Fuck me, I’m not famous

I’m resigned, reader. I accept now what I have been fighting desperately through December: despite a few choice bribes, and levels of self-aggrandisement that would make Katie Price wince, I’m unlikely to make it big in 2011.

And so to 2012, stretched out before me like freshly-starched Egyptian cotton. I like 2012. I have a lot of time for it. It’s a Leap Year, first of all, which gives me one whole extra day – one whole extra shot at success. You could say it has a lot of time for me, too.

More pertinently, 2012 is an auspicious year for bitter sorts like me. Britain plays hosts to Our Majesty’s Golden Jubilee, and to the Olympics. These are two grand events about which to write cynical things – and that’s without even considering the rich pickings another year of Tory Government, and an American Presidential election, will provide. For if there is one sport (sadly, non-Olympic) which Britain excels at, it is cynicism.

But as well as ‘Getting Famous’ (Resolution #1) and ‘Moaning’ (Resolution #2), I thought I’d give myself a Project (Resolution #3).

Introducing Project Pepper

This December, I became an uncle (Uncle Sam – Stars and Stripes topcoat and tails in the post). It got me thinking.

Now, I could spin you a misty-eyed yarn about how I looked at him and felt a pressing sense of avuncular duty, about how he curled his impossibly small finglets around my impossibly clunky fingertip and my heart melted like Lurpak on oven-fresh baguette. But I won’t, partly because it isn’t true, and partly because I have all the romance of Alan Partridge.

It happened more like this: two weeks ago, I was shopping on Carnaby Street. I’m not sure if you’ve been to Carnaby Street a week before Christmas, but if you imagine Heronimous Bosch’s ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’  set in a busy shopping precinct, you’re pretty much there. As I paced up and down, frothing slightly at the mouth, tearing apart clothes racks in a kind of consumerist frenzy, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be awfully jolly if I never had to do this again?”

This thought was succeeded by another: “I could make him a children’s book.” Over the next few days, as the kernels of so many almonds lodged themselves firmly in my gums, the kernel of an idea lodged itself in the fluffy marshmallow that I call a brain:

Every time Pepper the Elephant tries to suck water into her trunk, she sneezes.

By Christmas Day, I had convinced myself that it would at least keep me off the White Lightning through to Easter. I would write, lay-out and illustrate a children’s book over the course of 2012. If and when I finished, said book would be:

1) presented to my nephew; and,

2) published on my website, for anyone who was interested

From working in a photographic studio that made fine art books, I’m aware how much goes into book publishing: the writing, the editing, the fonts, the layouts, the colour management and proofing and reproofing, the litres of coffee and sweat and tears, the months of painstaking work. I have no delusions that what I produce will be of any particular quality.

Here are some caveats, in fact: I’m a poor writer, or at least an untested writer, as few have read any of the things I’ve written. I’ve never written for children. I can’t draw, and my design skills are, shall we say, basic. The end result, then, is likely to be (at best) of sentimental value to Clan Palin (a Clan that, it must be said, looks after its own: every exercise book I touched in 13 years of schooling sits in my parents’ loft).

I’m going to blog my progress here. Just like the book, I don’t really expect this to excite many – my main objective in blogging is merely to compel me to carry on with the damn thing. (You should read my main blog, though – it’s dead good.)

And finally, yes: I’m aware of Peppa Pig. Pepper will almost certainly be renamed, to avoid stepping on that pink colossus’ toes.

Watch this space.

I baked a lemon drizzle cake a few weeks ago. It was delicious – zesty, zingy and moist. One of my few baking triumphs.

I decided to bring a few slices into work. It is the Done Thing, and I hadn’t Done it yet. So I Did.

A lot of people liked it. They cooed and thanked me and patted their tummies and made contented ‘mmm’ sounds, like Buddhist hummingbirds. Some people, on the other hand, didn’t even try it. Why? “Because men can’t cook”, apparently. Even some of those who did try it referred to it dismissively as ‘man-baking’ (the cheek!).

Were I quicker-witted, I would have given them some zesty and zingy retorts. I would have floated the words ‘Escoffier’, and ‘Roux’, and maybe ‘Blumenthal’, and stroked my beard or thrusted my crotch meaningfully. Sadly, I only thought to do so several weeks afterwards. Now, in fact.

Lemondrizzlegate got me thinking. Why is our view of masculinity so constrained?

The truth of the matter is, I don’t like football very much, and I can’t grow a beard. At the same time, I can drink a lot of beer and I like very rare steak. I have cried at a lot of films, both on my own and in company. Hell, I cried at this, for God’s sake. But I wouldn’t be caught dead using fabric softener…

I’m being flippant. My point is a serious one: our view of men can be just as myopic as our view of women.

Mangling men

There is something peculiar about misandry. Yes, that’s what you call it when you belittle and denigrate men purely for being men – misandry. It’s probably not a word you use very much. It’s hasn’t floated down into the soft, familiar realm of common parlance quite yet, unlike its gynier cousin. It is, nevertheless, everywhere.

Whilst misogyny has been pushed slowly and firmly from polite discourse, to the dingy corners of locker rooms and Zoo magazine, Lucy Mangan, a respected columnist for the very-mainstream Stylist Magazine and The Guardian, can get away with writing things like this:

Men have fewer and narrower interests [than women]. They don’t dabble, they pick a pastime and hobby the hell out of it. 

(Link.)

Would Danny Wallace, Lucy’s counterpart in Stylist‘s male-oriented stablemate, Shortlist, get away with such a statement about women?

Or take the infamous case of the ‘All Men Are Bastards’ knife block. In a country where male-on-male stabbings are rising, and domestic violence against males is an increasingly-recognised issue, this is at the very least tasteless. The Advertising Standards Agency, in response to complaints by men’s rights campaigners, thought it

“a common and ironic piece of female humour.”

Maybe it is – but how awful is that?

Polite society doesn’t like men one bit. We can’t cook, we can’t clean, we don’t understand the subtle beauty of lilies and Häagen-Dazs. All we’re really good for is fighting and fucking. Fatherhood? Well, funny you should mention that…

Home alone

‘Paternity rights’. Say it. Roll it around on your tongue. It sounds like a real thing, doesn’t it? But it’s not.

Non-custodial parents (overwhelmingly fathers) cannot expect access to their children. Way back in 2004, Theresa May, the Conservative MP, tabled a motion establishing basic paternity rights (quoted in full here):

“That this House agrees that on the separation of parents…it is in the best interests of all children for both parents to be fully involved in their upbringing and hence that separated parents should each have a legal presumption of reasonable contact with their children…” 

An eminently sensible motion, you might think – but one that was trounced (283 Noes comfortably beat 168 Ayes).

As it stands, non-custodial parents still have no a priori legal right to see their children. Conservative support for a change in opposition gave paternity rights’ groups – most prominently Fathers 4 Justice – hope. Unfortunately, that hope was recently dashed: the recently-published Family Justice Review included such a recommendation in its draft stage, but in the end a vague call for judges to continue acting in the child’s best interests was deemed sufficient. Fabulously, David Norgrove, the chair, sought no actual proof that judges do this, nor did he give much time to the problem of parental alienation.

Mothers appear to win legal custody battles overwhelmingly, though the Ministry of Justice has repeatedly declined requests for an official figure. What we do know is that in 95% of cases - including out-of-court agreements – mothers become the primary carers.  It seems that ‘the best interests of the child’ are almost invariably served by the custody of the mother.

There are, of course, biological reasons why a mother may prove to be a better carer for very young infants – and the bond so developed leads to a reasonable presumption that mothers often will be favoured custodian. But custody does not have to be a monopoly, and there have been a number of high-profile, tragic cases in which non-resident fathers have been repeatedly denied the right to see their children by the mother. Enforcement of Contact Orders is logistically difficult, and often simply doesn’t happen.

At the same time, absent fathers are being blamed for all manner of social ills, not least this year’s UK riots - and much of this blame has real substance. One way to prevent fatherlessness is to protect fathers. There are many reasons a family may grow up without a father, of course, but at least some of the time the absent father will want to have more of a role in his child’s upbringing than he does.

Fuck Lemondrizzlegate

These seem disparate threads – an old-fashioned view of men on the one hand, and an alienation of fathers on the other. I see them as two facets of the same thing. Our concept of men is antediluvian – they are breadwinners, autists and aggressors. Family courts and female columnists deny the wide range of personalities, interests and emotions that men have. Men are uninterested and uninteresting.

We as men need to start talking. Why do we let misandry slide – through a misguided sense of chivalry, because of post-feminist guilt, or because we think other men will mock us as over-sensitive? To tell you the truth, I don’t really care who chooses to eat my lemon drizzle cake. I do care, very much, about the damaging effects that misandry may have on my gender.

Let’s ask why fathers have less access to flexible working. Let’s question the growing rates of suicide and depression in young men.  Let’s fight for our rights as men, as fathers, and as people. Let’s start talking about everything we’re saying nothing about.

There is a great scene in a new film, The Ides of March, that captures the zeitgeist: the idea of National Service is floated by Ryan Gosling’s character as a perfect piece of policy: the only people who disagree are under-18s, and they can’t vote.

This happens all the time, of course, away from the big screen. Even those of us who can vote are a bit concern: we turn out in lower numbers, and we are dwarfed by simple demographics. Recently, young people have seen a steady tide of news go against them. Many will pay more fees and receive less educational support. Young people are already suffering the brunt of unemployment. This belt-tightening will happen against the backdrop of handsome rewards for those who happen to be older.

Universal benefits for the elderly are preserved, despite a clamour for reform of that unjust system. Inheritance tax thresholds have been raised yet again, despite the tiny number of estates that attract the tax. (As an aside, the argument against inheritance tax has always struck me as a curious one: you had to be neither a shrewd investor nor particularly hardworking to ‘earn’ a huge amount of money off an unprecedented housing boom.)

But wait! What’s this? In swoops the Coalition to save the day. Yesterday they announced a raft of measures which will ‘unstick’ the housing market and catapult young people onto the property ladder, which sure sounds like a gee-whiz place to be to me, mister.

Thanks, but no thanks. Young people leaving university with £40,000-worth of debt, as they soon will be, cannot afford even 95% mortgages – and since most of our incomes would be spent servicing debt on such a mortgage, the situation would be little better than renting. Even if home ownership is desirable from an individual perspective – property does, after all, print money – from a societal point of view it is problematic.

There is a great irony in Mr. Cameron’s wording: ‘unsticking’ the housing market by encouraging ownership will make the economy very ‘sticky’ indeed. Young people now, more than ever, need to move to wherever there are jobs. If we lose ours, it is better that we are nimble, able to pick ourselves up and move to find work. Tying down the young people who could be contributing so much to our economy is the last thing we need to do. And that’s without factoring in the questionable logic of driving house prices still higher.

More than anything else, piling mortgages on top of eye-watering personal balance sheets enshrines a wider culture of debt. What is another £10,000 on a credit card, when you already owe the Student Loans Company £40,000, and your mortgage provider £250,000? Where do you suppose this ends, Mr. Cameron? This policy would further normalise debt. Spending hopelessly beyond our means is a poor basis for growth – a tough lesson which I thought we’d just learnt.

Our generation will live in the shadow of the previous one. We will struggle with the very real impact of climate change. We will pay for handsome pensions, the like of which we are unlikely ever to see. The poorest amongst us will struggle to find council housing, because of -  wait for it – the cult of home ownership.

I, for one, am angry. I see wealthy, middle class and middle-aged Britons, Britons who grew fat on a property boom that they will scarcely see the dark underbelly of, nodding along to the Occupy protests, grumbling about ‘greedy bankers’. It takes two to tango, folks.

This is the time of year we come together to remember – firstly the eminent folly of Catholicism, and then, a few days later, something much more important: the millions upon millions, millions whose totality will never be fully reckoned, who laid down their lives in the two great wars of the twentieth century.

The associations of that remembering are different for everybody. The pacifist sees Armistice Day as a sober reminder of the brutal price of war. Many of them will consequently choose to wear a white poppy  - and it’s worth remembering how many veterans share this sentiment. Those who knew Britain’s war years may remember individuals, individual lives lost and tragedies borne. Many use Remembrance Sunday as a wider commemoration of our armed forces – a thanksgiving for the sacrifices they have made, and continue to make, on our behalf. Each to his own. Remembrance should never be a diktat.

But herein lies the problem. Poppies have moved from a voluntary gesture to a PR necessity, and I’m not sure their new ubiquity has been matched by a concomitant increase in remembering. There is a new cult of the poppy, as Jon Snow observed in decrying ‘poppy fascism’. Laurie Penny wrote illuminatingly on it in the New Statesman a few days ago. Whether you agree with her pacifistic position or not, the thrust of her argument – that poppies are losing their meaning - resonates.

If wearing a poppy becomes non-negotiable, are poppy wearers still doing it because they care, or because they are told to? Aren’t we in danger of paying lip service to this most serious of causes?

Lip service

Talking of lip service, it is ‘Movember’, and millions of British men are paying literal lip service to charity. Movember, if you have been living under a rock (or, perhaps, in Turkish Dalston), is an attempt to galvanise men behind men’s health issues, most prominently prostate cancer, the third-biggest killer of British men. Men are encouraged to grow a moustache, and to solicit sponsorship for their efforts.

Well, amen to that. Just like The Heart Truth and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Movember (or, as I prefer, ‘Novembeard’) is a laudable attempt to increase disease awareness and raise money for deserving charities. Nevertheless, these efforts are problematic.

Many men I know who are taking part in Movember have only a vague understanding of its meaning. A friend I quizzed today (who is fundraising) did not realise that the Movember appeal fund dealt with diseases other than prostate cancer. Many, too, are not actually fundraising. One might argue that their contribution is still valuable: another moustache on the street means a little more awareness, and a key objective of the Movember campaign is encouraging more men to have prostate examinations (though it is worth noting that the NHS does not run a national screening programme for prostate cancer, since men at high risk are generally in close contact with their GPs).

But when does this just become tokenism? And if that tokenism pushes other charitable causes out of people minds, is this desirable? Cancer research, which takes the lion’s share of the Movember harvest, is an astonishingly well-funded disease area. Suicide, usually associated with depression, is the second-biggest killer of 15-24-year-olds. How many young men, currently cultivating their moustaches, know that? And of course, casting further afield, one could consider how charities delivering foreign aid or fighting climate change are impacted. Movember is reaping the benefits of choosing a powerful symbol, but is it too powerful?

It may seem as though I’m pouring cold water on a harmless bit of fun, but I have encountered a certain self-righteousness when it comes to Movember. It is a much milder equivalent of what has derailed the Poppy Appeal: when a symbol outgrows its message, that message risks becoming lost.

“New game in the office. We’re just starting random setences with ‘As a feminist’: “As a feminist, would anyone like a cup of tea?” #LizJones”

(Link.)

I wanted to articulate my views more fully, so here goes…

Anyone who meets me, or reads what I write, would think I don’t like children and never wanted to be a father. Indeed, for most of my adult life, having a child was the furthest thing from my mind.

I wanted a career, freedom, and a nice house. Since I was career-focussed, I looked down on family men.

But when I was in my late 30s, I decided that if I didn’t get someone pregnant soon then it might never happen. I had also reached a point in my life where I wanted to settle down with a woman, and though my girlfriend at that time was wildly unsuitable, I thought that I could change her.

Shall I list the ways in which we were a mismatch? She lived with her parents before she moved in with me, and earned very little money. I was working on a newspaper and was fiercely ambitious. She was laid-back, I am not. I was ready for a baby, she wasn’t.

And yet I wanted to hang on to Tracy. I thought that if we split up I might not get a replacement girlfriend in time to use my rapidly dwindling erection.

Tracy had never given me what I wanted from a relationship. At first, she wouldn’t even have sex with me. Then, finally, when she moved into my flat (probably more out of a desire to be able to walk to work than any real love for me) we started a physical relationship.

She was still very cautious, though. She insisted on taking the Pill, and insisted we use a condom for every moment of our intimate contact.

‘I don’t trust you,’ she said, muttering something about men claiming to want a career, but underneath wanting to start a family.

I called her bluff and told her there was no way I would want a baby with her, given she didn’t earn any money. Yet the truth was, I had hatched a plan that many will doubtless find shocking.

Because she wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I decided to make her. I resolved to prick one of the condoms she made me wear. I thought it was my right, given that she was living with me and I had bought her many, many M&S ready meals.

The deed itself was alarmingly easy to carry out. One night, during sex, I took the condom and, in the privacy of the bathroom, I did what I had to do. Bingo.

I don’t understand why more women aren’t wise to this risk — maybe sex addles their brain. So let me offer a warning to women wishing to avoid any chance of unwanted motherhood: if a man disappears to the loo immediately before sex, I suggest you find out exactly what he is up to. 

As it turned out, my attempts to get Tracy pregnant failed, and shortly afterwards she and I split up.

But my dreams of fatherhood persisted, and I resorted to similarly secretive methods to sire in my next relationship. And given that I was in my early 40s by then, this was an even more urgent situation.

At least on this occasion we were married, which you might think would — should — give a man every right to want to start a family. But my wife was 14 years younger than me, and she had told me she was not ready for children.

But I didn’t listen. All I heard was my own ticking cock, not her reasonable desire to be allowed to grow up herself first.

Of course, not every man in my position would resort to extreme measures. But I do believe that any woman who moves in with a man in his late 30s or early 40s should take it as read that he will want to use them to procreate, by fair means or foul, no matter how much he protests otherwise.

A 2001 survey revealed that 42 per cent of women would lie about using contraception in order to get pregnant in spite of their partners’ wishes. Well, many men are the same.

Perhaps my wife should never have married me if she didn’t feel ready for a family. Perhaps I should never have married her. There are always two sides to every dispute, but I think the words I flung at her when we eventually broke up were: ‘You stole my last chance of fatherhood from me! ’

My own attempts at ‘surprise insemination’ failed. But there are plenty more like me who are willing to give it a try.

Among my circle, many friends have told me how they have tricked their girlfriend or fiancé or wife. One found himself childless in his 40s, so he lied to a very new girlfriend about using a condom. She is now in a new relationship having to pay support for a child she never sees.

Another friend was engaged but his fiancé walked out on him. He is 39, and told me he was hoping she was pregnant ‘so she would have to come back’. Yet women remain in blissful ignorance of such tactics.

I spoke to several women before writing this article. One, in her mid-30s, has just got engaged to a man who is 39. She told me she is not yet thinking about starting a family, as she is self-employed and worried about the recession. They also live 45 miles apart, each in their own flat.

She told me she wants to wait until they have a house together, and for her business to become established.

I bet she will be pregnant within the year.

You’re right, Liz. Many people do find this shocking. Would a male journalist who made the same revelations keep his job?

Get out of public life.

That may seem pedantic, but I’m underling an important fact that most economists and many politicians overlook: we are human beings.

Since 2008, the powers that be have been worrying about one thing: how to kickstart the global economy. Different tacks have been taken in different places. The British government has adopted an austere stance – though, it is worth remembering, actuals cuts are highly backloaded. Germany has done similarly. Other countries have opted to cut back less, seeking to drive job creation through investment. Barack Obama is attempting to follow such a policy, though his legislature aren’t making it easy for him.

Politicians try to simplify these positions for the cameras. To paraphrase the ‘cutters’: deficits are unsustainable, and Western governments are spending eye-watering sums simply servicing debt. The ‘spenders’ note that the most effective way to cut debt is through growth, and that government debt is at historically low levels.

These positions are presented as factual – though of course they are interpretive. Fundamentally, economics it is not a science – it is an art. Economics makes assumptions, and many of those assumptions are about human behaviour.

To illustrate the point, Consider Steven Levitt’s anecdote:

“Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.

“What are you doing here?” one asks.

“My wife made me come,” the other says.

The first economist gives a confirming nod. “The same.”

After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: “If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll never tell anyone I saw you.” They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.”

Why the embarrassment? As a behavioural economist sees it, the act of voting makes little sense. Your vote is vanishingly unlikely to change the result – in national elections, a ‘close call’ still involves thousands of votes. Why bother?

We bother, mostly, because of a sense of civic duty. To vote is to feel connected to the society we live in, and to show our appreciation of those suffered so we could have that privilege*. In other words, the benefits are psychological.

Human behaviour is the great unknown quantity in economics.

Occupy where?

The Occupy Wall Street movement has reframed the debate over the global economy as a moral one. Demonstrators speak a strong truth: what is best for the global economy is not necessarily what is best for most of humanity.

As an aside: I am ambivalent about their position. On the one hand, it is hard to deny that the extent of the financial services industry’s responsibility for our economic mire (very large) has not been reflected in the extent of their suffering (bugger all). At the same time, they are not solely to blame. Our working and middle classes hopelessly overstretched themselves – through greed, not through need – and the younger generation, as well as the rest of the world, will pay the price. ‘We are the 99%’ lets a lot of people off scot-free. If the financial crisis has taught me anything, it is that everyone is greedy – including our damned ‘squeezed middle’.

Anyway, Occupy Wall Street demonstrates something important – a sterile debate about economic policy is not how politics works, because we are human beings.

Take the 50p tax rate. Many argue that it is a foolish policy, because it drives away top rate earners who would otherwise contribute generously to the public purse abroad. A clutch of leading economists recently made exactly this argument in a letter to the Financial Times. Our Chancellor has asked the Inland Revenue to find out whether the rate actually makes the UK any money.

But this exercise in arithmetic misses something. The 50p tax rate’s value transcends top earners. We all know about it. Those of us lower down the food chain care that it is there, because it seems like justice to tax these rich people heavily. Even if it doesn’t add anything to the public purse, it ensures the rest of us are invested in the grand project of living together in a democracy.

What is happening at Occupy Wall Street, and similar events worldwide, could be seen in the same light. Our governments would do well to stop counting the change they don’t have, and start thinking about the people they do have. After all: economies don’t make nations, people do.

*I should point out that I am, however, no particular fan of voting for voting’s sake – see this column I wrote for The Guardian in 2009.

How about the family who run your local grocery store, or your friends from church? How about your own family?

‘Hardworking’ is subjective. Some people would say models and professional footballers are hardworking. Others would strongly disagree.

During the 2005 general election, the BBC ran a story on the term’s ubiquity in political discourse. The blame, as for so many things, goes to New Labour’s charm offensive – specifically, their desire to snatch the ‘family values’ mantle from the Tories.

Their 2001 manifesto alone uses the term a Tourettic seven times. A ‘hardworking family’ is, of course, whomsoever you want them to be. They are the deserving common man, the squeezed Middle Britain. They are a flattering mirror held up to every Johnny who has a vote.

In social psychology 101, you learn about the ‘actor-observer bias‘ - the tendency we all have to blame others for their mistakes, but excuse our own. ‘Hardworking families’ are a way of crystallising this innate ‘us and them’ mentality into votes.

The Manhattan Project

The hardworking family is a concept which can trace its ancestry to the nuclear family – a central tenet of mid-century American conservatism. The industrial age tore apart settled communities, heretofore the social fabric of the nation. Men moved to urban centres. Their wives and their children followed. Nuclear families became the basic unit of civilisation – more social rag-rug than social fabric. The nuclear family represented modernity, wealth, and luxury – the new articulation of the American dream.

The Sixties and Seventies brought dissent from this hegemony, at which point the nuclear family became a political bargaining chip. Nowadays, Republican ‘family values’ form the basis of the schism that splits America.

Consider this: four American Presidents – James Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and James Buchanan – entered office as bachelors. Is this conceivable today? The nuclear family has become a moral centre of gravity, in America and in Britain. Politicians from nuclear families are elected by nuclear families, and run the country for the benefit of nuclear families. Hence, for example. the British Government offers tax credits for families with children, and the Conservative party is toying with ways to incentivise marriage.  Policies which reward traditional, nuclear families are generally very palatable.

The problem is that many families are no longer nuclear. The hardworking family fixes this. It is far more inclusive notion. It reflects the variety of modern families – the children who grow up with one parent, or no parents; with parents of the same gender, and of different race. It encompasses everyone without explicitly saying so – thus remaining palatable to the socially conservative. It was born of New Labour, but it is such a clever trick that it has been adopted by the left and the right, and on both sides of the pond.

Vanity fair

When politicians talk about ‘fairness’, they invoke a similar platitude. There are 16 references to what is fair and unfair in the 2010 Conservative manifesto, and over 70 in Labour’s.

Again, fairness is subjective. Some consider it entirely fair that the rich pay large amounts of tax to fund welfare initiatives; others see this as an unfair tax on success. The point is that no one can disagree with the notion of ‘fairness for hardworking families’, so arguing against any policy couched in these terms is tricky.

Catch-2012

Politics is a popular exercise: an appeal not just to the lowest common denominator, as the cynic might say, but every denominator; an appeal to hearts, kidneys, livers and spleens, as much as to heads. Spleens love hardworking families.

No politician can say this – there lies spin, and spin is bad. Thus the great balancing act of modern politics: running the PR machine so smoothly that the public never hears its roar.

P.S. Jack Thurston’s scathing 2005 piece on New Labour’s cult of hardworking families is well worth a read.

I was outraged about something else. At the end of last week, Priti Patel, a UK Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party, went on the popular British panel show Question Time to debate, amongst other things, the case for death penalty, in light of Davis’ execution. In her spirited defence of capital punishment, Ms Patel said many things I, and many others, disagreed with. This post focuses on one in particular, and the huge problem it underlined.

A fellow panel member asked Ms Patel whether there was any evidence that the death penalty actually deters people from committing murders. “There is evidence,” was her reply. And that was that.

Now, a panel show is a difficult medium in which to qualify statements, and Ms Patel’s willingness to commit herself is a refreshing quality in a British politician. But the question remains: what evidence?

I’ll be damned if I can find it. I am a man of my generation, so I Googled for answers. A search for ‘death penalty deterrent’ brings up mostly campaign groups, perhaps unsurprisingly. Amnesty, the human rights campaign group, presents charts showing murder rates in US states which do and do not use the death penalty. Rates tend to be far lower in states which abstain, but  conflating factors - poverty, for example – render this data fairly meaningless.

Prodeathpenalty.com  – a website wearing its heart on its sleeve, if ever there was one – hosts an article by George E. Pataki, the former Governer of New York who ran on a fierce pro-death penalty ticket. His essay is worth a read, though again the simple picture he paints is far from the truth - Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt’s bestselling economics book, illustrates the problems with inferring anything very much from US crime figures.

Further searching reveals one credible, modern source, again based on US data (the only large, Western country which has carried out significant numbers of executions in modern times). The source is a survey of leading criminologists from 2009, published in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. Their conclusion is clear:

“The findings demonstrate an overwhelming consensus among these criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty does not add deterrent effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment.”

My point isn’t that Ms Patel’s assertion was wrong, but that her source was not immediately obvious. She may well be basing her claim on very good data; she is, after all,  an intelligent woman. But we have no idea what that data is. Her statement was indicative of a huge problem in journalism and politics – the tendency to quote ‘facts’ without context or source. It is not a new problem, but there is a new solution: the Internet.

But firstly, a slightly different example.

The 6.5% rape claim

It is undoubtedly an arresting figure: between 2007 and 2008, 6.5% of reported rapes result in a rape conviction. It has been bandied around to support all kinds of things, by all sorts of people. It is the crime and punishment equivalent of Katie Price, generating column inches at an improbable rate (and often misunderstood?). So what does it mean?

As it happens, The Guardian recently wrote an in-depth piece on this very statistic. The number itself is real enough: 6.5% of reported rapes result in a rape conviction. Only 6.5% – and I feel that that number does deserve an ‘only’. But this simple fact is chronically misunderstood.

13% of reported rapes results in a conviction of some form – half (6.5%) result in a rape conviction, and the rest are for lesser charges, such as sexual assault. The 6.5% figure has been contrasted with the conviction rate for other violent crimes - such as violence against the person, which between 2002 and 2006 stood at 70% in England and Wales. But this comparison is false: the rape number is from initial report to final conviction, whereas the ‘conviction rate’, as defined by the Home Office, concerns only cases going to trial. The comparable figure for rape, in 2007, was 47%.

There is still a gulf here. It is absolutely fair to say that rape conviction rates are too low. Further, the misinformation which rape apologists seed is faintly sickening: notwithstanding some high profile exceptions, false accusations of rape are actually extremely low.

Some have suggested that this is a peculiarly British problem – since 6.5% is far lower than the comparable 25% figure for France. But, again, this is misleading – rapes are much more often reported in Britain. Countries with higher reporting rates tend to have worse conviction rates. If anything, our high reporting rate should be congratulated.

Why does this matter? I would argue (though I have no evidence) that this single figure is extremely damaging: a woman who thinks rapes are ‘unconvictable’ is a woman less likely to report a rape. Ironically, if this true, we can expect an increase in the 6.5% figure, as less rapes are reported. Is this really a victory? Should we not, instead, question the high ‘attrition’ rate in reported cases, and ask why the Police often fail to provide rape kits to victims?

So rape statistics are another case where proper referencing and proper clarity would be incredibly valuable. If everyone understood where these figures came from, we could be achieving more to prevent rapes.

Whose line is it anyway?

As Homer Simpson put it: “People can come up with statistics to prove anything.” Mostly, however, people don’t do so wilfully. Rather, facts are rephrased, rehashed, echoed. The original sources are obscured, context is removed, and much more weight is put on them than they can bear.

Journalists are of course hampered in efforts to properly reference their stories by basic practicalities: newspapers don’t have room, and broadcast media don’t have time. Politicians suffer similar constraints: a snappy political soundbite loses its snappiness when referenced. Acknowledging sources may also detract from a good yarn; I’m sure Johann Hari would agree.

But there is a third way: if journalists and if politicians are sincere in their pledges of transparency (and there is now an unprecedented public appetite for them to be so), they can provide sources for their claims online. Every article in The Times or the Daily Mail can and should be referenced online. Every ministerial speech should appear in referenced form on DirectGov. The Internet provides unlimited space and, in modern Britain, near-universal access.

This is not a criticism of opinion journalism; long may our proud tradition of mouthing off continue. From Jan Moir to Polly Toynbee, opinion journalists enrich public debate in this country. Nor does it preclude anonymous sources. Rather, it is an appeal: make it clear where any stated facts come from.

Some journalists – notably The Guardian’s George Monbiot and blogger Ben Goldacre – are already beating this drum. The Guardian and The Telegraph have partially taken up the mantle – their online comment pieces are hyperlinked to sources, albeit incompletely. A reference pack for their daily paper editions, however, has not been forthcoming.

Let’s put it another way: it is curious to me that we still consider The Times as a ‘more valid’ source than Wikipedia. Why? Both have their inaccuracies, but at least Wikipedia is referenced.

Standard form

A slightly-mysterious group of people in Switzerland, known collectively as the International Organisation for Standardizaiton, could help. They enforce internationally-agreed standards on all sorts of things, from environmental waste management to photographic film. They accredit organisations which comply with their standards. If you work in a large company, it will almost certainly have accreditations in quality control and environmental responsibility.

As of yet, there is no agreed ISO standard for the media to adhere to: a standard that demands all articles are referenced online, and that employed journalists have declared their interests; a standard that requires all staff to be trained in the legality of phone hacking, and to post full transcripts of interviews. There should be.

Political parties should also seek ISO accreditation. MPs’ pay should be docked when they stray. Press passes should be denied to any media organisation that falls short of agreed standards.

Times have changed, and what journalists and politicians say is no longer taken on faith. At the moment, it isn’t taken on anything; trust in our politicians and our journalists has never been lower (and note that the linked research precedes the News of the World hacking scandal).

Well, if you can’t be trustworthy, you can at least be transparent. We can and should demand more from opinion leaders in our country. Where do your opinions come from? Are they based on fact, hunch, or prejudice? If they can’t tell us, then their opinions are worth less than the paper they are written on.

For now, take a peek at my Flickr and Facebook pages.