Education and Career Path

As an example of the Monbusho scholarship in action, let me describe the career trajectory of the guy who plays Oliver Greenstar in my Coriolis campaign. Oliver studied in a relatively well-respected university in the UK, and came to Japan on a MEXT scholarship to do his masters at a prestigious university here. He spent a year as a research student, studying Japanese full time, before entering the master’s program. Despite being viciously bullied by his professor near the end of the degree he passed, published his master’s thesis, and obtained a job at a prestigious Japanese bank (one of the big ones). After his year of Japanese study his Japanese was good enough to do the interviews and applications in Japanese, and to work entirely in Japanese. He worked there for about two years before the work got boring, and then jumped ship to an international consultancy where his educational background, English and Japanese are in demand. He’s dating a nice girl from another part of Asia and living his best life in Tokyo. Basically he got into the international consultancy business without having to take any education loans, and got a second language skill as part of the deal. As a consultant for one of the big international companies he’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, but hey, he’s not in Bojo’s Britain so at least he’ll be able to face the firing in squad in good health.

Special notes for high school students

Note that if you’re finishing high school you can target all of these strategies now. Apply for the MEXT scholarship and if you don’t get it, go to a local university. Target one where you can study an Asian language, either Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Then apply for MEXT again at the end of your undergraduate, and if you don’t get it apply for an English-teaching company in whatever country you studied the language for. You can use this English teaching job as a base to find a job in whatever field you actually want to work, because you’ve got four years of language training under your belt and so should be able to speak the local language reasonably well. If this falls through you’re still okay because no matter how shit your degree was at that local polytechnic, a second language is a skill you can take to the bank. You can probably then find an okay job in a UK company targeting that country. This means you’re still trapped in a failing state, but at least your attempt to get out didn’t doom you to work at Brighton pier.

Remember, if you get the MEXT scholarship you’re going to graduate from university with no debt, proficient in a second language, and with a full career path in Japan likely right there in front of you.

Notes on other Asian countries

Most Asian countries have the English-teaching option available – for sure you can get to China or Korea if you don’t want to go to Japan, and they all have approximately the same requirements. All three countries now have functioning health insurance systems and decent public services. Obviously there are some issues about personal freedom in China and once the UK becomes a US vassal state you may find your British citizenship puts you a little danger there. Other countries like Thailand, Vietnam etc. also have English-teaching jobs but I’m not sure about the pay and conditions – you might find you can’t save money in these countries and it becomes a kind of trap. I don’t know. But any of the high-income Asian countries are good places to teach English.

China also offers scholarships for overseas students through the CSC. The Chinese education system is very good and if you get a degree at a good Chinese university you’re probably getting a better education than you’d expect in any British uni. I don’t know if the CSC offers scholarships to Brits or what the long-term consequences of that will be for your career in either country, but it could be worth investigating. You might also want to consider Singapore, which has excellent universities, but I have no idea how it works.

A note on the long-term risks of English teaching

You can make a life time career as an English teacher in Japan but it won’t be well paid and you’ll remain permanently lower middle class, which is not a big deal over here (Japan is an equitable country) but also not the best working life to pursue. But most importantly, if you spend more than a few years as an English teacher straight out of uni, your employability in your home country will take a nose dive, because you have no skills or experience relevant to a real job. So you need to make an exit plan if you want to return to the west. One option is to get an English as a second language (ESL) masters (you can do this online) and try to move into teaching English at uni, which pays slightly more and has a bit more prestige, but is a slightly riskier career (it can mean a permanent career as an adjunct, which is tough). Another option is to try and jump ship to a real company using whatever skills you’ve got but this can take time and may not lead you to a good place. If your Japanese is good you can maybe shift to being a standard office worker, but if you have no Japanese you need to bear in mind that English teaching is a trap if you do it for more than a few years. Bear in mind that Japan is aging fast, the pool of available workers is dropping in size, and as time goes on opportunities for foreigners here (even foreigners with weak language skills) are only going to grow. Also contrary to what you’ve heard (see below) Japan is becoming more and more open and welcoming to foreigners, even under supposedly militarist Prime Minister Abe, so things will just get easier as time passes. It’s worth risking for a year or two to try and build an escape plan, and if it doesn’t work out what have you lost? Just be ready to jump out if you see that trap closing before it’s too late.

Why Japan?

I’m recommending this escape plan because I know Japan: I live here and I know it’s a good place to live. You’ve probably heard that it’s expensive, treats foreigners badly and is very inward-looking. None of this is true. You’re not going to experience much racism at all, if you’re a woman you’re not going to get sexually assaulted on the train, and it’s not an expensive place to live. Rent is affordable even in Tokyo on an English teacher’s wage, your health insurance is fixed at a small proportion of your salary and is always affordable, food is good and cheap, and you can live a good life here even on low wages.

If you live in Japan you will be safe, you will be healthy, and you’ll be able to build a life for yourself even on a low income. If you want to live here long term you’ll need to learn the language (which is boring and bothersome to do); you may find that as a foreigner you are not going to be able to ascend to the peak of your career here no matter what it is. It may be hard for you to buy a place here either because your low salary precludes saving a lot of money for a deposit, or the bank won’t loan you money if you don’t have permanent residency. You won’t be able to afford to go back to the UK a lot unless you get out of the English teaching trade, and you will be restricted to short visits to nearby Asian countries. You’ll probably have to work hard and if you choose the wrong company after university (or the wrong post-graduate supervisor) you’ll be bullied and overworked. These are risks of moving here! But you’ll definitely have healthcare, your country won’t be collapsing around you, if you’re a woman you can walk safely at night no matter what time or how deserted the streets, and no matter what you earn people will show you the respect you deserve as a human being. And the government is not going crazy, nor will it.

So if you’re young and scared and worried about your future in Britain, and you really want to get out, consider these two strategies, and get out while you still can.

[Note: I wrote this a few months ago for Americans worried about what’s happening there, but in light of the coming Brexit storm I thought young Brits might want the same advice. I’ve copy-pasted that advice, added the example, and changed the bitchy asides to suit the political climate of your benighted isles].

fn1: Actually I’m not sure if they care about whether you have a face. But just to be sure, apply now before some lunatic gets a chance to stab you in the face.

fn2: or 30000GBP after Brexit works its magic on the pound

 

December 17, 2019

Labour did not Lose Because of Remain Seats

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, off-topic ranting, Science | Tags: , , |
[3] Comments 

Some commentators on Twitter and in the media are saying that Labour lost the 2019 General Election because it lost too many votes to remain parties, and that failure to retain support from remainers was the problem. Angry Labour activists on Twitter have been listing off the remain seats that were lost, and saying that a strong remain strategy would have saved the party.

This is completely wrong, and I will show this using data from the 2019 election and the 2016 referendum.

Methods

First I used the dataset of constituency-level results I assembled over the weekend, which contains results for 339 constituencies, semi-randomly sampled from the list of all constituencies on the BBC election site and linked to leave voting data from the 2016 EU referendum. The detailed methodology for assembling this dataset is given here. I then assembled a separate data set of only the seats Labour lost, using this handy (but not quite alphabetical) guide from the Metro newspaper. I merged these with EU referendum data.

Using the full constituency data set, I created a logistic regression model of probability of retaining a seat against constituency leave vote, for all the seats that were held by Labour at the 2017 election. I plotted the predicted probability of losing a seat against the proportion of the population in that seat. Then, I conducted a crosstabs and chi-squared test for the seats held by Labour in 2017, showing the probability of losing a seat in 2019 by whether or not it was a leave-voting constituency. I defined a “leave-voting constituency” as any constituency voting above the median leave vote (which was 53.55).

Next, using the data set of the 59 constituencies Labour lost, I calculated the mean vote in this set of constituencies, and the proportion of constituencies that were leave-voting constituencies. I compared this with data for all Labour held seats that were not lost in the 2019 election.

Results

In my constituency data set there were 142 seats held by Labour in the 2017 election, of which 30 (21%) were lost in the 2019 election. Figure 1 shows the cross tabulation of leave seats with seats Labour held in 2019[1].

Figure 1: (Hideously ugly) cross tabulation of Labour-held seats by whether those seats voted leave

As can be seen, 92% of remain seats were held, compared to 66% of leave seats. This is extremely statistically significant (chi-squared statistic 14.35, p<0.001). That’s a nasty sign that the main risk of losing a seat was that it was a leave seat, not a remain seat.

We can show this explicitly using logistic regression. Figure 2 shows the predicted probability of a seat being held by Labour in 2019, plotted against the proportion of the seat that voted to leave in the EU referendum. The red dots on this figure indicate whether it was held by Labour in 2019: red dots on the top of the figure are seats retained, plotted at the value of their leave vote; red dots at the bottom are seats that were lost, plotted at the value of their leave vote.

Figure 2: Probability of losing a seat in 2019 by leave vote

This model was highly significant, and showed that every 1% point in the leave vote reduced the odds of Labour holding the seat by 7%. Note that this figure includes Scotland, so the results might be slightly different if only England were considered, but even the strongest remain-voting seat that was lost – even were it in Scotland – is well above the remain vote of some seats that were held. This model shows that at the extreme end of the leave spectrum, up above 60% of the electorate voting for leave, the probability that Labour retained the seat dropped to around 50%. That’s terrible!

My constituency data set contains only 142 Labour seats, and 30 seats that were lost, but actually 59 seats were lost. Since my data set is semi-random, there is a small chance that it will misrepresent the results. So I checked with the dataset of all seats that were lost. This data set contains 59 seats. Here are some basic facts about this data set, and comparisons with the constituency data set and the full list of Labour-held seats:

  • Labour lost 14 remain-voting seats (24% of all seats lost) and 45 leave-voting seats (76%). This is very similar to my crosstabs, where 24 of 30 seats lost (80%) were leave
  • The average leave vote in the 59 seats that were lost was 57.7%, slightly above the median, ranging from 31.2 – 71.4%.
  • In contrast, the average leave vote in the 112 seats in my constituency data set that Labour held was 48.8%, ranging from 20.5 – 72.8%
  • The average leave vote in all seats held by Labour going into this election was 51.1%, ranging from 20.5 – 72.8%

This is clear statistical evidence that Labour went into this election having a slightly remain-leaning set of constituencies, primarily lost leave-voting constituencies, and emerged from the election even more remain-focused than when it went in.

Conclusion

Labour did not lose this election because of a large swing in votes to the remain parties. It did not lose a large number of remain-voting seats, but was decimated in the leave-voting areas. Labour held on to all of its most heavily remain-focused seats. In attempting to appeal to both leavers and remainers, Labour managed to retain most of the remainers and lose a lot more leavers. Labour emerged from this election even more remain-focused than it was when it went in[2]. There are some very simple reasons for this:

  • The swing to the Tories and away from Labour was much bigger in leave-voting seats
  • The Brexit party was only active in Labour-held seats, and got its largest vote share in the strongly leave seats
  • The swing to the Lib Dems was much less closely related to the leave vote than was the swing away from Labour (see my last blog post, Figure 4)
  • The intensity of the relationship between leave voting and swinging to Lib Dems was lower in Labour-held seats than Tory-held seats (see my last blog post, Figure 4)

In trying to please both sides of the Brexit divide, Labour failed to satisfy the leavers. Pro-brexit Labour voters were simply much, much more committed to Brexit than pro-remain Labour voters were to remain, and so Labour lost the leave areas. There are lots of remainers out there who want to claim that remain is wot did it, but they are simply wrong. I’m super pro-remain myself, but the data makes it very clear: British Labour voters want to leave, and they were willing to pack in their allegiance to the Labour movement to get that done. Whatever you might think of their politics, that is the simple hard fact of the electorates Labour represented.

It’s worth noting that in 2017 Corbyn campaigned on Brexit. The Labour manifesto explicitly accepted Brexit and said Labour would negotiate and leave. At that election Labour won a historically high share for a party in opposition, a higher share of the vote in fact than Blair won in 2005 (when he retained government). In that election they came within a bees’ dick of winning government, and in that period before Corbyn accepted the compromise of a second referendum two Tory PMs left, and Johnson only held onto government by the skin of his teeth (recall there was talk of a unity government). Blair and Cameron have both shown it’s possible to hold government with 35% of the vote, so it’s perfectly possible that had Corbyn gone into this election on a leave platform he would have seen a much smaller swing against him, and could have won it. We don’t know, but on the basis of all the evidence here it seems like the second referendum policy was a disaster for Labour.

This gives two clear lessons for Labour to take in over the next few years and as they choose a new leader:

  1. Labour’s policies and Corbyn were not the primary problem, and dropping them is not going to help. Obviously Corbyn is going to go, it’s traditional, but the manifesto’s policies were not the problem. The Labour right is going to push for the party to throw the Corbyn years down the memory hole (in today’s Guardian we have Suzanne Moore begging for a vet to “sedate” the Corbyn supporters!), because they are and have always been intent on fighting these genuinely left wing policies. Ignore them, and stick to the real Labour platform that will really help the country as it recovers from the horrors of this Tory leadership
  2. Labour – and the British left generally – have to get over Brexit. There is no option left to remain, and no chance it will ever happen now. The Labour right want to claim that Corbyn doesn’t understand working class voters but his original policy – of full-throated Lexit – was much more in tune with what ordinary working class Labour supporters want than anything that the Blairist rump have to say. The debate now for Labour has to be about the type of Brexit, and how to make it work. This means fighting Johnson’s bullshit deal, but on the basis that they can make a better one – obviously this doesn’t matter now but it is the job of the opposition to hold the government to account, and they should do so from the clear perspective of their voters, that Brexit has to happen. This is going to be hard for some of the urban remainers from the south and east, but that’s life if you’re a politician. Further talk of remain just has to end

For 20 years the EU was a thorn in the Tory side, constantly causing them trouble. Cameron ripped that thorn out with this referendum, and although May spent some time botching the healing process Johnson has patched up the damage and squeezed out the last remainer pus from the Tory body politic. If Labour don’t face the reality of Brexit and what it did to this party at the 2019 election, then the issue will fester for them – as it did over so many years for the Tories – and hold them back just as it did the Tories. It is time for Britain to move on from Brexit, and for the Labour movement to accept the reality of the disaster that is coming. Once people realize how Johnson’s Brexit has screwed them, they will turn to Labour – and Labour needs to be ready with a transformative, genuinely left wing agenda in order to recapture its heartland and do what is right for working people. Corbyn was right about Brexit, right about the policies Britain needs, and after he is gone he will still be right about what has to be done. Don’t repudiate those lessons, and in the process destroy the movement.

fn1: My apologies for pasting this as a picture directly copied from Stata, instead of making a nice pretty table – I hate it when people do this but it’s late and I hate making tables in html. Stata offers an option to copy as html but it doesn’t work. Sorry!

fn2: This final conclusion is shakey because it depends on my constituency data set, and I don’t know if it would still be true once all the remaining Labour-held seats are entered into the dataset. I think it will, but there’s a chance the final data set will end up the same level of leaviness as the 2017 constituencies, statistically speaking. But this conclusion is not a very important one anyway, so it doesn’t matter if it isn’t held up by the full dataset.

 

December 15, 2019

The Labour 2019 Election Loss was Driven by Brexit: Statistical Analysis of Election Results

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, Reviews, Science | Tags: , , , |
[3] Comments 

The UK General Election has just finished, with Labour losing badly to Boris Johnson’s Brexit-fetishizing Tories. The media are describing Labour’s loss as the worst since 1935, which is true if you look at seats lost but not at the vote – with 32.2% of the vote share it’s the best result for a losing Labour party since 1992, and although the swing against Labour was very large – 7.2% – this is partly because the previous share of the vote that Labour achieved, at 40%, was phenomenally high – Blair only beat 40% once, and many post-war Labour governments have ruled a majority with a much lower share of the vote than Corbyn achieved in 2017.

In the early post-election recriminations people are laying the fault entirely at the feet of Corbyn and the Labour manifesto, but I’m not convinced that a different leader or a less radical manifesto could have helped. The 2019 election was a historic election, similar to the 1945 election, with a huge decision about the future of the UK to be made and a major recent event hanging over the election. In the 1945 election the huge decision to be taken was the establishment of the modern welfare state, and the recent event was the war. In the 2019 election the decision is Brexit, and the EU referendum is the major event overshadowing the election.

This Brexit issue overshadowed the whole election, and in this blog post I will show that it had a huge impact on the Labour vote, which made this election almost impossible for the Labour party to lose. I will show this using a statistical analysis of 2019 election results.

Methods

I obtained 2017 election results and 2015 EU Referendum results from the UK Parliamentary Research Briefings website. I merged these data sets together using ONS ID (the unique number that identifies parliamentary constituencies) so that I had the percentage of each constituency that voted leave in 2016, and their 2017 election results, in one dataset. I then conducted a semi-random sample of the 2019 General Election results using the BBC Election results website. The sample was semi-random because there is no publicly available official dataset at this stage, so I had to enter them by hand looking at each constituency in turn on the BBC website[1]. I started by ordering my dataset by constituency name from A-Z and working sequentially through them on the assumption that I have limitless patience and 10 hours of my life to give to this, but gave up somewhere around “D” and took a random sample of another 100 or so constituencies. Because names are approximately random, this means I have 200 or so approximately random samples from the first stage, and another 100 or so genuinely random samples from the second stage. I may have had a hangover, but there are limits to how much time and effort I am willing to put into rescuing the UK Labour party from bad analysis!

I dropped Northern Ireland from my analysis because a) I don’t understand their political parties b) Sinn Fein’s decision not to enter parliament is weird and c) Northern Ireland should be part of Ireland, not the UK. I kept Scotland but excluded it from some of my figures (see specific figures for more details). I excluded the Speaker’s seat (which was Labour) from analyses of the Labour swing because there was no opponent so the swing was weird; I also excluded another Labour seat with a very high positive swing from these analyses, and dropped one Conservative seat (Buckingham) with the same problem.

Once I had done this I then calculated the swing against Labour, Lib Dems and Tories by subtracting their 2017 result from their 2019 result. I confirmed this works by comparing calculated Labour swing with actual Labour swing from the BBC website (which I entered as I went through my semi-random sampling). I obtained Brexit party vote shares from the BBC website, leaving this field blank if the Brexit party did not stand a candidate[2].

I then conducted several linear regressions of the swing:

  • A linear regression of conservative party swing as a function of leave vote in the EU Referendum
  • A linear regression of Labour party swing as a function of leave vote in the EU Referendum
  • A linear regression of Lib Dem swing as a function of leave vote in the EU Referendum
  • A linear regression of Labour party swing as a function of Brexit party vote

For all regressions I tested a quadratic term in leave vote, and I included a term for whether the constituency was in Scotland or Wales. I included a term for whether or not the constituency experienced a Brexit party challenge in the first three regressions, and tested an interaction with leave vote. I dropped any non-significant terms in order of their non-significance to get the best model. I also centered the EU referendum vote at its median (53.5% of people voting to leave), so that the constant term in all linear regressions measured the swing against the party in question in the median leave-voting seat.

I then obtained predicted values from all regressions to include in the plots of the swing against the leave vote or the Brexit party vote. Brexit party vote is effectively being used here as a proxy for Labour voters’ decision to abandon Labour over Brexit. I did not model the relationship between swing against Labour and Brexit vote because I think this swing is the Brexit party’s fault, but because I expect it represents the likelihood that Labour voters abandoned Labour over Brexit. One might suppose they abandoned Labour for Tory over general policy, or because they respect BoJo, but the only reason for abandoning to the Brexit party is Brexit, and so this acts a proxy for the possibility that they also jumped ship to the Tory party over Brexit. Because the Brexit party only stood candidates in Labour-held constituencies it is impossible to test what might have happened if the Brexit party stood against a Tory incumbent.

Results

I had data on 341 constituencies, just over half of all eligible constituencies. Among these 341 constituencies 146 (43%) had a Brexit party challenger. Of the 142 seats that were Labour held in 2017, 112 (79%) survived to be Labour-held in 2019. None of the 199 non Labour-held seats in my dataset switched to Labour in 2019. The mean swing against Labour in seats it held was 8.7%, and the mean swing against it in seats it did not hold was 7.5%.

Let us consider the relationship between the swing against Labour and the Brexit vote in seats where it was challenged by this party. Figure 1 shows the swing against Labour in England plotted against the proportion of the vote that the Brexit party won, with the predicted trend in the swing from my final regression model. The final regression model explained 54% of the variation in the swing against Labour, included a quadratic term for the Brexit vote, and included significant terms for Scotland (a 3.5% larger swing against Labour) and Wales (a 2.2% smaller swing against Labour). The intercept term in this model was -3.8, which indicates that in the absence of a Brexit party challenge these seats would have seen a mean swing against Labour of about 3.8% (95% confidence interval 2.6% to 5.0%). In this counter-factual[3], most of these seats would not have changed hands if there was no Brexit party challenge.

Figure 1: Russian Ratfuckery, in its most exquisite form

It is very clear from Figure 1 that the Brexit party had a massive impact on the Labour vote, pulling it down by a huge amount in the seats where they ran a candidate. The Brexit party did not win a single seat in this election, but they cost Labour a lot of seats. Once again, Farage had a huge impact on British politics without ever sitting in parliament. In some of the northern seats the Brexit party got a huge share of the vote, and it is very likely that almost all of it came from Labour. In the seats with a middling Brexit vote, between perhaps 5 and 15% of the total vote, Labour lost between 10 and 20% of the vote share. I think this is a strong indicator that Labour was bleeding votes due to Brexit.

We can confirm this by examining the relationship between the swing against Labour and the proportion of the electorate who voted for leave in the 2016 EU referendum. Figure 2 shows the swing against Labour in England and Wales plotted against the leave vote, separately for constituencies with a Brexit party challenger (red) and those without a Brexit party challenger (blue). Most seats with a Brexit party challenger were Labour seats, while those without a challenger were mostly Tory. The blue and red lines show the predicted swing against Labour from my linear regression model, which explains 39% of the variation in the swing against Labour. This model had a term for Scotland (which had a 2.4% larger swing against Labour), a quadratic term for the leave vote, and an additional effect on the swing due to the leave vote in areas with a Brexit challenger. In the median 2016 EU referendum leave-voting constituency, the swing against Labour was 6.5%, and this was 2.1% higher in seats with a Brexit challenger.

Figure 2: Relationship between the swing against Labour and the leave vote

It is clear from Figure 2 that the swing against Labour was smaller in seats with a Brexit party challenger that voted to remain in the EU. In seats not held by Labour, the swing against Labour was larger in seats that were either strong leave-voting seats or strong remain seats. In these seats – the seats Labour had to win to win government – Labour was being squeezed in both strongly remain and strongly leave seats. In the seats Labour already held (mostly with a Brexit party challenger), or that it did not hold but faced a Brexit party challenger and a Lib Dem or SNP incumbent, the party faced intense pressure due to brexit. In seats it held that had a large leave vote Labour was completely smashed. These seats are mostly in the famed “red wall”, the northern seats that Labour has always been able to rely on. Note the largest positive swing to Labour occurred at about the median leave vote, between 45 and 55.

An interesting phenomenon in this election is the failure of the conservatives to gain a large swing from Labour. The national swing against Labour was 7.9%, but the conservatives only gained a 1.2% swing. The primary beneficiaries of that swing were the Lib Dems and the Brexit party. Of course, these national figures hide major variations within constituencies, which are easy to see if we look at the swing to the Tories at the constituency level. Figure 3 shows the swing to/against the conservatives in England, plotted against the leave vote in the 2016 EU referendum. Red points are points where there is a Brexit party challenger, and blue points are those without a Brexit party challenger (mostly Tory-held seats) At the median leave vote my model estimated a swing to the Tories of 1.3%, with a further swing to them of 1.4% in Wales. This model included a quadratic term in the leave vote, and explained 57% of the variance in the Tory swing.

Figure 3: Observed and predicted swing to the conservative party, by EU referendum leave vote

It is noteworthy that in the seats that voted to remain the Tories experienced a swing against them of as much as 10%, but in the strong leave-voting seats they experienced a huge swing to them. This swing was larger in seats without a Brexit party challenger, presumably because there was no Brexit party to absorb the leave sentiment, but even in pro-leave constituencies with a Brexit party challenger the Tories gained a very large swing. Note, however, that in some pro-leave seats there was a swing against the Tories where there was a Brexit party challenger. These were Labour seats that saw all their pro-leave vote go to the Brexit party. But in pro-leave seats with no Brexit party challenger – the seats that Labour needed to win to form government – there was a consistent large swing to the Tories. We again see here the value of Farage’s decision to stand candidates only in Labour seats.

Finally let us consider the role of the Liberal Democrats, the greatest frauds in modern politics, in destroying the UK. Figure 4 shows the swing to or against the Lib Dems in England, plotted against the 2016 EU referendum leave vote, with the predicted swing from my regression model. Again, red points are for seats with a Brexit party challenger (Labour- or Lib Dem-held seats) and blue points are for seats without a Brexit party challenger (mostly Tory-held seats). This model has no quadratic term for the leave vote: in non-Brexit party seats every percentage point increase in the leave vote was associated with a swing against Lib Dems of 0.2%, but in seats with a Brexit party challenger this swing was only 0.1%. At the median leave vote the Lib Dems experienced a swing towards them of 6.0%, reducing to 2.8% in seats without a Brexit party challenger. Scotland and Wales saw large reductions in this swing to the Lib Dems, of 5.3% in Scotland and 2.1% in Wales. Basically, the Lib Dems performed best in Labour seats in England that voted to remain in 2016. In these seats the swing against the Labour party was often almost entirely towards the Lib Dems. This model explained only 29% of the variance in the swing, probably because the Lib Dems win by very local-specific campaigns, not so strongly affected by national factors.

Figure 4: Look at these arseholes spoiling the Labour vote

Note that in some Tory-held remain seats (the blue dots to the left of the figure) the Lib Dems had huge swings to them, but in many seats they did not win. A good example of this is Cities of London and Westminster, which was Tory before this election and did not have a Brexit Party challenger. The Lib Dems fielded Chuka Umunna, a class traitor who abandoned Labour to join TIG, then jumped ship from them to join the Lib Dems, natural home of fickle and untrustworthy people. He won 30.7% of the vote, scoring a swing to the Lib Dems of 19.6%. This enabled the Tories to hold this seat with just 39.9% of the vote, against Labour’s 27.2%. Had he not stood, it is possible that a large proportion of that vote might have gone to Labour. In the seat he used to represent for Labour, Streatham, Labour held on despite a surge of 17.0% in the Lib Dem vote (this seat is not in my data set so you can’t find it in Figure 4). Cities of London and Westminster voted 28.1% leave in the EU referendum, making it one of the least leave-voting seats in the country; Streatham voted 20.5% leave, making it the second least Brexity in the country. Thanks to Chuka’s “efforts”, the citizens of both these seats will now have to leave the EU.

What it all means

These figures and the associated regression models should make very clear that Labour was screwed by Brexit. The Tories scored huge swings in pro-leave seats, which shored up their vote in seats that Labour had to win and forced Labour to defend seats it could normally rely on. Worse still, Farage’s decision to stand Brexit party candidates only in Labour seats meant that Labour lost large numbers of voters to this no-good Russian con-job, while also facing defection to the Tories. At the remain end the Lib Dems were stealing their votes, so they were bleeding votes at both ends of the leave spectrum. The only way they could have averted this problem would have been to go to the election with a full-throated Brexit strategy – a Lexit manifesto – which would have shored up the red wall and ensured they didn’t lose many of those seats. However, even if this had been successful in the North, it would have cost seats in the cities, where the Lib Dems would have stolen many seats. This is worse than useless, since we know from experience that if they have the choice the Lib Dems will betray the country to the Tories, and will never form a government with Labour.

I don’t think a Lexit strategy would even have been that successful. Just as when Labour goes full racist, the people they’re trying to win back just don’t believe it, and vote for the Tories anyway. Had Corbyn gone to the election with a full-throated Lexit manifesto a lot of the people he was trying to convince would have assumed he was lying, and he would have lost the northern voters anyway, at the cost of the cities and the youth vote. Jo Swinson truly could have become PM!

Given this squeeze I think Corbyn made a sensible decision to run on a big left-wing manifesto and try to make the election about something other than Brexit. This was especially important given the Labour position on Brexit was consistently misrepresented by the media. I saw multiple media figures on Twitter claiming Labour did not support free movement (they did; it was in the manifesto) and saying their position on Brexit was “too complicated” (it wasn’t: they were going to negotiate a good deal and put it to a referendum). Given this their best bet was to try and turn the debate to one on honesty, the NHS, poverty and inequality. I think this is wise messaging and important: the UK is heading into the abyss, and at some point the Labour party is going to have to save the UK from ruin, so why not make this point at a time when you can’t win the Brexit debate?

I think it’s also important to consider what would happen if the party had made a choice to go full Remain or full Lexit. In the former case they’re abandoning their northern seats, telling them that they don’t care about their concerns and won’t listen to their democratic voice. In the latter case they’re abandoning young people, who are much more likely to be Labour supporters, and telling them they will destroy their future. Given that the future is all that young people in the UK have, this is political suicide. The only way to square this circle is to present a policy that offers hope to both these core groups. Labour is the party of the urban poor, industrial labour and young people, but when these three constituencies have radically different demands on the overwhelming issue of the time it’s impossible for Labour to win.

If Labour failed in this election I think it was in failing to convince the electorate of the value of their Brexit policy. But given they weren’t able to express it without the media mangling it and misrepresenting it, and given how dishonest and vicious the campaign was, I don’t see how any other leader could have done better. Even if you credit the notion that Corbyn is hugely unpopular, and assume some part of the swing was hatred of this genuinely decent guy, it makes no difference: the figures I’ve shown here make clear that Labour were fucked no matter who their leader was and what their manifesto was. This was a Brexit election, and the Tories are obviously the party of Brexit.

Three years after he exploded the Brexit bomb, and 30 years after he face-fucked a dead pig so he could win Johnson’s approval, David Cameron has achieved what he originally intended: the destruction of the Labour party by unleashing a racist monster in the UK. History will not judge any of these awful men well.

Where to now for the Labour party?

I think the Labour party should keep Corbyn and keep his manifesto. They aren’t going to win with another Blairist monstrosity – Ed Milliband tried that in 2015 and was sunk by a viciously anti-semitic media campaign that portrayed him as a Jewish communist with dual loyalties[4] who can’t eat a bacon sandwich. By the time the next election comes around the world is going to be desperate, trapped in the throes of global warming and looking for new ways out. Why throw away what the country needs? This election Labour’s manifesto was the best and most inspiring left-wing project in the UK for 30 years, and it was right. Jeremy Corbyn is right – he won the arguments. He just couldn’t beat Brexit.

I have seen rumours that some on the Labour right were cheering when MPs lost their seats. I have seen in the media and on Twitter Corbyn’s old enemies in the Labour party gloating over the Tory victory, laughing at the Labour movement’s disappointment and salivating at their chance to retake control of the party. Perhaps they envisage another illegal war, where they can kill another million muslims? Or perhaps they look forward to palling around with rich non-doms, being “intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich”. Oh, the larks! These people are not part of the labour movement. They’re scabs, and their obvious joy at this defeat is disgusting. They need to leave the movement, and leave it to those British people who actually want to save the country from ruin. During this period of reflection, we should be clear: it was Brexit that defeated Labour at this election, and the direction it was headed under Corbyn is the only future for Britain other than ruin. So these scabs need to get out of the party and leave it for people who actually care about the future of the UK and the future of the world.

Once Brexit is past, and these class traitors are out of the labour movement, we can hold the Tories responsible for what they have done. We couldn’t beat Brexit, but we can hold its architects responsible for the great evil they have perpetrated on ordinary British people.

fn1: It’s okay, I had a hangover and nothing better to do on Saturday

fn2: Or “chump”, to use the preferred terminology for these sad-sacks

fn3: Which is bullshit

fn4: Oh the irony …

 

December 12, 2018

Brexiters get their First Taste of “Taking Back Control”

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Today’s Guardian reports that Theresa May had to suddenly jet off to Europe to plead for new concessions on her Brexit deal, as the wreckers and traitors in her party circle and prepare for a leadership challenge. Within a day of her postponing the meaningful vote in parliament, Europe’s leaders are in the press singing from the same song sheet, that there will be no renegotiations or concessions, and although they’ll offer “explainers” to help her politically, they are preparing for a no-deal brexit. This is not the first time that the UK leadership have had their efforts rebuffed – David Davis failed to enforce multiple red lines – but it is a stark example of the challenge of managing an independent foreign and trade policy when you run a middling-size country with a fading service economy. This is Britain’s first example of what “take back control” really means.

I think a majority (or at least a large minority) of Britons either grew up after the UK entered the union or were too young to remember what life was like before EU membership. For most Britons, the last time their nation had full “control” of its foreign and trade policy it was an empire, with considerable power and influence globally and large captive markets in the colonies where it could rely on economic support. Naturally, if your history as an independent nation was one of imperial smash-and-grab policies you will have a rose-tinted vision of the benefits of full “control”. But modern Britain is not an empire and never will be, and it would be wise for Britain’s brexiteers to consider what it really means to “take back control” when your nation doesn’t have a huge population and is not an industrial giant. The reality is that as of next year Britain is going to be a nation of 60 million people with a hollowed-out industrial base, a weak agricultural sector and a limited natural resource base. What does it mean to “take back control” for such a country? Fortunately, we have examples, and it might be wise for Britain’s brexiteers to look at how those exemplars of independence achieved success.

I grew up in a country that was not part of any union and had to make its own way in the world, Australia. In order to be a successful independent modern nation Australia went through a 15 year period of reform, starting with Hawke’s Labor party grabbing power in 1983 and ending with the imposition of the GST in 1998. During that time we saw waves of reform. Universal health coverage was introduced (1984), labour reform happened (1983 – 1991), superannuation reformed (the mid-80s and early 90s), tariff barriers were removed, sclerotic industries were modernized and reformed (e.g the dairy industry), education reform was constant and oriented towards making it an export market, the relationship between federal and state governments was modernized and changed, migration was loosened and reformed, tax reform happened in several steps, and through it all we had a long, difficult and often frustrating conversation about the extermination and dispossession that underpinned much of our economic success. We also saw a shift in perspective from our old colonial masters to Asia, with sometimes fraught and complex negotiations with our Asian neighbours. By 1996 commentators spoke of the Australian people’s “reform fatigue”, a phrase I remember well, and this constant shifting of the ground on which older Australians grew up is part of the reason the electorate was described as waiting for the Labor party “with baseball bats” in the 1996 election. Most of these reforms were hugely important and successful, and from 1996 we had 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth. Even reforms that seemed largely cultural and not necessarily economic probably had a role to play in this complete modernization of Australian society – it’s unlikely for example that Aboriginal people would have stood quietly by and let the mining and resource boom of the 2000s happen on their land if they had not been given significant concessions in land rights in the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s unlikely that we would have been as ready to engage with Asia as we are if education had not been modernized with an Asian focus in the 1990s.

Australia also built its post-war success on migration, and I think now something like 20% of Australians were born overseas, with nearly 40% having been born overseas or having a parent born overseas. Our population grew rapidly from 1950 to 2000, and is nearly double what it was 70 years ago, with that increase heavily supported by migration. We also had to make significant concessions to international reality. For example, we outsource our defense policy to the USA and act with them in all their wars, even the illegal ones, and we have supported the One China Policy for practical reasons since the 1970s. When you have a population of 24 million people and rely for your economic wellbeing on trade with big Asian neighbours, you can’t afford to be too assertive in your foreign policy, and you also can’t afford big ticket domestic defense items like, say, Trident, or aircraft carriers. With the advantage of remoteness and the benefit of limited tariff barriers and huge quantities of natural resources we don’t need to worry about defense too much, so long as we keep trading without too many qualms about who we’re selling to. This isn’t a luxury that a nation like Japan or Germany can have, since they have large geopolitical rivals with bad histories quite nearby. Australia has long since given up on expecting to be a major player in the world stage, and where we exert influence we do so through soft power and being likable. Is this something that the UK wants to do?

Singapore is another country that has made it as a successful independent nation, but probably not in a way that is politically compatible with Brexit fever dreams. Something like 80% of Singaporean housing is government-owned, and there are strict rules on ethnic composition of housing blocks and other public amenities, along with strict censorship, to ensure that racial harmony is a fundamental part of the Singaporean way of life. Singapore also has a very large immigrant population, low tariffs, and an atmosphere of competition with other nations and social cooperation internally that the UK won’t be able to develop overnight. Singapore has often been touted as a model for Britain’s independent future, but it’s unlikely to be one that is palatable to the British voter, with its very large transient migrant population, heavy state investment in industry, housing and infrastructure, extremely long working hours, heavy censorship and strict rules to protect racial harmony.

Canada is another successful independent nation, but it has the agricultural and natural resources benefits that Australia has, is neighbour to a huge and dominant economy that is very culturally connected, and also built its economic success through migration. I have a friend who just got permanent residency (with his Japanese wife) in Canada without ever living there, and moved there to be on welfare payments while he looked for work. That’s not a migration model that will please Brexiters (his skin is quite brown!) and probably not a model that will be very attractive to potential migrants once Britain’s economy slumps. Canada also benefits from having no viable external enemies, a long cultural tradition of getting along with each other, and heavy state investment in e.g. health and welfare. It also has bears.

Japan is a nation that has been successful without migration, but it has a very large population (twice that of Britain), is very close to some very big trading partners, and succeeded with the help of major foreign support when it was rebuilding its (very large) industrial base after world war 2. Japan also, like Britain, has a weak agricultural sector and no natural resources. But Japan’s economic and international political success is built on a range of factors that would not appeal to the brexiteers. First and foremost it has a huge national debt and a bipartisan policy of using government money to fund infrastructure, bailouts, and industrial support. It has always maintained a strong industry policy, and tight relations between industry and government. It has a German-style approach to labour relations, in which workers are partners in business and government and disputes are resolved through compromise and consensus, and Japanese industrial leaders often have to tighten their belts with their workers in exchange for not having to put up with combative unions. Japan also has a constitutionally-mandated policy of pacifism, and invests heavily in overseas aid to ensure it maintains a strong connection in the region. Furthermore, Japan is a nation heavily committed to the international order, trying always to work through the UN and multinational agreements rather than being truly independent. Japan doesn’t pick sides or moralize, and is an exemplary global citizen. As a result of its lack of migrants Japan is also ageing, and is opening its borders to migration rapidly.

Something that many of these countries have in common is a commitment to social harmony. To varying degrees they have tried to prevent major outbreaks of social disorder or disruption – Australia does not have France style yellow-jacket demonstrations, and for example while Australia had 20 years of domestic environmental activism that was often quite confrontational, the end result was always some form of compromise to maintain the peace. Part of maintaining social order requires a commitment to equality, which is very strongly observed in Japan and Canada, and to various programs that may (as in the case of Singapore) require heavy government investment in order to ensure that there is a minimum standard of living for everyone. This is also not something that the Brexiters seem particularly happy with.

It seems clear to me that “taking back control” for Britain is going to require some difficult and unavoidable choices, that the British people won’t be happy to make. Cutting back on migration will mean that British people have to work harder and pull together in ways they aren’t used to; going independent will mean burning money on defense or outsourcing it to a great power or lowering expectations about Britain’s international assertiveness; being an open trading nation will require political compromises with trading partners that will stick in the craw of many of Britain’s elder statesmen; maintaining social harmony and a united front is going to demand sacrifices of everyone. But most of all, British people are going to have to come to terms with the reality that they don’t have much clout at all on the international stage, and that until they can develop some industries that foreigners want to buy, build some goodwill outside of the EU, and establish an independent voice that has some actual value to people they haven’t traditionally had much connection to, they aren’t going to be taken seriously globally. Theresa May’s hapless trip to Europe is a harbinger of what awaits them when they “take back control,” and as someone who grew up in a nation that has had to navigate difficult currents over dark waters, I would ask two questions of the British: do you want this, and are you ready for it? Because from what I have seen over the past year, you don’t and you’re not.

 

November 5, 2018

Enemies of the People

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When I was a teenager I remember my father as a difficult man with frustratingly retrograde opinions, which were typical of men of his nationality (British) and his generation (born just before WW2). He was a typesetter, a classic tradesman’s job from the post-war years, and he had the kind of views on race, gender, sexuality and social issues that you might expect of a man of this background and this age. He could say shocking things about non-white people, about women, or about any man who had not followed the same straight and narrow path from school to work that he had done. But his views were mellowed by his love of reading, and by a vague sense of groundedness about how the world actually worked. So for example he would say racist things about Aboriginal people, while also recognizing that they had been treated poorly by white colonizers; he could recognize the basic humanity of non-white people while believing basically that the races shouldn’t mix, and that his race (in particular the “English”) was superior. In my memory of my teenage years, he could say bad things but race issues were not always at the forefront of his mind. If welfare fraud or racial stereotypes or “young people today” came up in conversation he would be difficult, but somehow he still seemed to be navigating the world as it was, despite his limited education and because of his love of reading. My father introduced me to a lot of terrible ideas about Aborigines and women, but he also introduced me to National Geographic magazines, liberal views on sex work and drugs, Erich von Danniken[1] and archaeology more generally, and he always supported my interest in science, geography and reading.

When I was 17 my father lost his job and left me behind in rural Australia to return to the UK, where presumably he thought he might still be able to find work. Sadly a fifty-something typesetter in the late 1980s had no chance of finding new work, since his job had basically been automated away in the space of five years of rapid computer growth, so he ended up living on benefits in a trailer park in Devon. And over the years since he returned to the UK he went from being the infuriatingly backward but still-reachable uneducated man of my childhood to an out-and-out bigot, hating anyone and everyone who was different to him, full of bile and rage at the world and terrified of all the possibilities in it. He went from someone who worked alongside Indian and Caribbean men in industry to a scared old man who refused to visit London because it had “too many foreigners”; from a man who recommended Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to an ignorant climate change denialist; from a migrant in Australia to a man who hated all migrants and believed there were millions of “illegal asylum seekers” living in the UK; from a proud working man to a benefit fraudster who sat in the mobile home he was illegally buying with government rental support complaining about European benefit fraudsters coming to the UK to “abuse our generosity”; from a man who took pride in his nation’s role in resisting the Nazis, to a believer in every sinister lie he heard about Jews, gypsies, communists and gays. Over 30 sad years he became the Racist Uncle from central casting, terrified of the world and angry at everyone who was not an old, bitter man like him.

It was not just my father either: everyone else in my own and the older generations in my family became the same over those 30 years. Before I returned from a brief period working in the UK to Japan, I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room while she told me that “them black people will get what’s coming to them when Cameron’s elected”, and my uncle warned me “don’t argue with me, sunshine” while he spat bile and invective over the EU – while he was resting in the UK in between work placements in the Europe. Of the four men in my generation or above who I still know alive and living in the UK, two of them had their best career opportunities in Europe, and one of those got his first wife there.  Yet there they sat, hurling hatred and scorn at everyone connected with the European project, at black people, foreigners, young women – anyone who wasn’t like them.

This kind of hateful bile was a constant of my visits to my family in south west England, Brexit country. But there was one other constant every time I went down there: on every tea table, or clipped and stuck to the wall, or in the recycling bin (that they hated), or left scattered around to finish the crosswords: The Daily Mail. And from every bitter, pinched and angry mouth: “The news tells me that the gypsies are now …” “Which news?” “The Daily Mail!” Every opinion, every vicious and vengeful bit of hate speech, every tenuous or blatantly untrue “fact” they used to justify every one of their horrible, scornful opinions was dragged straight from the lying, filthy pages of that lying, filthy rag. Every day it headlined with some story about gypsies or travelers stealing land; or about hordes of “unregistered asylum seekers” who were getting free homes and cars and money while good deserving white people lived in the streets; or about how homeless white people were filthy pigs who brought it on themselves. Every day they bought it and read it and consumed its unfiltered hatred, mainlining discrimination and scorn to the point that my father, disabled by polio at the age of 5, would place his free disability parking sticker on the window of his car while ranting about some article from the Daily Mail and sneering at all these stupid young people who demand their human rights be respected. This man, whose entire twilit years were coddled by disability pensions and free healthcare and physiotherapy and special support for his disability, would mouth that phrase “their human rights” with such bitter rage that you would think he was talking about satan’s ballbag itself. But he wasn’t, he was speaking about himself, spurting out self-hatred and bitterness that he had been mainlining for 30 years from that disgusting, stupid rag, the Daily Mail.

So it was with a sense of profound disappointment that I read this morning in the Guardian that Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail for 26 of those 30 years that it was slowly turning my father from a normal human being to a rage-infested muppet, has received a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Editors, presented to him by the Editor of that other esteemed vessel of white men’s hate, the Daily Telegraph.

Some achievement. The newspaper most famous for its support of Oswald Mosley and Hitler turned into the delivery device for weaponized hatred, straight into the minds of uneducated men like my father who didn’t know better. By the time Dacre’s tenure was over he had managed to get UKIP national support, and bring on the Brexit he longed for that will destroy the economic security the Mail‘s own readers crave. This newspaper turned a nation of mild-mannered, stoic shopkeepers into a nation of rabid xenophobes and bilious haters, intent on kicking out anyone who was different in any way, or just plain kicking them if they couldn’t kick them out. Even on the Iraq war, the one thing the newspaper ever got right, it only opposed the war because it wanted to pull up the drawbridge and leave the rest of the world to burn, confident in the idea that Britain doesn’t need anyone and that any kind of social connection or sharing is weak, wrong and bad for the English. This newspaper poisoned the minds of a generation, so that it could get Britain out of Europe and damn the working people of Britain to a generation of peonage in service to its rich owner and his rich friends.

The Daily Mail did this by combining a tight writing style that perfectly appealed to the poorly-educated men and women of the war generation and the baby boom, appealing to their worst instincts and their colonialist nostalgic, and boosting that nascent racism and nostalgia into inflamed hatred and terror of any change. There is no policy the Daily Mail has supported in the past 30 years that was intended to benefit the lives of ordinary working or middle-class Britons, and the editor and his rich buddies knew that, so they coated every dodgy policy they pushed in the sweet and intoxicating icing of racism, hatred, and self-aggrandizing scorn. They pushed and amplified that scorn and racism, and used it to wrap every new and discriminatory policy they could, as they pushed Britain towards plutocracy. The final poison pill they tricked the elderly population of Britain into swallowing was Brexit, the bitter medicine that will strangle their grandchildrens’ futures. And the visionary who conceived of this horrible 30 year con receives a medal for his efforts.

In the future our grandchildren will look back on these 30 years as the last chance humanity had to change its direction. They will see that even as the planet went onto the boil, and inequality consumed the social order we had been building, a small gang of thieving plutocrats seized the media and politics and used their power to make sure no meaningful action was taken to turn society onto a different, better course. They will see how the many possible future pathways we could have taken to a better world were blocked off one by by these rich gangsters, until at the end of that 30 years we were left with a very small number of possible pathways to follow that would not end in civilization collapse and ruin. And then they will note that the people who spent 30 years heading off every road to a better future were given a prize for their efforts. Paul Dacre may be able to take that prize to his gold-plated grave, but the children of the future won’t deem him worthy of anything except scorn and ridicule. The same will apply to all those other titans of industry and media masters who brought us to this ruinous pass: all the newspaper editors who supported the Iraq war and unleashed Isis on a middle east already struggling under inequality and climate change; Rupert Murdoch, who unleashed Fox news on America and turned it from hope to hatred; Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens and all the other idiot centrist both-siders who twiddled while their nation slouched into nihilistic fascism, and put nazis and climate change denialists on the precious space of their editorial pages because they felt that “ideological balance” was more important than basic decency or a future for their children. All these people will be remembered as enemies not just of the people they were supposed to serve, but of human civilization. Remember the day this man got this prize, and the people who gave it to him. Some day there will have to be an accounting for the great evil being done in this time by our parents’ generation, and it might as well start with this man, who poisoned my parents minds against their own childrens’ futures, and turned a generation of hard-working, decent people into terrified haters. He will get away with what he did, but history will reward him with infamy.

fn1: I am not a believer!

 

 

October 21, 2018

Brexit Becomes the Conservative Party’s Iraq Fiasco

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On Saturday 700,000 people marched in London in support of a people’s vote on Brexit, basically demanding a do-over on the stupid referendum that brought the UK to its current terrible pass. This makes the march comparable in size to the march against the Iraq war in 2003, and reading about it I was struck by the similarities between what is happening now and the events that led up to that disgusting decision. The Brexit referendum was a rash decision by a formerly very popular politician that was driven forward by a campaign of lies and deceit, full of transparent falsehoods like the 350 million pound NHS lies. Now, just like then, the media have openly supported Brexit or offered only lukewarm opposition, and many in the Tory media have used accusations of treachery and cowardice against their opponents. Last year the Daily Mail had its “enemies of the people” headline, and in 2002 Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, was touring the country calling anyone who opposed the Iraq War a coward and a traitor. Then, as now, we had shady foreign power involvement in Britain’s political decisions – in 2003 it was clear that Blair had already signed up to the war regardless of public opinion, and in 2018 we’re discovering that the Brexit campaign was funded by shady overseas money, probably Russian, and almost certainly is driven by Tory politicians’ desire to protect their rich backers’ tax havens and money laundering activities from next year’s EU legal changes. In 2018 just as in 2002 we see politicians and media personalities heaping scorn on experts – in 2002 this led to the shady death of a WMD expert, and the BBC being forced into a humiliating apology for reporting it fairly, while in 2018 we see politicians openly dismissing any and every attempt to give a proper warning of what is coming. This leads to this horrible feeling – in 2018 just as in 2003 – that you know exactly what is going to happen, you can predict all the terrible things that are going to come of it, and yet still the political class is choosing to drive their train straight into the crash that everyone is warning them about. Just as in 2003, this rally will show the politicians clearly that that they are on the wrong path, but they will ignore it and make this terrible mistake regardless.

So it’s worth looking at the consequences of the Iraq war for the British labour party, because the party is still shackled to that mistake. The Iraq war sunk Blair as a politician, and within 5 years he was out. It completely ruined Labour’s reputation and forced them into years of introspection and chaos. Blair took the country to war in order to please a constituency – liberal interventionists, neo-cons, and “sensible centrists” – that had very little respect from Labour’s traditional backers, and as a result he created years of friction within the party apparatus. This ultimately led to the changes in the relationship between leadership and membership that brought Corbyn to power. For years after their election loss, senior figures in Labour were being pilloried by the membership for their mistakes, and opposition to the war was one of the central tools by which Corbyn was able to win the leadership – everyone else was tainted by their support, and as the catastrophe of ISIS unfolded in the Levant, Corbyn was able to stand tall as the only member of the Labour party with any principles. I have no doubt (although no evidence) that Blair’s decision to throw traditional Labour constituencies like the peace movement, supporters of Palestine, disarmament activists, and non-interventionists, under the bus in order to please an ultimately incredibly unpopular American republican caused many of them to abandon the party in disgust. I think this is part of the reason that Labour lost Scotland, a big part of the reason for the growth of Lib Dem support, and also part of the reason that Labour struggled to fight off UKIP in the mid 2010s. Nobody weds themselves to a party with 100% commitment, and it is possible for a party to abuse the trust that its constituencies give it. Labour’s loss in 2010 and the subsequent ruin of the UK economy at the hands of a bunch of pig-fucking Tory economic wreckers is at least partly due to the decision to screw their own constituencies in this way. Even today, traditional supporters of Labour on the left are much more circumspect in their support of it than they used to be, and although some centrist wankers will try to claim that this is because Corbyn turns people off, it is certainly also to do with the way those traditional supporters were alienated in the rush to murder a million Iraqis.

The same will happen to the Tories after Brexit. The entire fiasco came about because Cameron wanted to please a bunch of UKIP-voting idiots who were not core Tory constituents, and came at the expense of his core supporters in the home counties and business. Senior Tories disparaged the kind of conservative, careful experts in and outside government who warned them what disaster was coming, and have regularly and repeatedly acted in a way that alienates their business backers. The original vote was barely democratic, it’s now clear that it was gamed by foreign money to benefit a small claque of extremely rich money launderers, and it is almost impossible to find a sizable group of people in the UK who will benefit from it. Yet the Tories push on to disaster, and I bet that today even as this 700,000 people gather to remind them of their democratic responsibilities, senior Tories will dismiss them as unrepresentative. Next year Brexit will happen, the UK’s economy will crash, everything will go to hell, and suddenly everyone will remember that this was a uniquely Tory disaster. The next election will see them tossed out on their ear, and for a decade the only question asked of any aspirant to power in that party will be “did you vote for this shit?” The Tory reputation on trade and international diplomacy will be wrecked. The only question remains – what kind of insurgent will rise up through the party to replace the idiots who wrought this disaster on the British people? Will it be a traditional Tory equivalent of Corbyn, harking back to the original roots of the party and disdaining the modernising and populist elements that crashed it? Or will it be something darker and more sinister, a nativist or fascist tough-love authoritarian? In theory this coming disaster should put an end to nativism in British politics, as everyone who voted for UKIP and Brexit comes to terms with the economic ruin they left their children. But will this be what happens?

Because there is one big difference between what happened after the Iraq war, and now. Labour has always faced a hostile press who are willing to blame them for every problem Britain faces, while the Tories have an easy run from every arm of the media. After they bring the country to ruin, will the media’s love of pretending that their intellectually bankrupt economic ideas are “sound management” finally end? Will the media recognize the Tories for the traitors and economic wreckers they really are? Or will they simply put in double shifts to blame the entire fiasco on Labour and foreigners, and work extra hard to launder the Tories’ reputation? And in doing so, what new horrors will bubble up from the dark and sinister hinterlands of British conservatism, to replace the architects of this foolish and stupid policy? By rights Brexit and its fallout should be the end of the Tories, just as the Iraq war was the end of Blairism and the rich-appeasing faux leftism of 1990s Labour. If there is any justice these people will be cast into the political wilderness and their party reduced to a foolish rump. But with the support of liars and scandal-mongers like the Daily Mail, perhaps the Tories will be able to reinvent themselves in an even uglier, more perverted form.

Let us hope not, for the good of what will be left of Britain after 2019.

 

August 15, 2018

Vague on Obesity and the Causes of Obesity

Posted by faustusnotes under Health, Meat Life, off-topic ranting, Science | Tags: , , , , , |
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No this really is not “the healthy one”

Today’s Guardian has a column by George Monbiot discussing the issue of obesity in modern England, that I think fundamentally misunderstands the causes of obesity and paints a dangerously rosy picture of Britain’s dietary situation. The column was spurred by a picture of a Brighton Beach in 1976, in which everyone was thin, and a subsequent debate on social media about the causes of the changes in British rates of overweight and obesity in the succeeding half a decade. Monbiot’s column dismisses the possibility that the growth in obesity could be caused by an increase in the amount we eat, by a reduction in the amount of physical activity, or by a change in rates of manual labour. He seems to finish the column by suggesting it is all the food industry’s fault, but having dismissed the idea that the food industry has convinced us to eat more, he is left with the idea that the real cause of obesity is changes in the patterns of what we eat – from complex carbohydrates and proteins to sugar. This is a bugbear of certain anti-obesity campaigners, and it’s wrong, as is the idea that obesity is all about willpower, which Monbiot also attacks. The problem here though is that Monbiot misunderstands the statistics badly, and as a result dismisses the obvious possibility that British people eat too much. He commits two mistakes in his article: first he misunderstands the statistics on British food consumption, and secondly he misunderstands the difference between a rate and a budget, which is ironic given he understands these things perfectly well when he comments on global warming. Let’s consider each of these issues in turn.

Misreading the statistics

Admirably, Monbiot digs up some stats from 1976 and compares them with statistics from 2018, and comments:

So here’s the first big surprise: we ate more in 1976. According to government figures, we currently consume an average of 2,130 kilocalories a day, a figure that appears to include sweets and alcohol. But in 1976, we consumed 2,280 kcal excluding alcohol and sweets, or 2,590 kcal when they’re included. I have found no reason to disbelieve the figures.

This is wrong. Using the 1976 data, Monbiot appears to be referring to Table 20 on page 77, which indicates a yearly average of 2280 kCal. But this is the average per household member, and does not account for whether or not a household member is a child. If we refer to Table 24 on page 87, we find that a single adult in 1976 ate an average of 2670 kCal; similar figures apply for two adult households with no children (2610 kCal). Using the more recent data Monbiot links to, we can see that he got his 2,130 kCal from the file of “Household and Eating Out Nutrient Intakes”. But if we use the file “HC – Household nutrient intakes” and look at 2016/17 for households with one adult and no children, we find 2291 kCal, and about 2400 as recently as 10 years ago. These are large differences when they accrue over years.

This is further compounded by the age issue. When we look at individual intake we need to consider how old the family members are. If an average individual intake is 2590 kCal in 1976 including alcohol and sweets, as Monbiot suggests, we need to rebalance it for adults and children. In a household with three people we have 7700 kCal, which if the child is eating 1500 kCal means that the adults are eating close to 3100 kCal each. That’s too much food for everyone in the house, even using the ridiculously excessive nutrient standards provided by the ONS.  It’s also worth remembering that the age of adults in 1976 was on average much younger than now, and an intake of 2590 might be okay for a young adult but it’s not okay for a 40-plus adult, of which there are many more now than there were then. This affects obesity statistics.

Finally it’s also worth remembering that obesity is not evenly distributed, and an average intake of 2100 kCal could correspond to an average of 2500 in the poorest 20% of the population (where obesity is common) and 1700 kCal in the richest, which is older and thinner. An evenly distributed 2100 kCal will lead to zero obesity over the whole population, but an unevenly distributed 2100 kCal will not. It’s important to look carefully at the variation in the datasets before deciding the average is okay.

Misunderstanding budgets and rates

Let’s consider the 2590 kCal that Monbiot finds as the average intake of adults in 1976, including alcohol and sweets. This is likely wrong, and the average is probably more like 3000 kCal including alcohol and sweets, but let’s go with it for now. Monbiot is looking to see what has changed in our diet over the past 40 years to lead to current rates of obesity, because he is looking for a change in the rate of consumption. But he doesn’t consider that all humans have a budget, and that a small excess of that budget over a long period is what drives obesity. The reality is that today’s obesity rates do not reflect today’s consumption rates, but the steady pattern of consumption over the past 40 years. What made a 55 year old obese today is what they ate in 1976 – when they were 15 – not what the average person eats today. So rather than saying “we eat less today than we did 40 years ago so that can’t be the cause of obesity”, what really matters is what people have been eating for the past 40 years. And the stats Monbiot uses suggest that women, at least, have been eating too much – a healthy adult woman should eat about 2100 kCal, and if the average is 2590 then a woman in 1976 has been at or above her energy intake every year for the past 40 years. It doesn’t matter that a woman’s intake declined to 2100 kCal in 2016, because she has been eating too much for the past 35 years anyway. It’s this budget, not changes over time, which determine the obesity rate now, and Monbiot is wrong to argue that it’s not overeating that has caused the obesity epidemic. Unless he accepts that a woman can eat 2590 kCal every year for 40 years and stay thin, he needs to accept that the problem of obesity is one of British food culture over half a century.

What this means for obesity policy

Somewhat disappointingly and unusually for a Monbiot article, there are no sensible policy prescriptions at the end except “stop shaming fat people.” This isn’t very helpful, and neither is it helpful to dismiss overeating as a cause, since everyone in public health knows that overeating is the cause of obesity. For example, Public Health for England wants to reduce British calorie intake, and the figures on why are disturbing reading. Reducing calorie intake doesn’t require shaming fat people but it does require acknowledgement that British people eat too much. This comes down not to individual willpower but to the food environment in which we all make choices about what to eat. The simplest way, for example, to reduce the amount that people eat is not to give them too much food. But there is simply no way in Britain that you can eat out or buy packaged food products without buying too much food. It is patently obvious that British restaurants serve too much food, that British supermarkets sell food in packages that are too large, and that as a result the only way for British people not to eat too much is through constant acts of will – leaving half the food you paid for, buying only fresh food in small amounts every day (which is only possible in certain wealthy inner city suburbs), and carefully controlling where, when and how you eat. This is possible but it requires either that you move in a very wealthy cultural circle where the environment supports this kind of thing, or that you personally exert constant control over your life. And that latter choice will inevitably end in failure, because constantly controlling every aspect of your food intake in opposition to the environment where you purchase, prepare and consume food is very very difficult.

When you live in Japan you live in a different food environment, which encourages small serving sizes, fresh and raw foods, and low fat and low sugar foods. In Japan you live in a food environment where you are always close to a small local supermarket with convenient opening hours and fresh foods, and where convenience stores sell healthy food in small serving sizes. This means that you can choose to buy small amounts of fresh food as and when you need them, and avoid buying in bulk in a pattern that encourages over consumption. When your food choices fail (for example you have to eat out, or buy junk food) you will have access to a small, healthy serving. If you are a woman you will likely have access to a “woman’s size” or “princess size” that means you can eat the smaller calorific food that your smaller calorific requirements suggest is wisest. It is easy to be thin in Japan, and so most people are thin. Overeating in Japan really genuinely is a choice that you have to choose to make, rather than the default setting. This difference in food environment is simple, obvious and especially noticeable when (as I just did) you hop on a plane to the UK and suddenly find yourself confronted with double helpings of everything, and super markets where everything is “family sized”. The change of food environment forces you to eat more. It’s as simple as that.

What Britain needs is a change in the food environment. And achieving a change in food environment requires first of all recognizing that British people eat too much, and have been eating too much for way too long. Monbiot’s article is an exercise in denialism of that simple fact, and he should change it or retract it.

 

December 27, 2016

Respectable: When Someone Writes a Book About Your Life

Posted by faustusnotes under book reviews, Meat Life, Reviews | Tags: , |
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Lynsey Hanley’s Respectable: The Experience of Class is a book that, in many respects, is about me. Hanley was born on a working class housing estate in Northern England in 1976, which makes her three years younger than me, and unlike most of her peers she left her working class origins to become middle class, by dint of getting a university education and a middle class job – just like me. In this book, Hanley describes the challenges of getting from there (the working class housing estate in 1980s Britain) to here (her current middle class position and lifestyle), and the challenges of living middle class when your upbringing was working class. Both aspects of this story are very important to me: escaping the bonds of working class life is a kind of cultural version of getting into orbit, requiring a huge personal effort and risk to get a single shot at hitting escape velocity, but the journey doesn’t end there. Getting into a new class, whether stolid middle class or some internationalist transcendental state, is not necessarily enough to free you from the old bonds of working class culture, and you can spend a long time – for me, perhaps a decade or more – feeling like a stranger in a new land, and even after you become to some extent familiar with the rules of your new world, you still feel like a fraud, and you still are stalked by this fear that it can all be taken away from you in an instant, that you’re just there on sufferance.

Hanley describes the social, cultural and spiritual challenges of both stages of this journey in rich and stunning detail in this book. She does not just describe the general challenges, though, but pinpoints specific, stunningly accurate details about the process that speak so powerfully to me of my own experience that it feels as if she has reached out from the pages into my own memory, and crafted an explanation for feelings and memories that I couldn’t pin down and understand until she shaped them. In both the general issues and in these details, she captures the essence of Britain’s class problems brilliantly.

On generalities, she describes the social and cultural barriers to a proper education for working class people in Britain, both those imposed on the class from outside (such as sub-standard schooling, economic barriers to progress, the difficulty of getting into grammar school for working class people) and those imposed on the working class by the working class – things like the way that working class children punish any of their own who show too much interest in school, the way that working class families don’t push their children to achieve or don’t consider the possibility of sending them to better educational opportunities (like grammar school) outside of their own experience, and the punishing assumptions they have about their own limited futures. For example, in describing the general atmosphere of working class culture in Britain in the 1980s, Hanley writes

Casual violence – symbolic, domestic and public – was endemic in the place and times in which I grew up. Casual racism was part of the fabric of daily conversation. Casual cynicism pervaded: a consequence of casual exploitation and casual displacement, which fed into people’s souls and manifested in their treating everything like one great frigging joke, because that’s how they felt they’d been treated their entire lives.

She follows this with a discussion of one of the motivating factors underlying this atmosphere, loss:

You may wonder what led to this collective conviction that there was no point. It might be argued that another primary aspect of working-class experience, a feeling which most defines a certain way of being in the world, is loss. Loss is everywhere: the loss of optimism as experience victory-laps hope; the loss of loved ones too soon to war, workplace accidents or to ill-health; the loss of a sense of home, going back generations as families move repeatedly in search of relief from poverty; the loss of close ties as families are broken up in a similar way by moves down south, to America, Canada, Australia; and the loss of a sense of place as families attempt to remain rooted in a changing environment, such as when a local works that once employed just about everyone in the area closes down.

This really struck at my own understanding of growing up poor in Britain – we were always moving looking for a better job or opportunities, then our family ties were broken by moving to New Zealand (and then Australia), and finally my older brother was taken from us by the state because of his continued involvement in crime, no doubt partly because his constant sense of dislocation stopped him having any sense of responsibility to the community he was victimizing. Hanley’s description of the economic, cultural and educational environment of England in the 1980s is exactly how I remember it, and her piercing insight into working class culture of that era really closely mirrors my own.

On the details, Hanley has a remarkable ability to isolate small incidents and moments that bring to life the challenges of trying to grow out of working class culture, and trying to get an education that will matter in an environment that is so inimically opposed to anyone standing out, as well as so committed to its own failings. For example, she describes a simple moment in her day like this:

While working in the library I go downstairs to Greggs to get a cup of tea … In the time takes to reach the bottom of the staircase I overhear a total of two sentences: one, by a woman speaking into a phone, is ‘FUCK OFF about your rizlas, I don’t wanna hear it,’ and the other, from a young man to a young woman, is ‘I can’t hear a FUCKing thing you’re saying with you walking ahead of me.’ My bones turn to glass again and I remember that often things do seem terrible just because of where you are. I’m thrown back into a world of ignorance and everyday violence – and if that sounds extreme, you needed to hear the way in which those ‘fucks’ were said: the desperation and life-fatigue of the first and the casual aggression of the second.

This is such a perfect, crystal clear description of an ordinary moment in the working class world that it might have been grabbed straight from my own everyday life. And it’s a reminder of how hard it is to operate in a different world – a world where people only swear when they’re surprised or angry, and never with the same venom – that you didn’t grow up in and have no familiarity with. Somehow you have to negotiate an entirely new set of manners and norms you don’t know anything about, at the same time as you’re still traumatized by and accustomed to an entirely different set of behavior that marks you out as trouble to everyone else.

This switch in background and norms is hard to adjust to, but it’s made even harder by the discovery of how much you were being held back from, and how much your own class is despised. Early in the book Hanley observes

The interesting thing about entering the middle class is that everything you have known is turned on its head. You go from being invisible to society, and yet at the same time the object of constant scrutiny and mistrust, to being at once anonymous and in possession of a voice. You are trusted to get on with things, and encouraged to go on endlessly about the way in which you do them

Everything about this sentence speaks so clearly to my own experience of growing up a working class boy and then stepping out to middle class life, and the different assumptions and expectations that are made about and of you when you are in one group compared to another. These changes can be like a slap in the face sometimes, in those moments when you realize just how much you were being denied. For example, when I first attended university – my big chance to step out of my class, though I didn’t realize it then – I was surrounded primarily by the children of the wealthy middle class in Adelaide, and I was shocked at the casual wealth of their lives and their casual assumptions about their rights and what they could and couldn’t do in public. These same middle class children refused to believe my achievements in high school, which were far superior to any of theirs, simply because my presentation as a poor kid from the country did not match their stereotypes. These children who had sailed through high school to an assumed berth in university, with the minimum of effort because their high quality schools ensured they got a good education and they had been groomed for progression from birth, were unable to comprehend that in my struggle to escape a terrible school I had worked hard every day and as a result got vastly better marks than them and won coveted awards – simply because of where I was from and what the signifiers of social class attached to me said about my potential. Eventually, of course, as I became more comfortable with the middle class world, I stopped wearing my working class history on my sleeve – changed my clothes, moderated my accent, dropped the swearing and rough language – and people stopped assuming limits to my achievement based on where I was from. Once I became more comfortable navigating the particular landscape of middle class life, people started assuming I was one of them, and a new world of opportunities and possibilities opened up to me.

But as comfortable as you become, you never truly forget or overcome that upbringing, and in discussing this Hanley brings up a recurring image that I think very well describes the crippling limitations the working class places on itself: the wall in the head. This is the barrier you build inside your own soul that stops you properly appreciating, and properly navigating, the middle class world you have entered. It can manifest in little ways, like an unwillingness to spend more than a certain amount of money on certain things, or in big ways like a fear of debt or an inability to manage money the way rich people do. It can also stop you grabbing opportunities that your peers take for granted, because it holds back your confidence and makes you timid about your own possibilities, and I think (Hanley doesn’t say this) in some ways it acts as a kind of PTSD, making you subject to a kind of existential fight-or-flight syndrome that makes you fearful of change and easily cowed into not taking risks. This is also part of the second trait of people who have moved up, which Hanley identifies: a fear that it will all be taken away from you in a moment and that you are living in your new, freer world on borrowed time. I think I still carry this fear inside me now, and I think most who have risen out of poverty to the middle class carry this feeling inside them. It can be a positive reminder of how far you have come, but it can also be a whip that strikes to stop you taking risks, or doing things that other middle class people do, because of a fear that you might be pushing your luck. This, for example, is why I did not travel in most of my 20s, even though most of my middle class peers had. Too risky!

Hanley manages to combine this political and economic analysis of the conditions facing the working class with an almost anthropological understanding of how these conditions manifest at a personal level to give a really engaging and powerful description of the process of social mobility, and its consequences for those who are able to climb the ladder. She combines her own insights and stories with the work of a wide array of sociologists who have studied class, in particular a book by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, that describes the same phenomena in an earlier age, from a similar standpoint. In updating this book for the modern era she incorporates more pop culture, and I guess tells stories that are more relevant to people like me. But in weaving all this together she tells a story that is almost perfectly about me, and I guess about people like me. It is the first time I have ever seen anything about the experience of poor people taking advantage of social mobility, that combines a sensitive and genuine respect for the class she has left with a scathing criticism of that class, without blame or sneering. For that alone, this book was like an awakening for me, the first time I ever thought that my experience of fighting so hard to become a scientist was unusual or challenging or rare, and exactly what forces I had to overcome to do what I unthinkingly did when I was just 17 years old. There are, of course, some differences – she grew up in the industrial north while I grew up in the rural southwest, and she never had the good fortune to migrate to Australia, a country that determinedly set out to make sure that the economic and political barriers to social mobility were lowered considerably (at least for my generation). Australia doesn’t have the same class structure or the same rigid divisions as Britain, and it’s possible that for people who were born and raised in Australia this book has nothing to say. But for someone like me, with an experience grounded strongly in British class barriers, this book was a powerful and eye-opening attempt to describe my own life story – an amazing experience for anyone who sees their story told by someone else, in a sympathetic and detailed account of their own life that mirrors yours. It’s the first time it has ever happened to me, and I will always be grateful for it.

The book does have some flaws, and for me the main one is its poor structuring. The book as a whole and the chapters within it don’t really have a strong introduction/body/conclusion structure, so that at times it comes across more as a rambling series of anecdotes rather than a coherent story. Some chapters end abruptly without anything resembling a review or conclusion, leaving you wondering exactly what Hanley was trying to say, and then the next chapter doesn’t really flow from the previous one, starting almost on a completely separate topic without any coherent structure. For me this was not a problem, since I was reveling just in having my story told, but for someone reading from a more dispassionate or disinterested perspective it might render the book far less readable than it might otherwise have been. Also, for someone reading from outside the class – i.e from the perspective of a middle class person who might influence policy – the lack of coherence might conspire to hide any possible conclusions that can be drawn about what needs to be done. This is particularly problematic when combined with the book’s other main flaw – its lack of recommendations. I would have loved to have seen a conclusion that gives concrete ideas about what needs to be done to make social mobility easier, political and economic recommendations on the one hand for weakening the stultifying grip of Britain’s class culture , and on the other hand a kind of self-help guide for those of us who have managed to climb the ladder. I don’t know how we can climb that wall in our head (or break it down) or how to escape that cloying fear of failure that haunts us, and I wonder if Hanley does either – but if she does, I’d love for her to have shared it with me. These flaws mean that while the book may be a powerful explainer for those coming from inside the experience, and potentially a powerful guide to understanding barriers to social mobility for those in other classes who are trying to break them down, it may only provide a limited guide to what can be done, and may turn off others who aren’t already approaching the problem with a sympathetic ear. Coming from inside the story, I can’t really say how much damage these two flaws do to the book’s overall mission, and I hope that they aren’t too overwhelming for other readers.

I was recommended this book on the left wing blog Crooked Timber, in a post by Chris Bertram, who turned to it as part of his attempt to understand Brexit. I don’t know how much it would help with this but I think it definitely provides a strong insight into how people in the working class experience class, and how hard it is to escape. I have written before on this blog about how I think social mobility is not the solution to inequality that many people hope, and have instead suggested we need to make all work rewarding and dignified. Hanley seems to have absorbed the same lessons from her own experience of changing class, writing in the conclusion of the book

I hope that by using elements of my own experience I have illustrated some of the shortcomings of a political narrative that places the onus for social mobility – for ‘getting out’ of the working class and into the middle class – on to individuals, rather than making it possible for everyone, regardless of occupation, to live comfortably.

I agree with her on the importance of this, and I hope that in reading this book others – especially from those classes that actually influence policy – will see how challenging it is to be ‘socially mobile’, both in taking the chances offered and in living with the consequences, and will rethink the way British society is organized to stop people at the bottom living comfortably, and to force them to climb so high and so hard to get out of the class they’re in. It’s not exactly a manifesto for revolution or social change, but I hope if more people read this book they will come to understand through its eloquence and insight just how hard they make things when they demand that everyone in the working class be respectable, and the impossibility of making Britain a better place by social mobility alone.

 

June 26, 2016

The Political Science of Brexit

Posted by faustusnotes under Horror, Maps, Meat Life | Tags: , , |
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On Thursday last week the British people voted to leave the EU, sending shockwaves through the British political establishment and the EU leadership. In the aftermath there is a lot of finger-pointing and blame going on, and as I predicted in a comment at Crooked Timber before it happened, people are lining up to blame Labour for what is a very Tory disaster. Here I want to talk about the limited available data on who voted what, to put paid to the idea that this was primarily (or even partly) a Labour failure. I’m then going to talk a bit about the “white working class” and the EU, and also give a brief opinion about what this means for health and the NHS. I intend to be polemical. By way of background, I have British citizenship and British parents, I’ve talked about growing up in Britain before on this blog more than once, and I really am not surprised by this result. I have only lived briefly in Britain since I was 13 – I immigrated to Australia and then worked for a year and a half in the UK on issues related to the NHS (during this period I started my blog, which is why it has the Thames as its header image). All my family still live there and I think in many ways my family present the ideal anti-EU demographic – I grew up in an environment steeped in racism and heirarchies of discrimination that I think people who grew up outside of the Tory working class, or outside of Britain, really can’t understand. This background informs my interpretation of political movements in the UK, and at its base is a simple theoretical position: for many British people, race consciousness always beats class consciousness.

What could possibly go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong?

The demographics of Brexit

There isn’t yet much clear data on who voted what, but we do have two data sources: the electoral returns for the local authorities, and an exit poll conducted by John Ashcroft. Let’s look first at the electoral returns, which are summarized neatly in the Guardian‘s referendum results page. In case that page dies I’ve put some screenshots of its contents here. First is the map, above, which shows clearly the regional pattern of voters: Scotland and the city centres voted remain (yellow) and the country areas voted leave (blue). For reference, the region I grew up in is the area of Wessex in the south west; I’ve magnified it below. This is the land of King Arthur and even contains a tiny separatist movement in the far south west (Cornwall). It doesn’t include Wales, which I’ve had to include a bit of in this map. The yellow (remain) areas are the cities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Plymouth. Outside these cities it is entirely blue. I grew up in towns like Salisbury (the furthest Eastward big blue blotch); Frome (south west of that blotch, in light blue); Falmouth (the dark blue patch west of the two small yellow ones) and Cornwall (the light blue patch poking out into the Atlantic). These are areas that benefit hugely from EU funding under the Common Agricultural Policy, were once strongholds for the Lib Dems, and are now shifting fast to UKIP. They’re heavy tourist towns with very low proportions of migrant and non-white people; unlike in London, if you go into a cafe in Torbay (where my parents live now, the dark blue patch east of Plymouth, I think) you’re likely to be served by a white local, rather than an Eastern European worker. These areas have received most of the benefits of the EU, and very few of its migrants, and have been largely isolated from previous waves of Commonwealth migration (ie Indians and Caribbean people).

Oo-arrh, Oi've got a brand new combine 'arvester!

Oo-arrh, Oi’ve got a brand new combine ‘arvester!

These areas are old, with only three major universities in Bristol, Bath and Exeter. They’re rural and tourist-focused, and they’re also repositories of British history, holding places like Stonehenge, Avebury, and Tintagel. They’ve always been a little bit wayward and remote from the concerns of Londoners, so I suppose a bit of restive anti-EU thought makes sense here. But what about the rest of the UK? The Guardian has some graphs showing the proportion of people voting leave/remain by major socio-economic and demographic factors, which I’ve placed below.

Let's make a classic political science error!

Let’s make a classic political science error!

It’s very clear what’s going on here: the more higher-educated, wealthier people, and the more people not born in the UK, the more likely the area is to vote remain (for those not steeped in British class lore, the UK office of national statistics classifies people by their social class, and “ABC1” is the professional and higher class groups). If you remove Scotland from this chart it will probably be even clearer, since Scotland’s poorer areas were more likely to vote remain. Note also that older areas were more likely to vote for leave.

It’s a classic political science error to infer individual voting patterns from area-level statistics, because it’s well-established that these statistics often go in the opposite direction at individual and regional level (Andrew Gelman famously showed this for the USA: richer states are more likely to vote Democrat, but in all states poorer people are more likely to vote Democrat). However, this pattern in this case is so clear that even though we don’t know how individuals in those areas voted, we do know that areas with higher numbers of poor and uneducated people were full of people pissed off at the EU. It’s fundamentally the job of politicians to understand these kinds of big population-level movements in politics, and for Cameron to call a referendum on this topic despite the existence of such a powerful and fundamental dynamic in the electorate is either incredibly reckless, or incredibly ignorant, or both. This stupidity is compounded by the fact that areas with large numbers of poor and uneducated people are more likely to be labour-held areas, so Cameron was going to be relying on his political enemies to support him. I don’t think Corbyn is venal or stupid, but coming hot on the heels of the era of Blair, it’s incredibly risky of Cameron to assume the leadership of the Labour party wouldn’t be venal and stupid enough not to leave him hanging on this issue for cheap political gain.

This brings us to the next issue: who actually voted how in these areas, and was the failure of the leave campaign the fault of Labour and its racist voters? For this we cannot rely on area-level data, but need to look at individuals, and sadly so far the only information we have is from John Aschcroft’s exit poll. I won’t screenshot this poll, which I linked to above, but the conclusion seems to be that this was a very Tory disaster. Here are some key figures:

  • No difference in gender (52% voting leave in both)
  • Young people were much more likely to vote remain (73% for 18-24 vs. 40% for the over 65s)
  • Big trends by social class, with the wealthier more likely to vote remain (a similar difference between the “lowest” and “highest” social class to that in age)
  • Labour, the Greens, the SNP and the Lib Dems voted heavily in favour of remain (over 2/3 for all groups) while Tory and UKIP voted for leave, so that only 20% of leave votes were drawn from Labour, vs. 40% from Tory
  • 33% of leave voters listed immigration as their main concern, and 79% described themselves as English not British

The big caveat on these statistics is that the party affiiliation is based on voting in the 2015 General Election; turnout for this referendum was higher than the 2015 General Election, and so it’s likely that a lot of people who voted in this referendum did not vote in 2015 but did vote in 2010, or never vote; in this case describing them in terms of the last vote they cast may not be very informative. Nonetheless, of those who were recently involved in an election, those who voted for the tenets of the labour party were not interested in leaving. This fact is backed up by looking at the map, where the big labour heartlands in London were all for remain. The Guardian has analysis of some of these heartlands (because of course journalists immediately latch onto the meme that attacks Labour, not the obvious responsibility of all the Tory areas that voted leave). It describes a strong leave sentiment in the otherwise labour-focused area of the Thames estuary (the land of Eastenders), and a suburban revolt outside the Labour heartland areas of Merseyside and Tyneside. Tyneside is a good example: the former industrial heartland and labour stronghold north of the river voted remain, while the more suburban Tory-voting south side went with remain.

My conclusion from this is that the leave vote was driven by pensioners, the “lumpen proletariat”, and Tory voters. The remain vote was driven by labour stalwarts, the educated, and working people in the big cities and former industrial heartlands, who perhaps understand that their future depends on being part of an integrated market. Obviously this is a broad brush, and a disappointingly large number of Labour voters (about 35%) sided with leave. Some people are saying that Corbyn should have gathered these people up with a better campaign, but I think this claim is doubtful. To the extent that Labour voted leave, they’re largely rebelling against the policies of New Labour, and for Corbyn to be more involved in the remain campaign he would have had to have shared a platform with Vampire Blair and the Pig-fucker General. I don’t think this would have convinced more people to vote remain, and would likely have had the opposite effect. If the Tories wanted Labour to help drag the country back from this disaster, they were going to have to make it less of an obvious Tory shitshow, and tell the idiots from New Labour to stay home and out of the sunlight.

What about the white working class revolt?

People do like to bang on about how the average Labour voter is a racist and the only way Labour will get the “white working class” vote back is by appealing to these baser instincts, but I think this is fundamentally flawed. Yes, many working people in the UK are opposed to immigration and can express shockingly racist views, but a lot of these people were prised away from Labour back in the 1980s, and more left during the era of New Labour. I don’t think Labour will ever be able to get these people back, and it’s silly to talk about them as if they are part of the Labour heartland. The sad reality is that British politics realigned in the 1980s, at the same time as its industrial heartland hollowed out, so that the Tories have a reliable stock of poor white people voting for them on racial grounds. This is the “victory” of Thatcher-era politics and the vicious racism of the Daily Mail and the Sun. Amongst these groups, these newspapers have been pushing an anti-EU agenda for 25 years (just try reading the Daily Mail on Europe!), and also a vicious anti-Labour agenda. Of course these papers were going to do all they could to mobilize these readers against the EU in this referendum, and there’s very little the remain campaign can do against 25 years of constant anti-EU propaganda, much of which is straight up lies. This is hardly helped by the willingness of journalists to consistently let the leave campaign get away with their lies about the 350 million pounds (that Farage admitted wouldn’t go to the NHS the morning after the referendum).

It needs to be made clear too that racism was a central part of the leave campaign, and they weren’t deploying a nuanced critique of immigration. The leave campaign was doing very poorly, well behind remain, until they dug up the claims about Syrian refugees, boats on beaches, the sexual assault “nuclear bomb”, the breaking point poster and the constant terror campaign about Turkey joining the EU very soon. Once that stuff came up, leave started catching up rapidly in the polls. Then of course political geniuses like Osborne screwed up the remain campaign with their petulant threats, and the job was done. When people as unscrupulous as Boris Johnson are willing to put out the kind of misleading, deliberately untrue, and viciously racist stuff they did, there’s very little a principled campaign can do except watch the election getting stolen from them. Fundamentally you can’t win a campaign against people who happily tell juicy lies and a media that supports them.

I think a lot of commentators from both left and right in the UK fail to see how potent this stuff is because they didn’t grow up surrounded by it – they grew up in pleasant leafy neighbourhoods to professional or wealthy families, and didn’t have to put up with this stuff day-in, day-out during their childhood. If they did they would know, as I do, just how filthy and nasty the underbelly of the British polity is, and just how ugly its views are. A previous generation of Labour political leaders might have known this, but Tony Blair flayed those people and replaced them with his soulless ghouls, who know nothing except focus groups and servitude to the Elder Gods. I described this kind of politics two years ago on this blog, and this referendum is the vindication of my analysis. There are solutions to this problem, but “giving the racists the chance to shine” is not one of them.

The implications for health policy in the UK

The UK has been out-sourcing medical training and workforce development to Europe and the Commonwealth for years. Up to 26% of doctors and 11% of all NHS personnel come from overseas, a great many from the EU, and once the UK leaves the EU these EU staff will need to be replaced from elsewhere. More could be drawn in from the Commonwealth, but it’s unlikely to be able to fill the shortfall quickly because many Commonwealth countries have only small numbers of medical staff, and may not be able to provide a great deal more. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that a country that just voted to leave the EU out of fear of immigrants is going to suddenly implement policies to bring in more immigrants. The result of this will be further pressure on the NHS workforce, with even more difficulty in replacing staff as they retire and leave at a time when the aging population is putting more and more demand on health services. It takes 10 years to train a doctor and 5 years to train a nurse, but the government has been cutting funding for these training programs (including the nurses bursary) and has been repeatedly warned that it is facing a shortfall in health personnel even without leaving the EU. Pressure on universities is likely to increase with the sudden loss of EU funding, and in the huge economic readjustment that has to happen when EU funds disappear, universities are going to face major shifts in funding sources and needs. Without central organization they are unlikely to prioritize nurse training – they haven’t to date, why should we expect they will do so in the future, with tighter funds?

This problem will be even more pronounced for small and medium enterprises outside of the NHS that provide services to the NHS, and also to financial services companies. At the moment there are a range of barriers to employing non-EU staff that were put in place in response to past concerns about immigration: you have to prove the job can’t be done by a local, and it’s very hard for non-EU workers to bring in spouses. As a result most small companies don’t sponsor visa applications, preferring instead to recruit from the EU where such rules don’t apply. For financial services companies, the sudden loss of their most qualified pool of staff is going to have huge implications, and I suspect for many of them the simplest approach will be to move to Europe. The same will apply to universities, who will suddenly lose access to the best-educated region in the world. This likely won’t affect senior staff but it will have a huge impact on the supply of graduate students and early-career researchers and teachers. These jobs aren’t just boutique jobs for underwater basket-weavers – the UK has a huge pharmaceutical industry that depends on universities and research institutes, as does its high-tech industries like oil exploration services, the arms trade, aerospace, and growth industries like alternative energy. Suddenly putting up barriers to employing people from the most highly-educated part of the world is going to be really bad for high-tech industries in the UK, at a time when industries that primarily employ lower-skilled professionals (like tradespeople) are offshoring rapidly.

This is going to be an economic disaster for the UK for a very long time to come. Their only chance of a decent economic future is to implement an industrial policy, significantly improve funding to health and education, and shift from austerity to a Japan-style deficit-financed industrial society. The only person with a vision to do this – Corbyn – is about to be eaten alive by the Blairite ghouls still shambling through his own party, which will leave the political landscape ruled by Boris Johnson, who has no vision for the UK economy and is going to be so reviled by the time the UK exits that he won’t be able to make anything happen even if he had a sensible idea.

Conclusion

This was a political disaster that is going to leave Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and Farage the most reviled politicians in modern British history. It will likely lead to the breakup of the Union, and if it doesn’t, a return to civil war in Northern Ireland. It will also plunge the UK into a long period of economic collapse that it has no way out of, and no scapegoats for. The EU, coupled with a decent economic policy aimed at renewing British industry, was the only chance for the UK to remain globally relevant and for its citizens to enjoy a good quality of life. Cameron has wrecked that one chance in order to score a victory over the idiots in his own party, in a reckless and breathtakingly stupid political gamble. The tidal wave of economic and social problems about to hit the UK is the perfect proof that conservative politics is a wrecking-ball through modern life, and they should never ever be trusted with power.

 

November 23, 2015

Get your Infanticide out of my Star Wars

Posted by faustusnotes under Horror, Meat Life, Nerd Culture | Tags: , , |
[4] Comments 
Christian doctrine summarized

Christian doctrine summarized

Today’s news brings us reports that the Church of England’s gentle attempts to frontload the new Star Wars movie with a one minute long advert for their brand of authoritarian fantasism have fallen flat, in what everyone (even Richard Dawkins, apparently) is calling a defeat for free speech. In a stunning moment of unexpected bravery from our corporate overlords, the bosses of three different cinema chains have told the CofE to get fucked. Rather than being horrified by this slow slide into oppression, I am very happy, and extremely angry that the CofE felt they had the right to pull this nasty piece of totalitarianism on the British public. Before you start hyperventilating, dear reader(s), let me explain …

I’m not an easily offended man, I think, and I think I’ve been on the record as supporting free expression for all religions. I’m an atheist but I don’t subscribe to the “Militant Atheist” school of “thought”, which holds that religion is a childish emotional prop and that society should and will grow past it. I respect individual religious belief, I think religions should have freedom in public life and I’m not especially bothered by the special place that some religious institutions hold in public life – e.g. the christian churches of various denominations in various nations, Islam in Turkey, etc. In the modern era I really don’t see religion as a big threat to our continued progress towards enlightenment, and I have no problem with its open expression and with its historical contributions being recognized. I’m also, I think, on record here as saying I suspect that a lot of the militant atheist spokespeople are sexist, racist bigots who are especially fond of using their atheism as a cloak for their obvious anti-Arab or anti-Islamic racism, and I don’t think that their aggressive tactics do atheism any favours. To the extent that atheism is a movement (it’s not) we don’t need these people as our chief representatives. However …

The Church of England, because it has a huge and privileged position in the British intellectual world. It is the establishment church, meaning the head of the church is also the head of a nuclear-armed state. It owns most of the publicly-run schools, and I can personally attest to the way it used those schools to exclude other religions from discussion, to misrepresent them and to force us to learn and recite its doctrine. It gets free public air time for Sunday worship and special events that no one else gets, and its religious events are the key public holidays, during which time it gets almost untrammeled access to both state and private television and radio. Despite this near constant exposure of a large portion of the population to its propaganda message, and despite the fact that the major media organizations treat the corrupt content of that message with kid gloves, it is still losing the intellectual battle with atheism, agnosticism and who-gives-a-fuckism. So, having lost that battle, and aware of that, they are now going to start forcing adults who have graduated from their schools and escaped their slimy clutches to sit through a minute of unbridled power worship before they can enjoy some actually good fantasy.

Why should we put up with this? Why should I be forced to endure that horrible piece of authoritarian “poetry” when I have already been forced to recite it every morning for the first 17 years of my life? If I am not voluntarily reciting it then there is a simple reason: I think it sucks and I don’t want to. So don’t make me read it again, if I never have to read that horrible little cry for help ever again in my belief-free existence I will be a happy man. And most importantly, what gives the church the arrogance and sense of superiority to think that it’s okay for them to afflict me with this crap during my daily activities? Every time I go to a hotel in the English speaking world I’m given a free bible [another public service extended exclusively to the christian church by private companies], hasn’t the church worked out that if I wanted to read that prayer I would?

Most people understand that if you have told someone something a certain number of times and they still don’t believe it or don’t want to hear it, it’s time to stop yelling at them. Apparently the luminaries at the head of the Church of England have yet to learn that lesson, and think they have some special right to lambast us with their brand of patriarchal authoritarianism just once more, because that one more minute will get us back. The thought of sitting there, waiting to watch something I really want to watch, while for one minute this old man lectures me on how much I should love a god I don’t believe in, makes me so angry. It’s a direct reminder that these evil old men still own my society; an attempt to force me back to being my 8 year old self, shivering and powerless in assembly hall while I wait to be free of their pointless rituals. How dare they do this?

Some random dude at the Guardian is complaining that the real reason the cinemas refused is because they’re scared the illuminati might force us to listen to a muslim prayer in the future, and then they’ll be forced to play it if they also play the christian one. For me personally a passage from the Quran is largely meaningless, and if I listen to it it won’t make me angry because I have no historical association with Islam (though I guess this depends on the prayer they choose!) But for the record I think that Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and everyone else should steer well clear of my precious pre-Star Wars advertising time. I also really want to hope that this is not the reason the cinemas said no, but rather that they, like me, are horrified at the thought of allowing any church to preach to us for a minute before a movie. I’m glad they don’t need the money that badly!

The sooner the Church of England is out of schools and television altogether the better. It’s a dying institution that is propped up by the state and the buttresses of history, but its days are numbered. This desperate, mean-spirited lashing out at non-believing adults needs to be stopped early, and rather than seeing this decision as “nonsense on stilts” or some kind of blow to free speech we should recognize that it is a huge victory for modern values over superstition and authoritarianism. Well done those British cinema chains, and shame on the Church of England for thinking that such a move would ever be okay.

 

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