Month: April 2011

Poverty Over campaign: why Christian Aid is not serious about eradicating poverty

I am a regular donor to Christian Aid, with a history of support that goes right back to when I was a boy.  It has outlasted my attachment to the Church itself because the charity does not go in for proselytising, and they are dealing with some pretty gritty and important issues.  So I get their supporters’ magazine.  The latest publicises their Poverty Over campaign (which in the publicity is written as POVERTY).  The aim is to “deal with the root causes of poverty”; the publicity highlights eight issues: climate change, conflict, corruption, disasters, food and agriculture, health, inequality, and tax.  All of these issues are closely related to poverty.  But, like “Make Poverty History” before it, the title suggests that its aim is to end poverty, rather than to merely alleviate it.  And here it has almost nothing to say.  Perhaps because the answer is too uncomfortable for most of the charity’s supporters, and perhaps even its staff, to accept.

There has been rather a lot of progress in eradicating poverty in the last couple of centuries.  According to the map that accompanies the article, in 1821 pretty much the whole world was in poverty (Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands were the exceptions according to this, though the inclusion of Ireland is surely a bit shaky).  Now according to the map alongside it only a minority of countries are in poverty, across the central part of Africa, and a few Asian outliers like Afghanistan and Burma.  That picture seems a bit too bright, but we need to acknowledge the progress made by countries such as South Korea and China in the last 40 or so years.  It is worth asking how such rapid progress has been made.

We usually think of poverty in terms of low consumption – insufficient food, poor shelter, a few clothes and practically nothing else.  It is more helpful to look at the other side of the coin: low production, or low productivity.  Beating poverty is about boosting the productivity of countries that are poor.  It’s not about dumping surplus production from the rich onto poor societies, the only other way it can theoretically be broken

And yet raising production involves wrenching change.  And one change above all: moving people from the countryside to towns.  In poor societies agriculture is ludicrously inefficient, and this drags the whole economy down.  In towns it is much easier to mobilise people into more productive activities in manufacturing and services.  What is more, it is much more efficient to deliver basic services such as education, health services, power and water to people living in towns.  Pretty much every breakout from poverty, from our own in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, to China now, has invovled the emptying of the countryside and the growth of massive cities.  Only when society is much more wealthy, and infrastructure much better, do we see some reversal.  Now where’s that in Christian Aid’s eight issues?

The problem is that we in our comfortable developed societies don’t like the idea of imposing such drastic change on the poor.  The change is painful.  Families are torn apart; initially poverty at both ends (in the country and town) is extreme.  Our attitudes to the country are tinged with a folk memory of a lost rural idyll.  There’s another uncomfortable truth.  Such changes sit uneasily with democracy.  Some of the most successful changes have been carried out by benevolent dictatorships  (consider China, the early days of South Korea, Singapore).  The record of democracies may be better than that of kleptocratic dictatorships, but it is flawed.  India has advanced phenomenally, but, compared to China, it has left huge swathes of the population behind in dire poverty without much hope of escape.  Poverty Over implies turning a blind eye to progressive dictatorships.

So what should we be doing if we truly want to end poverty?  Well the first point is that we can’t impose progress from outside.  Ending poverty is painful, and not an automatic choice; things may have to get worse before they get better; this has to be led by the locals.  We have to back off a bit.  The second point is that most aid should focus on urban poverty.  Rural poverty may be cuddlier and more instinctively appealing (remember the Christmas campaigns about buying people goats?) but it carries the risk of perpetuating poverty rather than ending it.  Rural aid should concentrate on making it easier for people to migrate: so improving literacy and education is an obvious one.  But even then you get more bang for your buck in the towns.  Thirdly we should promote the role of competition and businesses in the developing world, if we can.  Too often local elites leach off local businesses, or create excessive regulation as a source of soft jobs and bribes.  That prevents more productive employment opportunities from being created.   Fourthly, promote constructive multinationals.  Multinationals inject a dose modern productivity and efficiency into countries, and helps raise levels of trade.  They are perhaps the best way of channelling our excess wealth into the developing world.  Of course there are badly behaved multinationals, complicit in corruption and taking more than they give – but when they work well they are a better, more sustainable channel of help than any other.

Urbanisation; helping businesses; supporting the right sort of multinationals.  Apart from a tangential reference in dealing with corruption, none of this gets a look in in Poverty Over.  Not even education does.  Instead of ideas that would really help eradicate poverty, we get a ragbag of politically correct issues that suit the tastes of western do-gooders.  Christian Aid is not beginning to tackle the root causes of poverty.  Perhaps it shouldn’t try.  Good knows that just alleviating its symptoms needs doing.  That’s why I will continue to support them.

Archipelago: desolation observed

Some of you will know that the photo on this blog is from the Isles of Scilly – a view of the Western Rocks from the island of St Agnes, in fact.  Since the 1980s I have had a timeshare cottage on the island of Tresco, and go there every other year.  So when we heard about this film, Archipelago set as a timeshare holiday on Tresco, in the neighbouring, though larger, property to ours, we had to see it.  It’s a beautiful but intensely uncomfortable film.

The film is directed by Joanna Hogg, and is an acute observation of a family holiday with two 20-something siblings, Edward and Cynthia, and their mother Patricia, in November, in the shooting season.  It’s the holiday from hell as Cynthia poisons it with overwhelming negativity, which is not explained.  It’s an understated sort of film.  The camera is static; there’s no music, the dialogue is awkward and feels unscripted, there are many awkward silences, the light seems to be as is.  We watch the holiday fall apart in a sort of slow motion.

The film is utterly faithful to the place.  Ms Hogg takes no liberties with the location in the way that film-makers love to.  The sounds, birds, the helicopter, tractors and even the foghorn, all evoke Tresco.  The holiday proceeds exactly as a week’s timeshare does, right up to the housekeeping team turning up on the last day.  The only jarring note is that the birdsong seems a bit vigorous for November, and we get screaming swifts at one point, long after they would have migrated (and swifts don’t come to Scilly much, anyway).

The programme notes at the BFI refer to the English upper middle class’s inability to communicate.  That’s a bit hasty; the English upper middle class is everybody’s favourite object of derision.  There isn’t much communicating going on, but we don’t know why.  Maybe everything has already been said.  We don’t know why Cynthia is so bitter and fragile, but there must be a reason.  Edward is just as isolated, as nobody will support him, especially with his imminent venture as a volunteer in Africa.  He’s nice to Cynthia’s nasty, but equally uncomprehending of others – as poor Rose the cook finds to her cost.  Patricia is the easiest of the family to like, but is unable to bring her family together, with her absent husband, who was supposed to join them, adding to her frustration.

Film makers  love to play God.  Ms Hogg’s restraint is remarkable.  A beautifully crafted film is the result.

Is victim culture to blame for post combat stress disorder?

There’s a long and interesting article in today’s Independent, highlighting the remarkable finding that US soldiers are much more likely than British ones to suffer post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – by a massive 30% to 4%.  The article’s American author, Ethan Watters, suggests that the difference is cultural.  His analysis turns out to be more of a critique of US ways in ignorance of British ones – but the core idea, that mental illness can be driven by society’s attitudes is an interesting and disturbing one.  Disturbing because it suggests that the modern fashion for exploring victimhood is making suffering worse than it needs to be.

Mr Watters says that the original diagnosis of PTSD was developed by anti-war professionals in the Vietnam era, and motivated by the wish to show the harmfulness of violence and war.  Because people increasingly expected to suffer illness after experiencing trauma, like combat experience, they duly did.   PTSD was pretty much unknown before Vietnam (and it’s not the same as shell-shock and other manifestations of mental illness resulting from combat experience noted in earlier wars).  Of course there is not much evidence of PTSD in earlier wars because nobody was looking for it.  Also, I might add, survival rates are much higher these days.  Mr Watters then goes on to develop the idea that illness is exacerbated by the emptiness of modern culture, which deprives victims of moral support.

This is all very well as a narrative, and I think there is something in it.  But I don’t think this explains why so many fewer British veterans suffer PTSD.  Mr Watters suggests that the British are much more sceptical about PTSD , and have a stronger belief in natural resilience. That does not sound like the modern Britain that I know and love, where victim culture appears rampant and, I suspect, more politically accepted than in the US.  And besides, we are much less religious than Americans, so surely the desolation of modern culture should be much more prevalent? The difference between the two countries is much more likely to be around the way their respective armies work.  British veterans are more likely to suffer from alcohol abuse or depression, incidentally.

But the idea remains that a focus on victimhood and traumatization, which can verge on celebration sometimes, is very unhelpful.  We should celebrate resilience.  Most people have it within their own resources to recover from trauma, and many can be strengthened by it; we need to acknowledge this, rather than undermine the confidence of those do not, in fact, need outside support.

The anti academy movement is its own worst enemy

Yesterday, as a school governor, I attended a seminar on converting schools to academy status, organised by the London Borough of Lambeth.  The paradox of the education profession was clearly evident; however good they may be at teaching the nation’s young to be clear and rational, the profession’s members seem unable to promote a rational debate about the future of education.

Lambeth tried to put forward a balanced debate with four speakers broadly supportive of conversion in the right circumstances, four vehemently opposed and one complete fence-sitter.  Of the supportive speakers, one, Bill Watkin of the Specialist Schools & Academies Trust (SSAT) was a model of clarity, addressed his arguments to the audience (headteachers and chairs of governors), and was easily the most impressive speaker of the day.  The others included a head and deputy head who had taken their schools into academy status and somebody from the Cooperative School Society promoting a particular model of academy operation; their focus was quite narrow and presentation tended to be a bit plodding with too much PowerPoint.  All four managed to be pretty dispassionate, and none was evangelical for the academy model or government policy.  Each had different light to shed on the issue.

The “anti” speakers were awful; they seemed to be addressing the public or feeding the paranoia of staff, rather than trying to influence senior school management.  Two stood out, though neither stayed for the panel session.  One, Phil Beadle, makes regular appearances on TV and writes for the Guardian.  His arguments were as chaotic as his hair, and amounted to a rant about the way the academies he had worked in were run, mixed in with tribal anti-Tory paranoia.  The other was Alasdair Smith of the Anti Academies Alliance; his grey suit, purple lanyard, grey/white hair, general bonhomie and habit of laughing at other speakers,during their presentations, all put me in mind of an archetypal UKIP candidate.  His arguments were no more coherent than UKIP ones either: a general rabble rouse about how damaging academies would be to the overall education system, how all academies were run like grasping businesses, that it was a lonely world out there for academies, and nothing about how senior managers should weigh up the pros and cons.  The other two speakers, one a headteacher and one from the Campaign for State Education basically said the same thing, but were a little duller.  The arguments were polemical rather a serious review of the evidence, scattering numerous horror stories to support their arguments.  What Lambeth thought it was doing by inviting all four to speak is a bit mysterious.

A few important and interesting points did manage to emerge.  There isn’t much money in converting to academy status; for that you need an outside sponsor.  Since education departments are being cut back drastically (Lambeth is no exception, with the key decisions all being taken before last year’s election, not as a consequence of the Coalition’s cuts) the amount of support they can offer to LA schools is pretty minimal.  Most of the things that schools might want to do (including forming relationships with their neighbouring schools and local authorities) can be done under either model, which cuts both ways.  The best part of the process, one of the academy heads said, was that it forced the school to think about its vision and strategy, and how to carry it through.

But the standard of debate was pretty awful.  Most speakers complained that the government wasn’t offering a clear vision, but they had little or no vision to offer themselves.  The antis seem to want the outside world to go away, so that schools can bumble in their own comfortable little worlds as before.  There was no horror at the awfulness of so many schools, unless they happen to academies, of course.  And then there is the hate and anger.  Mr Beadle quoted extensively from former Conservative education secretary Ken Baker to prove that this was all an evil Tory conspiracy to destroy public services.  I am not so much horrified that he says this sort of thing, but that so many people seem to be listening.  I have seen something similar on local forums about our proposed new “free” school in Wandsworth: a complete inability of the leading anti-campaigners to listen, or to weigh up arguments and evidence – even if they are at least more polite and better tempered than some on the other side of the argument.

But leaders of schools need to do the best for their children and communities schools by working with government policy as they find it.  The academies decision is a delicate process of weighing up pros and cons, often with no killer argument on either side.   What is coming out of the anti academy movement is no help.  It is so tempting to think that if that is the best their opponents can do, academies must be a good idea.  The movement is its own worst enemy.