Wilful Neglect

We try, within the limits of our resources, to report and comment on what’s happening in Wessex.  That’s to say, what’s actually happening and not what we or anyone else would like to be happening. 

Political correctness has been described as a war on noticing.  The blinkers were well and truly on in Oxfordshire recently, judging by today’s report into child sexual exploitation there.  But not only there.  (Bristol has also been mentioned.)  Oxfordshire County Council’s former Leader told the BBC that his authority ‘is not another Rotherham’.  Well, only relatively: 373 youngsters, predominantly from Oxford, groomed and exploited over the course of 15 years, as compared with 1,400 in the Yorkshire place.  But what’s yet to come to light?  A senior investigative source told The Guardian (a London newspaper): “If you think you haven’t got a problem in your city or town, you are just not looking for it.”

Not looking for it.  And even if you are, looking in the wrong place.  The BBC’s coverage and the reactions of London politicians have been remarkably uniform.  It’s ‘the system’ that’s broken.  Cameron offered a new offence of ‘wilful neglect’, promising to jail social workers who don’t notice.  (The tabloids are hovering: social workers are as damned for what they notice mistakenly as for anything they miss.)  For Labour, Yvette Cooper bizarrely insisted that nothing was more important than introducing compulsory sex education in schools.  It’s everybody’s fault then.  Police.  Social workers.  Educators.  Councillors.  A report speaks up for the abused and ignored girls and all the establishment can do is put the spotlight yet again on the girls and how they are treated.  It’s everybody’s fault but the perpetrators’.  Let’s not mention them.  Let’s not take their communities apart with a crowbar and expose what it is that produces the same familiar pattern, again and again.

No, let’s not.  There’s a higher priority.  Let’s go after those who by their war on noticing have allowed the problem to fester, those whose soixante-huitard sociological prejudices have warped their ability to understand the individuals of which society is composed. 

Let’s try a zero-based budgeting approach to social work.  Why do we have it?  Even the term is vaguely Victorian.  Nurses nurse, police police, teachers teach.  Social workers?  Work socially?  Why not scrap the entire profession and replace it with one or more professions defined by what they actually do and seek to achieve by doing?  The post-Climbié split between children’s services, linked to education, and welfare services for vulnerable adults, linked to health care and housing, may have some distance still to travel before reaching a settled form.  Especially in an era of constrained resources where questions about focus and value for money are unavoidable.  A public interested in integrated outcomes won’t care if social work as such disappears in the process because it finds it unable to describe itself.

There are some common perceptions of social workers that they have done little to dispel.  That instead of responding to a political agenda they think society should resource and empower them to pursue their own.  Or that they have no incentive to solve society’s ills because this would do them out of a job.  Or that, in contrast to the tightly defined roles of 50 or 100 years ago, their role is now so all-encompassing that their ambitions are bound to be undeliverable.

For example, the Wikipedia article ‘History of social work’ asserts that “Social work has its roots in society to deal with poverty (relative poverty)”.  That’s a start but it’s wholly inadequate to describe the actual range of activities that social services today undertake.  Problems associated with age or disability, for example, are problems associated with age or disability.  Lack of money worsens them but having money won’t fundamentally make them go away.  It’s also far too easy to confuse social services with social security, one more area of government where assumptions tend to have a very long shelf-life.

The financial and political reality is that social services will be expected to do more with less, and failing that, to do less with less.  Politically and professionally, the challenge is how to do that with the least possible harm.  A herd of sacred cows is likely to face slaughter along the way.  And that's an outcome that may be long overdue.

Squeezed Down The Plughole

“Man stalks across the landscape, and desert follows his footsteps.”
Herodotus (5th century BC)

North-eastern Wessex, along with much of the rest of southern and eastern England, is now subject to a hosepipe ban. Parts of western Wessex are heading that way too.

Why? Last night, the BBC’s reporter let slip that one component of the problem is population growth. Thank you. Perhaps the reporter has since been quietly led outside and ‘dealt with’? For a long time, it’s been against the policy of the BBC and of the London regime as a whole to mention the ‘P’ word. Half a century of ceaseless mental dragooning has left them unable to tell the difference between racism and preventing the destruction of the environment through over-use. Nothing could be worse than curbing the right to live wherever you want, regardless of the consequences for others. That would be prejudice in favour of those already here, an attack on the equal right of all human beings to devour their world. And anything, even the end of civilisation as we know it, would be better than that.

Our own population policy recognises that something must be done, in the most humane way possible, or something will be done anyway, in ways that are less than humane. New housebuilding must be wound down and the economy, especially the financial sector, radically restructured to remove the pathological imperative for growth. Emigration must be encouraged. Paying folk to leave our shores would be well worthwhile in terms of improved quality of life for those left behind. Less stressed, less polluted, lower cost. Child benefit needs to be reformed to remove any incentive for having large families. One way would be to pay it on an inverse sliding scale, tailing off as family size grows. This would more accurately reflect the true costs of child-rearing, encouraging the re-use of clothing and toys, for example. (At present, the only distinction made is between the first child and all subsequent children.)

That the London parties will all throw up their hands in horror at such suggestions shows how out of touch they’ve become. They forget that a sustained or, where still possible, improved quality of life for all ought to be the primary goal of sound political thought and action. Deliberately fostering irresponsible and environmentally destructive practices that undermine that quality of life is what they do best. For the New Left in particular, the creation of conditions of tension in the belief that a better society will somehow emerge out of them is an article of faith (‘chaos is good’). On the near Right, there is a similar belief that chaos is self-correcting, through the operation of markets (‘greed is good’), but stunned silence when markets hit resource barriers. What do you mean, we can’t buy our way out?

The result is authoritarian panic, lashing out at the symptoms. Viewers of Channel 4 News last night will have seen Jon Snow floating various possibilities with his interviewee. Putting a (horrendously expensive) pipeline alongside the new HS2 rail link to shove water Londonwards. Banning the installation of new baths and power showers. And this is the same Jon Snow who supports building 2 million new homes, including on greenfield land. Will the penny ever drop? Solutions are needed, Jon. Solutions that don’t go on feeding the problem. Solutions that don’t penalise those who are not the fundamental cause of the problem. Solutions that get folk to open their eyes to what the fundamental cause really is. And the threat it poses to all of us who just want to go on living our lives in some reasonable state of comfort.

It really isn’t a lot to ask. Just a whole lot more than the London parties are willing to deliver. Much of the time they seem actually to relish the scarcity their policies promote. More folk, fewer resources. So more rationing, and fairness, and jobs for the boys (and the girls) who oversee it all! More folk, higher house prices. So smaller houses, making super-efficient use of space! More folk, less water. So new Building Regulations that only permit showers! More folk, less farmland. So a vegan diet for all! Eliminate your non-needs! Minimalise, move over and make room! Stop living! Start existing!

Seen in this context, the drive for a less wasteful society is not a neutral, technical process but carries all kinds of ideological baggage needing to be screened. Unavoidable scarcity and avoidable scarcity have been deliciously fused to deter any analysis of the latter. Yes, the future will be constrained. But the economic constraints brought about by the exhaustion of energy minerals and other non-renewable resources will be bad enough without ageing hippies and their acolytes engineering a situation in which a whole level of political constraints gets imposed on top so as to keep order in their human zoo.