Its a question of trust

Today 07/07/10. I have just finished listening to Prime Minister’s Question Time.
David Cameron answered a question from Harriet Harman on Crime with a whole string of statistics to show that violent crime had risen under Labour. Harriet Harman, in my view rightly, vigorously contested this.
I am seriously concerned by this.
During the early days of the general election Campaign a row broke out when Chris Grayling, who was then the Shadow home secretary came out with what appears to be very similar assertions.
These were picked up by the reporter Mark Easton who established that the assertions were based on the comparison of two sets of figures which should not have been compared.
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/grayling_crime_stats.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/stats_watchdog_barks_back.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/grayling_crime_stats.html
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/conservative_estimates_on_viol_1.html
• The matter was explored in an interview with Chris Grayling on BBC Today. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8494000/8494982.stm

The Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar was seriously concerned that using statistics in this way could have the effect of undermining trust in crime statistics and published the following:

Click to access statistics-authority-publishes-overcoming-barriers-to-trust-in-crime-statistics–england-and-wales.pdf

Doing damage to trust in statistics has serious consequences. If we reach a point where each side is only prepared to trust the statistics it likes it becomes impossible for us to engage in calm pragmatic analysis of what the problems are and what needs to be done.
Effective politics is about being able to talk to people that we do not necessarily like. Good statistics is a tool to make this possible. Bad statistics can have the effect of locking people into polarised positions. The stalemate that has happened in this PMQs and the previous one is a clear example of that.
We all like statistics which confirm our own position! This article explains why. http://is.gd/deeTc persuading people to shift from believing what they want to believe to what is the truth will often rely on people being able to trust the information that is given to them.
This government has a problem. I do not believe what I am being told. And I do not think that I am alone in that!
I need to see the government move to a much more careful and well advised use of statistical material before I can begin to hear what they are trying to say!

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July 7, 2010

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The first bad news day

To say that I watch Andy Coulson would of course be misleading. The whole point about Andy Coulson is that he is someone we do not see, doing things that we do not know.

I may not watch him, but since his appearance in front of the press standard’s committee, I have been aware of him, and I am now taking an interest in the way that this new Government, under his watchful eye, goes about the job of managing news. It is always impossible to know what he actually does, or what he has a hand in, but we know how things work. We have seen how the relationship between tabloid stories, PMQs, BBC and quality press is used to blow stories up in to the big story of the moment. We can I am sure expect much more of the same.

Andy Coulson’s job has changed of course. Over the last few years, his success will have been judged by the way in which the mood of the nation was being influenced by the media, and the extent to which people accepted that it was all Gordon’s fault. Now his job is different. It is now going to be about finding ways to distract the attention of the nation on days when bad news will predominate.

Today was the first scheduled bad news day, the announcement of £6bn cuts in spending, so out of idle curiosity I scanned the newspaper shelves. Yesterday the News of the World headlines on the sting operation on the Duchess of York had dominated, as a story which is about Royalty, Greed and Subterfuge could be expected to do, so I expected to see quite a lot of that. Here are the front-pages.

The Sun

Army Chief says “I quit”

The Mirror

Outcast Fergie
Small item on Tories party on the eve of £6bn cuts

The Mail

Now will Andrew throw her out?
Osborne war on speed cameras
BA strike will hit Holidays

The Daily Express

£500,000 sting shames Duchess of York
Babies DNA in secret vaults

The Times

Business aid biggest loser as Osborne Wields axe
Kabul Criticises Fox
BA flights threatened
Duke Embarrassed
Article by Libby Purves on how Sarah Ferguson would be better off cooking lasagne.

Guardian

How Israel offered to sell South Africa the bomb.
Civil service faces £163m squeeze on jobs and travel

Telegraph

First swing of the Axe
Large picture of Sarah Ferguson with an article by Lib Dem Minister Lynn Featherstone condemning her. (This made it on to the BBC news as well)

Independent

Juliette’s protest
Civil service braces itself as axe looms.

I thought it was quite bright to have the condemnation of the Duchess given by a Lib Dem Minister, also thought it was quite bright to have all the announcements about cuts actually given by Lib Dem David Laws. There are obviously a lot of advantages to being in a coalition.

Now it would of course be entirely fanciful on my part to suppose that Andy Coulson could possibly have any influence on perpetuating undercover investigation of the Royal family by the News of the World, or on the timing of the release of the news, but it is certainly the case that he understands what gets the British public going, and that he is happy to use that in any way he can.

So all in all the first bad news day has probably gone off quite well for Andy Coulson, but it took a Duchess story to do it. If they are having to throw the Duchess at the first cuts announcement I can only begin to imagine the kind of stories we will be seeing by the time the really bad news starts coming!

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May 24, 2010

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Gordon Brown – the web as a power for good

Often we force our politicians to be heard only in soundbites. It is no wonder that we sometimes complain that they are saying nothing meaningful.
This video is I think Gordon Brown speaking as he likes to speak, to a live audience, with his own voice and in his own time.

creating change, open democracy, Uncategorized

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January 23, 2010

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We’re Going on Boar Hunt!

A speaker at a conference on ageing I went to recently explained why it is that women live longer than men. Apparently it’s because of the boar hunting. Women’s immune systems work better than men’s because with our ancestors women regularly went through periods of semi starvation. This happened because we valued the aggression and energy of the young men who had the job of hunting the boars enough to give them more food. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but it is a reasonable explanation of why young men do things differently.

There were a series of things on the radio this morning that made me think about young men, and the place of boar hunting behaviour in politics.

There was the quiet measured voice of Hans Blix talking about his impressions of the Chilcot Inquiry. He was talking about his slow and careful search for the truth of what was happening in Iraq, and how this came up against Tony Blair’s certainty and need for decisive action.

Then there was the upsetting case of the violent young brothers in Doncaster http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8473888.stm
The BBC’s Home editor Mark Easton, did his best to cover this in a fair way, and I found he was also talking about the certainties of young men. He recollected the 1993 speech of Tony Blair and the strong impact that the James Bulger case had on the nation. He talked about the way David Cameron is now using this case. He doubted the advisability of using these extreme cases in this way. He felt that Tony Blair was wrong then and David Cameron is wrong now.

This case is of course is following the standard pattern of the “moral outrage” story that seems to be favoured by Conservative media advisors. First you get the lurid headlines, then you get the question at PMQs and then you get the measured speech, in which we are told Cameron will claim that he has the answers and everything previously has failed.

It takes the arrogance of a young man to be able to make these claims, and of course they are not well founded. These are intractable problems, rare cases, indicators of generations of abuse and unhappiness. There are no quick answers. To indicate that there are is to mislead people.

But to come back to the boar hunt. Elections are our political equivalent. Just getting through a gruelling election process is done with a great deal of adrenalin, testosterone and anger. It’s a young man’s game, which is probably why we are regularly treated to shots of David Cameron out jogging, sweating manfully.

The boar hunters may bring home the bacon, but do they have the qualities we need for good government?

Like it or not we probably need young men, their energy, enthusiasm, and even at times their misplaced certainties and arrogance, but we also need to find ways to ensure that back home at camp, when the boar hunting is over, and the process of governing resumes, that other quieter voices will be heard.

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January 22, 2010

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So What’s the worst that can happen?

I have just been picking up on a number of interesting things.

Here is a chart of the priorities  identified by the conservative party prospective candidates. This is to be found in Conservative Home.

It is not surprising that concerns about the deficit come far higher up the list than measures to improve services.

A bigger surprise is that the concerns about reducing the carbon footprint ranks quite so low.

Given that the Conservatives fought the local elections in June on the slogan of Vote Blue get Green, this  does make one question how far they mean what they say.

The following  blog from the Telegraph’s writer gives the impression that the Conservative front bench would like to convey the view that their climate change deniers are a rump, and will soon be gone.  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100018706/cameroons-say-climate-change-deniers-are-old-and-dying/ The PPC statistics might lead us to doubt that.

 It is always a mystery to me why it is that people can be passionately against the idea of taking action on climate change.

This video is I think useful in exploring what is trapping some people into their current belief that inaction is acceptable.

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January 18, 2010

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The donation to Andrew Lansley’s office raises uncomfortable issues.

There is a heated discussion going on about the Telegraph’s discovery of a £21,000 donation to the office of Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Minister for Health. It has been made by a well wisher who happens to be involved in the private health industry, and it raises understandable concerns

There is nothing new of course about people who believe that they may have something to gain, or perhaps simply want to see their friends in power, dipping in to their pockets to help a party that they think has a good chance of success.

It is nothing new, but it is something that makes many people feel queasy. Most of us just really do not like the idea that decisions about policy might be influenced, even subliminally, by a minister knowing he can do something to benefit his friends.

But beyond that it is the sheer amount that confuses me.
Ok £21,000 isn’t such a large amount, but presumably it is not the only income that Andrew Lansley’s office has received, and I am frankly puzzled. What do they need that amount of money for? What is it meant to buy?

It is perfectly reasonable for a local party to want to print and distribute a number of leaflets a year – They might want to hire some rooms for some meetings, they might want some posters for the lamp posts, balloons perhaps, possibly even a hoarding or two, but what is the rest of it supposed to do?

I wonder if constituents would want to know how their local parties are spending money and where it is coming from. They might find it interesting if for instance money from the fabled Ashcroft millions is being used to buy glossy leaflets in the hope of impressing them. They might want to know who has expensive websites done by smart professional agencies, and who has something put together by volunteers.

We talk periodically about reforming the funding of politics. I really think we should. With things as they are we have a kind of arms race. The favourites get money that they really don’t need being thrown at them in a way that perhaps quite unjustly raises questions about their integrity. The others have to scratch about to find just about enough money to do the job properly.

For both it is a distraction.

Personally, I have this unfashionable idea that we need politicians, and that it is a hard enough job for them without having to spend massive amounts of time worrying about money. It is best if we remove both the temptation and the anxiety connected with money, and leave politicians focused on the work we need them to do. We might get a cleaner kind of politics if we do this.

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January 15, 2010

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Did the world over-react to swine flue?

Just been watching Newsnight’s piece on did the world over-react to swine flu?

Why is it that we all believed there were to be many thousands of deaths when in fact only 250 people have died.

Why is it that so much money has been spent on drugs, with all the clever clauses in the pharmaceutical companies contracts.

There was one glaring omission in Susan Watts report. She never asked the question about the role the media may have played in this.

My distinct memory of the time when the papers were all going crazy about swine flu is of Jeremy Paxman doing one of his Paxman specials, demanding repeatedly to know “how many people are going to die?”. I also remember that the scientist he was interviewing did a reasonably good job of standing up to this and trying to make the point that we were talking about statistical probabilities rather than reliable predictions of numbers of deaths.

I do at times get a little angry about this.

If someone with the intelligence of Jeremy Paxman gets caught up in this hype and search for headlines then it is hardly surprising that so many of our journalists do the same.

It is time to recognise that the media search for lurid headlines is one of the biggest dangers that good government has to face.

If reputable journalists like Jeremy Paxman join in this kind of clamour, then the government has very little option but to take the measures it did, and they had to do so with the pharmaceutical companies knowing that they hold the ace of public opinion in their hand.

My feelings about journalism and statistics are strong ones. This is because I live in Stafford, and I have been dealing for the last year with the fact that journalists as a species do not appear to be able to read or interpret statistics correctly.

The eye witness stories from Stafford hospital made great media material.- and there are many important things that they teach us about the increasingly difficult task of dealing with our ageing population. These are real questions with national significance. The headline grabbing statistics of numbers of “excess deaths” on the other hand are and always have been nonsense.

In a few weeks the Stafford Hospital Inquiry will present its findings and I think we will be asking a similar question. Did the world over-react to Stafford Hospital?

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January 15, 2010

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How do we get dignity in care?

I am just listening to Michael Parkinson on You and Yours with regard to Dignity in Care.

This is an issue I have been deeply interested in for many years, partly as a result of my own experience coping with my mother’s 8 years of dementia.

There are many real concerns about how we do deliver care.

It is not surprising that we are getting a number of individual stories being told on the programme of times when things have gone wrong.
These are depressing stories.

The media are keen to hear these horror stories, and of course we need to hear them.

What I am hoping is that the programme will go on to look at what it is that we need to do to turn this around. I sent an audioboo though to you and yours to try and address the issues. Not sure if they will include any of this.

Listen!

The issues that we are dealing with now are the tip of the iceberg. As the demographic change bites we will find more and more problems unless as a society we get to grips with how we are going to fund the care that we need and how we are going to change our own attitudes.

The programme is now looking at a care home which is taking a particularly imaginative response to the care of dementia patients. It can be good. At its best dementia can bring with it a simplicity and an opportunity to reach out to people in a very simple way. Making this happen means giving those people who are delivering care proper respect. They need to know that their job is valuable and valued.

They also need time, and for their work to be something integral to the community, rather than a kind of warehousing for people that we no longer want.

One of the key resources that we have that could make this work is our own older people who are still well. We should be thinking of paying older people to go into care homes and hospitals in order to give support for patients and residents.

A lady is just describing a really well designed care facility in Welwyn where people with dementia were able to live independently – within a small purpose built complex, which allowed people to be safe, but have company and support when they needed it.

This can be done – but acheiving this means that we as individuals need to be going out in our communities, engaging with the local authorities and planning process, and making sure it happens.

We are approaching the end of the programme. The F word – Funding has been mentioned twice.
I am afraid that this programme, like so many other programmes on this subject has dodged the vitally important issue of how we as a society are going fund care. Not a single word about the Green paper proposals which do fully cover the funfing options.

The Alzhiemers champion has just raised the issue of agencies generating large profits from the provision of care, and indicated the need for proper regulation of charging.

She has also raised the question of how we should be able to measure quality in homes. and regulate the provision of domiciliary care. The care quality commission is looking at this.

The programme is over. Maybe we are still at the point of making sure that people are aware of how big the problems are.

Such a pity that we keep going over the same old ground. Time to move towards the solutions.

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January 12, 2010

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How can we hear when the people speak?

For all of us who want an election that is fought on the issues, the challenge of making this happen can at times seem daunting.

I have seen enough on the doorsteps at Crewe, a local by-election, and what came out of the polling boxes in June to show me what happens when we are dealing with an electorate that does not feel that it has an effective means of making its voice heard, is fundamentally ill-informed and is therefore open to manipulation by what appears to my lay persons eyes to be cynically orchestrated press campaigns.

One of the things that I find quite alarming at present is the extent of the divide that is opening up between people who are informed and people who are not. We have more opportunity than ever before to find out the facts and share opinions. We also have endless opportunities to express our own opinions. The sheer volume of words out there in itself becomes a part of the problem. 

A lot of people have identified that the internet and social media have a huge potential for bringing about the kind of empowerment that many people see as necessary, but we are not there yet. 

Because these questions have been on my mind for several years my attention was caught by an item on @R4today regarding Deliberative Democracy http://cdd.stanford.edu/
A conference is being held in London involving James Fishkin who is author of “When the people speak” http://cdd.stanford.edu/research/whenthepeoplespeak/ this is being pulled together by @power_2010 http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/guy-aitchison/uk-citizens-gather-to-disuss-how-to-reform-system

The conference brings together a panel of participants who will consider 58 questions. These have been assembled from the thousands of questions submitted to @power_2010. The questions and process are explained here http://citinq.3cdn.net/114ff346931f337110_kkm6i41qv.pdf  
James Fiskin explains the principle behind his process.

“Our subject is how to achieve deliberative democracy: how to include everyone under conditions where they are effectively motivated to really think about the issues. This is the problem of how to fulfill two fundamental values—political equality and deliberation.”

I think his analysis of the current barriers to effective participation is useful. He sees four main problems

• Individuals choose not to take the time to be informed because of “rational ignorance”. If I have one opinion in millions why should I take the time and trouble to become really informed about politics or policy? My individual views will have only negligible effects.
• Second, the public has fewer “opinions” deserving of the name than are routinely reported in polls. Respondents to polls do not like to admit that they “don’t know” so they will choose an option, virtually at random, rather than respond that they have never thought about the issue.
• A third limitation is that even when people discuss politics or policy they do so mostly with people like themselves—those from similar backgrounds, social locations and outlooks.
• Efforts to manipulate public opinion work best with an inattentive and/or uninformed public. If the public is inattentive, then it may not take much to persuade and it may be easy to prime. If it is uninformed, it may be manipulated even if it is highly engaged or even emotionally gripped by an issue. In that case, it may be easily misled through misinformation or primed to consider only certain dimensions of an issue.

I think this analysis will seem pretty accurate to many people. It certainly does to me.

An important aspect of James Fishkin’s work is that it measures the way in which the opinions of his representative groups actively change as they are given more information.

The experiment going on in London this weekend is something that I think we should watch with interest.

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January 8, 2010

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We can’t go on like this Dave!

 The hoardings have gone up. A large head shot of David Cameron with “we can’t go on like this” all over the country.

The prospect of five whole months of electioneering is not an appealing one. Today I tuned in to hear David Cameron deliver his press release on the Health service. I did this because I really want to know. How is it that Dave sees the Health service, what is it that he actually intends to do and how does it differ from the actions that are already being taken by the Labour Government?

Dave’s promise of a less divisive kind of politics, in which he should acknowledge the positive in the actions of his opponents, is just two days old. So this event was a disappointment to me on two fronts. I did not get any of the detail that I was looking for and we were back into Dave’s habitual attacking mode.

My mind started to wander. I found myself asking does David Cameron suffer from a mild form of Tourette syndrome? The characteristic of Tourette is a tic, a little quirk that you are not quite in control of, most likely to appear when you are in a stressful situation. Playing the role of “the next prime minister” must be pretty stressful. His party, and those who hope to gain his victory if it should come have invested so much hope in him. It is not an enviable position. The scope for getting it wrong over a five month campaign is considerable.

I first became aware of David Cameron’s tic back in March 2009. He came to Stafford for a photo opportunity. It was a contentious thing to do at the time. A journalist questioned the appropriateness of his being there, and his response of “Rubbish” really upset me. At a time when emotions were running very high in Stafford it felt both unhelpful and gratuitously rude. It is only subsequently that I have realised that whenever he feels just a little under pressure his response is to pepper his speeches with words like “rubbish” “fake” ”huge” “Massive”. These are protective words used  to discourage further questioning. They tell us something about his emotional state but little about the facts.

Because his speech this morning conveyed little I went to look at the draft manifesto. The tic is evident here too. Take the first paragraph after the preamble. (In this blog I am just concerned with the language. I will come back to analysis of what he is saying on another occasion).

“We will scrap all of the politically-motivated process targets that stop health professionals doing their jobs properly, and set NHS providers free to innovate by ensuring they become autonomous Foundation Trusts”. This is followed in the next paragraph.

“With power comes responsibility, and it is essential that doctors and nurses are properly accountable to patients for their performance. We will unleash an information revolution in the NHS by making detailed data about the performance of trusts, hospitals, GPs, doctors and other staff available to the public online so everyone will know who is providing a good service and who is falling behind.”

This is quite puzzling. There is the data that he likes, we need that and it will empower us, and there is the data he doesn’t like which has to be “politically motivated process targets”

A little further down the page we get to what can be cut and what is sacrosanct. It is unclear where the data for the “information revolution” lies. Is it a specially valued part of the health service, or is it part of the amount “that Labour is currently wasting on bureaucracy”?

So far I am not clear if we are just seeing muddled thinking, or if there is a real distinction which I am failing to see and need to have spelled out.

My concern is this. Most of us who take our politics seriously understand the scale of the challenges ahead. There will be a lot of words used over the next five months. This is a real opportunity to set out choices as clearly as possible and build a dialogue with the voting public. It can be a very creative process, one which actually changes the way in which our democracy works for the better.

At the moment that is not what we are getting. For me at any rate this is all too much about Dave and what Dave feels.

So now that we have reached day three of David Cameron’s campaign I can’t help feeling, “We can’t go on like this Dave!”

useful article “Come off it Dr Cameron” picks up on the fact that many of the proposals picked up by the Conservatives Draft manifesto are already in place  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/04/cameron-changes-nhs-happened-already

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January 5, 2010

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