The longest journey starts with a single step
Regular listeners to the Moral Maze(hi Mum) will spot the connection between Michael Buerk and David Aaronovitch. The former has been the long-time presenter and chair of the programme, the latter was a very accomplished stand-in earlier this year. But this week there is another connection – immigration and jobs.
Today in The Times, Aaronovitch is fighting a brave rear guard action against the widespread but erroneous view that immigration creates unemployment and drives down wages. Given how many people – the latest being Ed Miliband – seem to have bought the ‘immigration is bad for the poor’ line, David’s determination to base his opinions on the actual statistics is an example – to misquote TH Huxley – of slaying a seductive hypothesis with an ugly fact.
Last night after our Moral Maze conversation about the morality of bailing out the Greeks (or should that be bailing out the banks), Michael Buerk was telling me about a recent visit to Herefordshire. Knowing me to be a bleeding heart liberal, the great man was as circumspect as possible in asking why it is still the case that Eastern Europeans migrants are willing to take jobs which indigenous youth refuse (I imagine he might have posed the question in somewhat more forthright terms if his interlocutor had been my fellow Maze panellist, Michael Portillo).
From their different perspectives both David A and Michael B agree that the problem about unemployment in areas where there are jobs is more to do with the readiness and willingness of local people to work than the impact of migration.
Why is this? The political right’s argument will tend to focus on the failings of the unemployed and will prescribe a more authoritarian regime in terms of benefit conditionality. The left may point to low wages and the poverty traps created by reductions in the value of in-work benefits. There may be validity in both arguments.
But I think other things are at play too. One might be what could be called the narrative of work. My suggestion to Michael Buerk was that Eastern Europeans may be willing to do tough work for low wages because they see this as part of a bigger life story. Perhaps their ambition is to settle in the UK or maybe to return to their mother country with enough money to set up their own business. In contrast, young people with limited skills and expectations of career progression may see the choice as simply between being free to hang around on limited benefits (perhaps occasionally topped up occasionally by cash in hand odd jobs) versus the constraints and indignities of a menial job which only gives them a few pounds a week more spending money, by the time things like transport, uniform etc have been paid for. This is not to condone those who choose not to take opportunities but to suggest that motivation is not just a matter of proximate choice but also wider life narrative.
I don’t know if there is any authoritative research on this but anecdotally it seems that employers who have a good reputation for looking after and progressing staff (M&S, McDonalds) will attract plenty of applicants for jobs even though starting wages are modest. Also relevant is research undertaken a few years ago which showed that many working class young people had a pretty sketchy understanding of the labour market and the range of careers that existed in any sector, such as health care.
I guess all I am saying is that part of encouraging young people to take on opportunities which offer limited short term benefits is to provide information and encouragement so that they see this as being the first step on a bigger project of personal growth, financial independence and career development. Ministers are currently mulling over whether to abandon independent face to face careers advice so perhaps this is another reason to suggest they shouldn’t. It’s also why I hope we at the RSA can take forward the promising work we have been doing around providing mentoring for students in FE.
Getting young people to take up modest opportunities (and we shouldn’t forget that in some areas there are no opportunities at all) is about sticks and carrots but also about advice, encouragement and support, and in that we can all play a role.
Don’t read this, read that
A recently submitted comment on an old post, makes a valid point. It’s in response to my repetitive and transparently self-serving requests for evidence that people read this blog:
‘Matthew, ten people want you to keep on blogging. Please employ a cost-benefit analysis. R’
The comment (leading me immediately to suspect anyone whose name begins with the letter ‘R’) panders both to my unquenchable thirst for self-deprecation and encourages me to spend less time posting. (See what you’ve done, ‘R’ – bet you feel pretty low now?)
Fortunately, I can kill two birds with one stone. Towards the back end of last year, The Times ran a couple of articles by me in their ’4th plinth’ (as I call it) commentary slot. I also got invited to some great breakfasts to coincide with the publication of the newspaper’s Eureka supplement. At last, I thought, my ambition to be a regular columnist is about to be fulfilled. Sadly, the new dawn turned out to be a flash in the pan. Since then, I’ve sent in loads of ideas, and even a couple of full columns, with no joy.
So, human nature being what it is, you would expect me to read The Times comment pages with a jaundiced eye – ‘how can they reject me and print this rubbish?’ But I am bigger than that, oh yes, and being big is made very easy today when there are four brilliant pieces:
Duncan Bannatyne, urging British entrepreneurs to invest in Haiti;
Richard Kemp, on why we should feel positive and determined in the face of bin Laden’s latest claims;
David Aaronovitch, writing about the Edlington case with his usual mixture of common sense and scathing wit; and
Rachel Sylvester on Chilcot, making me feel (a little) better about my old boss. (Accompanied, for balance, by a clever and cruel cartoon.)
The fact is I could write articles till the cows came home, made themselves a light supper and settled back to watch Newsnight (or should that be ‘Moosnight’?) and still not match any of these.
I guess I’ll have to stick to the quality-assurance-free zone that is my blog. Sorry ‘R’!
Why the ATL (and The Observer) should be ashamed of themselves
I said yesterday that the ATL’s methodology for its attack on parents and children couldn’t possibly be as dodgy as the one I used for the NASUWT twenty five years ago. This morning David Aaronovitch confirms that it was! The ATL (usually a serious and thoughtful union) should be ashamed of itself. I wonder whether there are any maths or statistic teachers at their conference and if so whether they would teach their GCSE pupils to rely on a self-selecting, unrepresentative, deliberately skewed sample in order to legitimise a major attack on the behaviour of large sections of British society. As for The Observer – which dedicated four pages to this tendentious nonsense- well that’s the last time I’ll be parting with £2.
‘The progressive consensus’ – and me, me, me ….
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Social brain, The RSA
Back to Number Ten this morning to discuss ‘the progressive consensus’. With only an hour for discussion, four presentations and 30 very clever people (plus me) round the table it was hardly surprising that the conversation comprised little more than the identification of a list of issues. But looking at what I found the most interesting points there is a line of connection.
• We are at an important moment in history. The goal must not simply be to mange the crisis and get back to business as usual. It is important to talk about what we might call the national ethos. In the face of uncertainty will people opt for greater individualism or greater social solidarity?
• Policy matters but so does culture – in institutions, in communities and in nations. Fascinatingly, research on values indicates that, despite globalisation and immigration, values are converging within nations but diverging between them (despite the event being under Chatham House rules I can attribute this point to David Halpern who is soon publishing a book about it). To take one small example, what Brits and Germans mean by equality and social justice is very different.
• One characteristic of contemporary British values is that we are hostile not just to the state but also to the market, or at least to big business. The over-riding national mood now is one of powerlessness in the face of events and big power of various forms. Adding to this, the credit crunch and the Government response may cement oligopoly in key markets – banking, supermarkets, mobile phones, energy companies.
• Government likes to talk about empowerment both as a good in itself and as a means towards more efficient and more responsive public services. But it is not clear the public want to be empowered (if this means transferring more responsibility to them) or that central Government has any clear account of who, realistically, is to do the empowering
• In all of this, conventional politics and the jargon-laden language of economic management and public service reform leaves people cold. Politicians need to find a way of speaking to people’s worries but also to their resilience, to their aspirations – and to their altruism. This is a time for leadership, people are open to new understandings and possibilities but leaders are not using a vocabulary people can understand, let alone be inspired by.
Interesting stuff.
Not that this is what I will remember from the morning. Before we went into the seminar one of the directors of my old haunt, the IPPR, said to me: ‘we all have a good laugh about your blog – it’s all me, me, me’.
Can this be true? I am shocked. I have decided to spend a lot more time thinking about whether it is true that I am obsessed with myself. Maybe it’s something I should blog about? I have also resolved to stop talking so much about myself, for how else can I create the space for other people to say what they think of me?
Despite this terrible blow to my frail self esteem, I was given some comfort when David Aaronovitch (whose column today is particularly brilliant) told me that my pals over at the Times Comment pages enjoy my blog.
It’s the stuff on the brain they like best so they can rest assured that with Elizabeth Gould here tonight and Norman Doidge (whose new book is stunning) here tomorrow, it will be the brain and not progressivism, nor even me, me, me, that will be my focus over the next couple of days.
Meeting the challenges of blogging
One of the challenges of blogging (so I’m told) is to see how many strands can be incorporated in the smallest number of words. Today I want to cover:
- The search for a EU agreement on climate change targets
- An event at the RSA
- Cultural theory
- My time at Number Ten
- What I am doing today
All in 350 words (obviously, this doesn’t include this bit). Here we go:
We will be wishing Ed Miliband well today as he tries to persuade other EU countries to sign up to an ambitious carbon emissions reduction target. Climate change really emerged as a key national policy priority during my time in Number Ten. I remember one particularly important meeting with TB when he endorsed a ‘wedge’ approach (I think that was what it was called), in which Government backed many different interventions; partly because progress demanded we use every tool in the kit but also because we couldn’t tell which method would turn out to be the most effective. So nuclear power would be pursued, along with renewables, along with action to reduce industrial and domestic energy consumption, along with backing new energy efficient technologies etc.
But this plural approach to policy interventions needs to be matched by a plural approach to human agency. Last night we had a lively debate as part of the WWF-UK series on values and sustainability. Three speakers – Jules Peck, Bishop James Jones and Professor Tim Jackson – said sustainability requires a revolution in values led by pioneers willing to live very different lives. Our contrarian was David Aaronovitch. He argued that the green movement does itself no favours when it is associated with self righteousness and a censorious attitude to the behaviour of non-greenies, particularly the aspirations of the less well off.
If I’d had the chance to make a point I would have talked about cultural theory saying that a plural approach to sustainability should mobilise not just the egalitarian instinct of confirmed greenies but also hierarchical interventions (like the EU agreement) and individualism. Only by mobilising all the ways that people think about and act on change can we tackle the popular default on climate change which is fatalism (‘what difference can I make?’).
One of the examples cultural theorists give of a failed solution is Kyoto which was a hierarchical intervention lacking any story of how to tap into individualist sentiment or tackle fatalism. This afternoon I am off to a cultural theory seminar at the LSE. It will be interesting to see what is said about sustainability.
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