The abuse of education

Two items in The Daily Mail deserve comment today, and both concern education.

First, Peter Hitchens has argued for the non-existence of dyslexia.  He comments that:

There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of ‘dyslexia’ does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught.

Mr Hitchens seems to contradict himself here.  If there are physical barriers to learning to read, then surely dyslexia does exist.  My own belief is that dyslexia does exist, and that it is the result of neurological abnormalities.  If you have any doubts on this matter, then please watch this documentary about the actress Kara Tointon.

The problem arises that once we have admitted the existence of dyslexia, then the concept becomes open to abuse.  Poor literacy can result from neurological abnormalities, but also from either lack of intellect or poor teaching - or both.  Parents may be unwilling to admit that poor literacy in their child results from lack of intellect, and teachers may be unwilling to admit that poor literacy in their pupils results from poor teaching.

The second item is a report that the Labour Party is planning to make school pupils study English and mathematics until the age of eighteen.  I can remember that the last time Labour was in opposition it adopted the mantra of education education education, and yet its subsequent thirteen-year tenure of government was far from inspiring.  It happily pandered to the whims of certain interest groups, and I see the same thing here.

Suppose a Labour government recruits more teachers.  Those teachers will then have an obvious incentive to vote Labour at subsequent general elections, because any other party in government might decide that there are too many teachers, and look to make some of them redundant.

This policy may well prove to be an own goal, however.  Employers are unlikely to want their teenage employees to have to take time away from their work to take extra lessons in numeracy and literacy which may well serve no practical purpose.

My own experience suggests strongly that many employers care little for literacy.  There are of course a lot of jobs which require numeracy, but not that many which require a high level of literacy.

I believe that politicians should seek to improve the education of pupils up till the age of sixteen, and not obsess about a belief that more is somehow better.  I also believe that there should be a statutory definition of dyslexia which seeks to restrict the use of the word to situations where a neurological abnormality can be identified.

Black violence: a black woman speaks out

It is reported that the owner of a bar in an inner London borough has spoken out about violent disorder which apparently has driven several bars in the area out of business.  The bar owner in question is a black woman, and she has claimed that the absolute majority of people who have disrupted these venues are black men and increasingly some black women.

Some people might think that the area in question is increasingly inhabited by non-whites, and that therefore it is only to be expected that trouble-makers will tend to be non-white.  But of course a lot of older people in the area can recall a time when it was far less violent.

Before I continue, please watch three clips from the 1962 film How The West Was Won, starring (among others) Debbie Reynolds and Gregory Peck.

An early scene
  
The Sacramento river

The ending

This film tells how white people built a great civilisation where little more than open country existed before.  Black people and Chinese people had a hand in the process, but it was predominantly a white entreprise.

Four hundred years ago, North America was poor, as were Africa and Australia.  Europe was also poor by present day standards, but was nevertheless highly advanced by the standards of the time.  Today the USA and Canada are rich, as too are Australia and New Zealand, and their prosperity is the consequence of colonisation by white Europeans.  By contrast, Africa largely remains poor.

Zimbabwe, which was ruled by a white minority as recently as the 1970s, is impoverished even by the standards of Africa - and yet this country was known as the breadbasket of Africa when it was under white rule.

So far I have merely observed facts.  I invite the reader to draw appropriate conclusions.

Should we increase the minimum wage?

Switzerland is considering a minimum wage equivalent to £14.81 per hour, reports The Daily Express.

As I know little of life in Switzerland, I will consider the likely impact of such a move here in the United Kingdom.

The minimum wage became law in this country back in the late 1990s, and currently stands at £6.31 per hour.  This equates to an annual pre-tax salary of around £9800 for someone normally working thirty hours each week, or roughly £11,500 for someone normally working thirty-five hours each week.

Whether or not £9800 can be regarded as a comfortable salary depends on personal circumstances.  A young adult living with parents might not need much of an income, and likewise a married person whose spouse also has an income.  Nevertheless many people find it very hard to subsist on the minimum wage.

I can remember the debate in the 1990s about whether or not Britain should have a minimum wage.  Opponents offered various arguments, one of which was that it would result in either unemployment rising or else unemployment falling only very slowly.  I accept that there is something in that argument, but all the same I have a strong objection to working people living in poverty when they could be earning a comfortable wage.

If you are earning a low salary, then it is possibly because your employer has very little money.  Alternatively it might be because your employer has lots of money but prefers to spend its money on fat cat salaries for senior staff rather than on a comfortable salary for everyone.

If the United Kingdom had a minimum wage of £14.81 per hour, then someone who normally works thirty hours per week would earn an annual pre-tax salary in the region of £23,100.  On the one hand there would be far less poverty among working people if the minimum wage were higher, but on the other hand it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a higher minimum wage would make it very hard for unemployed people to find jobs.

Opponents of a minimum wage often argue that the way to combat poverty among the poorly paid is to have a system of in-work benefits such as tax credits, but I have two objections to this.  The first is that in-work benefits cannot be relied upon as a source of income, because the government can easily cut the amount of help available to the impoverished members of the work force.  The second is that tax credits are unfair to people whose income varies throughout the year.  It is easy to end the year having received too much money in tax credits, even if you were entirely honest about your income.  Having to repay tax credits feels like a gross insult, especially when the overpayment was accidental.

Rather than increasing the minimum wage, a sensible government should look towards a more flexible approach.  Employers should be banned from paying large salaries to senior staff unless not one of their employees earn less than – let us say – 140 percent of the minimum wage.  (This would currently equate to £8.83 per hour – roughly £13,800 per annum for someone working thirty hours each week.)

Such a system would not be perfect, but would have obvious benefits.  First, it would reduce the number of working people who would live in poverty.  Second, it would not apply to companies which were genuinely short of money, and so would be unlikely to push up the level of unemployment.

Some readers might be thinking that such a system would remain unfair.  Someone who works for a company with little money might still earn a salary which makes it hard for them to subsist, and that is true.  It is highly unlikely that any one system will completely eradicate poverty.  The ideal solution is to have a system which minimises poverty.

Our fellow-travelling national press

I have just spent some time reading some comments on The Guardian website by one of their established writers.  It is interesting.

This man - I do not care to name him - openly despises the British National Party, the National Front, the English Defence League, and the now-defunct British Freedom Party.  However he does not appear to despise the Labour Party, even after its links to the Paedophile Information Exchange have been widely publicised in the national press.  Here are some examples of his point of view.

Reporting on a demonstration by the BNP, he condemns the police for arresting members of a communist counter-protest after they dared to move out of an area allocated to them by the police.  However this condemnation appears to derive not from any sense of fairness, but rather from a belief that communists should be allowed free rein.  I have known of instances of BNP supporters - and National Front supporters - being harrassed by the police, and yet I do not see the national newspapers offering them any sympathy.

Reporting on the austerity crisis in Greece, he condemns the fact that the political party Golden Dawn organises food banks for Greeks only.  However he does not condemn the mainstream political parties for creating the situation in which people are forced to rely on food banks.

I am British.  If I lived in Greece I would be a foreigner.  I would not object to Golden Dawn or anyone else giving priority to the native population when it comes to helping ordinary people to cope with the evil effects of misrule by evil politicians.

This journalist also praises the communist organisation Hope Not Hate, but does not comment on the inanity of its name.  I am not the first person to point out that hope is the opposite not of hate but of despair.  For me, the name suggests that we should not hate the evil politicians who have ruined the lives of so many ordinary people, but rather we should hope against hope that things will improve if we keep on voting for communist trash.

I never buy a copy of any national newspaper, and neither will I pay to read any of them online.  I hope that every single one of our national newspapers will either start to talk sense or else go out of business.  Maybe one day the people who write for our national newspapers will find themselves relying on food banks.  But whose fault would that be?

This previous post is on a similar theme:
Police and muslims: get real

Do fat cats suffer from depression?

White Dee from Benefits Street is supposedly suffering from depression, but some people argue that she is not.  Meanwhile the chief executive of Somerset County Council has quit her job by mutual agreement.

According to The Daily Mail, Sheila Wheeler was absent from her desk from mid-November up until her recent departure.  So far no clear explanation has been offered for either her absence or her departure, and it appears that legal proceedings make it unlikely that a clear explanation will ever be offered.

It is reported also that her salary was £160,000 per annum, which by my reckoning is close to thirteen times the minimum wage.

The job market is not fair.  If you are unable to read, then you will not be employed as a postman, and clerical work will probably be off limits as well.  If you are tone deaf, then no one will employ you as a musician.  If you are unable to walk, then your employment opportunities are also limited.

And so I come to depression, which is hard to define.  Physical ailments generally have physical symptoms and bio-chemical causes which can be studied and understood.  By contrast, depression is hard to study with any precision.  Indeed it is very hard to be certain that someone is suffering from depression, and certainly a lot of people do not believe that White Dee is depressed.

Of course it is hard to be absolutely certain that someone is illiterate or tone deaf, but people do not tend to use either condition to justify taking time off work.  By contrast it is common for people to use depression and stress as reasons not to work.  Consider this testimony regarding a company founded by Samantha Brick:

Making close to half a million in our first year should have meant profit, but this was wiped out by high salaries and accounting errors by staff. Then, when we began having cash-flow problems, Sarah [the general manager] signed herself off sick with stress for a month. She also confessed she'd been dodging calls from people who were due payment, thus ruining my firm's reputation.

Another thing we do not know is whether or not some people are more susceptible to depression than other people.

 

I repeat that we do not know for certain why Sheila Wheeler was off work for three months, or why she left.  What we do know is that when we add in her payoff equivalent to three months’ salary, she has effectively deprived the council of six months’ salary – and this is a fat cat salary we are talking about.

People who earn fat cat salaries should not be allowed to take time off work suffering from depression except in very restricted cases.  If you are going to pay someone a large salary, then it should be on the basis that they deserve a large salary.  It is only fair that people who are deemed to deserve large salaries should be largely immune to depression.  If we have to suffer the existence of fat cats, then at least they should not also be prima donnas.

As a final point, it is utterly wrong that we are not allowed to know the reason for Sheila Wheeler's departure.  It is common for workplace disputes to be resolved in a way that binds both parties to confidentiality, but that should not apply in the public sector.  We have the right to know what our money is being wasted on.

Related previous posts include:
Fat cats in Cambridgeshire
The way out of Benefits Street

Denmark joins the renegades

A renegade is someone who walks away from a collective identity, such as a religion or nationality.  Denmark is not strictly a renegade nation.  It was a founder member of the Council of Europe and joined what is now the European Union in 1973.  It remains a member of both, but has recently taken the decision to outlaw halal and kosher slaughter.

These methods of slaughter are both required by religious custom - Islamic and Jewish respectively.  Both are widely perceived to be cruel.  An animal in a slaughterhouse is normally stunned prior to being killed, but both of these methods of slaughter require that the animal is either not stunned or else not adequately stunned.  Halal killed animals are sometimes stunned lightly so as to prevent them from resisting when their throats are cut, but they regain consciousness as they bleed to death.

I welcome this new law in Denmark not merely because I happen to oppose these methods of slaughter, but because it is a law which has been opposed by certain interest groups who tend to get far too much their own way.

Russia has strict laws about homosexual propaganda, and Uganda is considering bringing in even more strict laws about homosexuality.  The Gambia left the Commonwealth last year, apparently because its president objected to the British government promoting sodomy among member states.

I care little about whether or not these various laws make sense in themselves.  After all there is perhaps not one country in the world which does not have some laws I might find offensive.  The important thing for me is that these countries are prepared to defy international pressure to make laws which make sense to them - or at least to their governments.

These countries are the renegades.  They have walked away from international consensus, and dare to think for themselves.  Maybe the United Kingdom could now do the same.

Related previous posts include:
Why only three hours Mr Putin?
Vlad, get a life.

The archbishop speaks out

I have long since become accustomed to Britain's church leaders speaking out on some political topic or another, and time and again I find myself not in any way surprised that church attendances nowadays aren't what they were.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols has recently been speaking out against the government's welfare reforms, and he has been rewarded with the invective of tabloid journalist Dominic Lawson.

Dominic Lawson is the son of the evil former government minister Nigel Lawson, but of course he is not responsible for his parentage.

The archbishop has quite rightly observed that many people in Britain are going hungry as a result of welfare reforms.  In reply, Lawson notes that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, is himself a practising Catholic.  I have some questions for him.

If the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is really a Catholic, then why does he serve in a government which condones abortion on demand?  And what about homosexual marriage?

I do not know where the Roman Catholic Church stands on mendacity, but the present government tells one lie after another.  For example a senior civil servant recently maintained that benefits sanctions are imposed only as a last resort.  That is utterly not true.  They are commonly imposed as a first resort.

Lawson continues:

It’s nonsense to say that there is no longer ‘a safety net’ when the state is currently spending £94 billion a year on working age benefits; and the time processing benefits claims — the most cited reason for destitution — has actually improved over the past few years.  The official figures are that 92 per cent of them are processed on time; in 2009/10 it was as low as 86 per cent.

Maybe Dominic Lawson would like to discuss his views with some of the many victims of benefits sanctions.  Also, if the number of benefits claims being processed in good time is as low as 92 percent, then surely someone somewhere should be held to account.

Lawson also suggests that food bank dependency is linked to fixed odds betting terminals, but he does not call for these  dreadful machines to be outlawed.

Lawson attempts to justify the welfare reforms by making reference to the public sector net debt of over £1.2 trillion - but he does not mention the fact that the government was only recently trying to commit this country to yet another illegal war.

Maybe Dominic Lawson would like to explain why the government cannot seek to reform its finances by adopting a stance of armed neutrality, abolishing overseas aid, and not paying excessive salaries to government ministers and civil servants who cannot work out how to assess welfare claims in good time.

I somehow suspect that Mr Lawson is no more of an economist than his evil father.  As for the archbishop, I will admit that he is right on this occasion.

Related previous posts include:

Catholics, stand by your Polish brother 

We get monkeys anyway

Gambling ruins lives

The way out of Benefits Street

A reasoned approach to war