The annual Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom is out.
The UK is 28. Behind Jamaica, which reminds us that press freedom can’t solve every problem.
Italy is 61. The lowest rank of any major developed country.
China is 174. Out of 179. But still ahead of Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea.
If you have children, and you have not read a history of the British education system, then this book is already worth reading. It is far from perfectly organised, and it fails to make some — to me — obvious and powerful points about education policy. Indeed the book might have been better as a more closely focused pamphlet of 120 pages rather than the 200 pages that it is. But overall, School Wars contains enough good information to leave you grinding your teeth at the weakness and hypocrisy of British politicians in all three major parties. It has proven, in Britain, easier to have a rational debate about homosexuality than about education.
Why? The proximate reason is that the British establishment is still overwhelmingly educated in elitist schools which refuse to accept poor or more difficult to teach children. The apex of this system is the roughly 7 percent of children who go to private schools and the 5 percent who go to grammars. But if you count in other church and non-church state schools which cherry-pick their intake, there is probably one-fifth or more of families and kids which undertake their education on the unspoken basis that it is reasonable to leave everyone else to fend for themselves.
In a country like Italy, the elite plunders the state directly. In Britain, the approach to making sure the establishment gets more than its share is far more subtle. Indeed one can only admire the refinement of the hypocrisy. Instead of grabbing what you want directly, you give yourselves an unassailable advantage by creating selective schools for those with more money, more accumulated learning and better social networks and then ‘compete’ with people who have had to undertake their education in the real, everyday world of mixed incomes and abilities.
School Wars fails to make the most important point about this system — that those who support it are anti-competitive. The British education system exists to prevent children having equal educational opportunity and therefore from competing on an equal basis. It is a myth that the rich and powerful like competition — it is a threat to their status. What they like is competition according to rules they set, just what the British education system offers.
Another thing School Wars fails to address is the false fear that most people have about a nationalised education system, where each school would educate a fair cross-section of the population. Such an arrangement would create a more genuine free market, but it would never mean that the monied classes could not bring their money to bear on their children’s advancement. Such support would simply have to occur outside school, as is the case in Scandinavian countries, continental European ones, north-east Asian ones, or Canada, which have non-selective school systems and post higher average educational scores than Britain. Money still counts in those countries. However you cannot move your child to some ‘gated’ educational community free of the poor.
It may seem there is a lot missing from Melissa Benn’s book. In fact, there is a lot in it. She is good at showing how real improvement in Britain’s education system cannot come from piecemeal change. Britain needs a simple, straightforward commitment to education as a public good. Everything else leads back, through any number of byways, to manipulation of the system by more powerful interests against less powerful interests. The loser is the aggregate quality of education. As constructed today the British school system is really an experiment to prove the existence of middle class selfishness. We knew that existed already.
The trial of police officers involved in a wrongful 1980 conviction of 3 men for murder in Wales has collapsed on a technicality. The case has interesting parallels with the Sollecito and Knox case in Perugia. The three convicted men left no forensic/DNA evidence at the crime scene, despite a murder by 50 stab wounds. The man later convicted of the murder left plenty of forensic evidence, but police were obsessed with the other three suspects. As in Perugia, their theory was more important than the investigation.
It all looks rather Italian, as does the failure to complete a trial of the police officers alleged to have perverted the course of justice. However we must note that there have already been two enquiries into this case, and there will now be a third. That isn’t the same as Perugia, where the expectation is that there will be no enquiry, nothing will change, and police and magistrates will not even get a telling off.
As I stop for a tuna sandwich, the Fat Controller has left the Treasury and is heading for parliament. Here is what I predicted in January. Let’s see how Osborne’s admissions today measure up.
Next day:
1. Osborne changed his growth forecast for 2012 from 2.5% to 0.8%, so at this point he was out at the start of the year by a fact of just over three.
2. There will be a few more tank engines, but any real impact from the Fat Controller’s plan depends on the private sector coming in to leverage about £5 billion of public money. HM Treasury explication of its ‘clear’ infrastructure plan is here.
3. It is very small beer from Osborne, less than I expected. Outlook has to be that growth will fall even further than he now says and there will be some additional capex stimulus in the first half of 2012. He is going to follow the curve rather than influencing it throughout this crisis.
4. Politically the FC is taking the low road of a blame game. It’s all the fault of the Eurozone and the previous long-lived Labour government. There is a sufficient kernel of truth in this to deflect attention from the fact that Osborne himself has no new ideas about anything.
The Duke of Edinburgh is quoted in the papers today by someone he spoke to at a reception as follows:
‘He said they were absolutely useless, completely reliant on subsidies and an absolute disgrace.’
To which of the following was the beloved husband of the Queen — and in his youth Prince of Greece — referring?
a) the royal family
b) Greeks
c) wind turbines
d) all of the above
The latest from the investigation into the death of Mark Duggan, whose death sparked the UK riots this summer, is worth taking on board.
Recall that when police shot him dead, Duggan was initially said to have fired on police. And a shot Duggan supposedly fired almost killed a policeman, except it lodged in his radio.
The point we are at now is that a) Duggan did not fire a shot b) Duggan did not have a weapon in his hands.
Instead there was a weapon inside a sock inside a box in the back of his car that police had information he had acquired.
It is not quite as bad as shooting an unarmed electrician in the head multiple times at point blank range. But the Duggan killing points to a London police force parts of which have lost touch with what policing means as a profession.
Meanwhile:
Two of three members of a community liaison group set up to create trust in the official investigation into Duggan’s death have resigned. And the Met is running to the Press Complaints Commission with what looks like a very lame complaint against The Guardian‘s reporting (same link); it isn’t quite Giuliano Mignini firing off allegations of criminal libel against any journalist who gainsays him, but it is a little chip hewn from the same moral block.
It isn’t easy to see amid all the goings on, but there is a fork in the economic road. A third week of improving jobless claims in the US signals the very slow recovery of the world’s biggest economy. Meanwhile the spreading of the stress in European debt markets signals that the worst in that region is yet to come.
The world is suffering two different macro crises. A private debt disaster hit countries running the Anglo-Saxon model. As Hyman Minsky would have expected, the US is beginning to escape from this because its government carried sufficiently low debt that it could step in and bail the problem out with monstrous sums of public money. The US is also assisted by having a diversified economy that contains the planet’s best manufacturing firms in addition to its biggest banks (something not considered in Minsky’s ‘financial instability hypothesis’, but then he never claimed it was a complete theory). The UK, and Ireland, and Spain, are more one-dimensional and hence more stuffed. As this article makes clear in Britain’s case.
The second macro crisis is the public debt one of the Eurozone. Here the state cannot step in because its debts are the problem. Instead the state has to negotiate its way out. Which involves politics. Which is why the problem is more intractable than the private debt disaster where the solution is automatic (deleveraging, falling asset prices, misery for anyone who failed to ‘play the market’).
The major ‘negotiation’ of the public debt crisis in Europe is Italy’s, which is now in its ‘Chin Up, Let’s All Stand Together Phase’, under Mr Monti. The press today is being terribly positive. But I cannot see where a good outcome could come from. Italians are all in favour of Mr Monti because he has not yet set out clear policies. Once he does, the political parties will attack him, and allege that dark, conspiratorial forces are behind him. Without a clear roster of policies that have to be approved by a referendum, there is no practicable way forward. And no party is urging a referendum because it would involve making policy choices clear. The parties were not even willing to offer up ministers for the government. The preference is to let the ‘technocrat’ dig his own grave.
The Economist has published its sixth, and presumably final, cover story on Silvio Berlusconi. The headline – ‘That’s all folks’ – is supposed to evoke the cartoon quality of his premiership. But coupled with a backdrop of Sil set in a painting of end-of-Empire Roman lassitude, it is too busy. Far more visually effective was the June 2011 cover with a simple photo of Sil and the line ‘The man who screwed an entire country’.
I haven’t been the biggest fan of The Economist’s coverage of Italy because it has focused so overwhelmingly on Sil — rather than on a the malaise of an entire professional class which he symbolises. What sets Italy apart is that, relative to its level of economic development, it has the most backward, self-serving professional class and professional institutions of any state in the world. This includes, but is far from limited to, its political and legal and fiscal institutions.
There is also a very English undercurrent of hypocrisy in the manner in which the British elite discusses the Italian crisis with a told-you-so attitude. The Economist is particularly guilty of this, putting the boot in to the German response to the crisis on a weekly basis.
What is forgotten is how the Germans are left to do the political heavy lifting in Europe almost single-handedly. They have a French ‘assistant’, but he is barely worthy of the name.
If Britain had joined the Euro, things would have been different. There would be two big political grown-ups in the Euro-zone instead of one, and that would have made the job of dealing with Italy so much easier.
You cannot argue with Britain’s decision to stay out of the Euro from a selfish, pragmatic perspective, but anyone who supported that decision should limit themselves when yelling from the sidelines about what to do now. How would you like to be Merkel, put in a team with Sarko, and expected to sort out Greece and Italy?
If Britons are honest, they must concede that post-war Germany has done the bulk of the work in creating a stable, prosperous and progressive Europe while the British — famed as people of action — stood around bitching. And when Britain realised it desperately needed to be inside the Common Market in the early 1970s, it needed German support — against French opposition — to get in.
Germany, not Britain, is the moral leader of Europe in the past half century.
Here is an interesting panel discussion about the Icelandic financial crisis. It is chaired by Martin Wolf (see blogroll), and includes Paul Krugman (see blogroll), Simon Johnson (see blogroll), a deputy director of the IMF, the current head of the Icelandic central bank, and another knowledgeable Icelander.
To recap: Iceland had by some measures the worst financial crisis in the history of the world (Wiki summary here.). However, because there was zero chance the country could bail out its banks — and it is not a Euro area member — they had to go bust, capital controls were introduced, and foreign wholesale funders of the Icelandic banks took the main financial hit. The obvious comparison is with Ireland, which has a similar-size crisis but is in the Euro and partly as a result was forced to go the bank rescue route. So, while Iceland has written off much of its bad debt and is recovering, Ireland is presently set to honour every European cent it owes and faces a decade of painful adjustment.
The event was filmed this week and runs to 1.5 hours. It is just about worth watching the whole thing, but if you don’t have time, scroll through and check these highlights as a taster menu of the way the world has changed — intellectually — as a result of the global financial crisis.
6 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the previously unthinkable phenomenon of the IMF admitting to mistakes.
30 mins: An IMF deputy director actually says: ‘Capital controls were probably the best thing that could be done at the time’. Remember that when the Asian crisis broke in 1997 the IMF was trying to change its articles of association to make a battle against capital controls a centre-piece of its mandate.
57 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the ‘new, cuddly IMF’.
62 mins: The point is made that the lessons of Latin America 1982 and south-east Asia 1997 have were finally learnt such that they could benefit a country (Iceland) whose population is the size of a mid-western town in the US. Roughly speaking, bad US, IMF and World Bank policies were used on approximately 1 billion people in order to learn positive lessons that have been applied to 300,000 people.
89 mins: Martin Wolf talks about the Vickers plan for UK financial sector reform, which he refers to as ‘modern Glass Steagall’. I think it would be fair to say he hopes that this is what it will turn out to be, since the ring-fencing strategy put forward by the final Vickers report has not in fact been tried before.
Final thought: the very moment when the IMF is said to have become ‘cuddly’ may be the one when it needs to not be cuddly. Italy, which I continue to believe will require IMF intervention, cries out for the toughest and most invasive kind of IMF action if it is to remain in the Euro area. This includes intervention in institutional areas like legal system reform where the Fund has never previously (to my knowledge) been active. Just when the IMF decided to be nice and listen to Icelandic policy makers, it needs to be Mr. Bad Cop to have any chance with Italian ones. In saying this, I stand by my own preference for Italy to be pushed out of the EU and forced to confront its problems itself — because only that will really force the country to grow up.
The British middle class
A great story by Zoe Williams about the national education system, national education versus private education, and middle-class selfishness. For me, the ghettoised education system remains the thing to like least in Britain.
Premiership football
The tale of how footballer Wayne Bridge decided to stay at Manchester City on his £4.7 million salary even though the team is unlikely to give him first team football and he has been left out of the Champions League squad. Somehow the price mechanism doesn’t seem to be extracting peak performance from Wayne.
Continental Europe
Still, being here in the UK you get to look at certain other places in Europe and reflect that things could be so much worse.
