I cannot understand how on the one hand the government through taxation seeks to help the worst off while liberalising the gambling laws with the other when the evidence suggests gambling addiction hits the worst off worst of all.

If you agree – and particularly if you live in the UK – please sign the Campaign Against Super-Casinos Expansion’s online petition.

I wrote a fairly extensive post about the gambling bill when it first came up in 2004 with some of the evidence against it.

In a recent New Yorker he looks at phenomena once thought to be normally distributed that are actually distributed according to the “power law” – for example ‘problematic’ homeless people, corrupt cops or polluting cars. In other words it turns out that in these cases a hard core cause most of the trouble, which calls for different public policy solutions – for example, giving a lot of help and support to the most ‘undeserving’ of the homeless (eg drug-addicted and/or mentally ill people). The argument here is that they cost the system so much anyway when they ‘go wrong’ that you can spend quite a lot on them and still come out ahead if their self-harming behaviour can be curbed.

Someone I know who has worked in emergency rooms was less sanguine. They suggested that these ‘lowest of the low’ were so damaged that they simply do not respond to any interventions and that public policy interventions should instead be used to help the large number of homeless people who are (as Gladwell points out) just ‘passing through’ homelessness in order to ensure they don’t return to that state.

P.S. Gladwell now has his own blog and has posted there about the power law article.

Seems everywhere I look there is news about how revenge corrodes the soul and how the ‘good guys’ often act badly.

Historical papers revealed by the Guardian in the last week told how during and immediately after WWII, Britain ran interrogation centres that sounded as bad as anything the Gestapo came up with. One in Germany that starved and tortured prisoners first targeted Nazi party members or former members of the SS then by late 1946…

suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers – Russians, Czechs and Hungarians – but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

By a depressing irony, “Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf… [six] were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war.”

The revelations of the previous week were even more disturbing. During and after WWII, a torture centre was run in London – the “London Cage”. The fact that those tortured appear to have been largely SS men and those accused of war crimes does little to excuse the brutal conditions there.

And now by an odd coincidence Spielberg is about to release a film – Munich – about Israel’s decision to hunt down and assasinate the killers of 11 of its atheletes at the 1972 Munich games (reviewed here).

All of this makes one think about the way that things seem to be going both here in the UK and in the US where torture may now be illegal but evidence obtained under torture may be OK and where peaceful protesters against military recruitment are attacked by police.

Also see my earlier post-Abu Ghraib musings on a similar theme…

But hopefully with that out of my system I can return to our regularly-scheduled Xmas cheer!

I suppose this is something I am bound to have to weather in years to come once I am published academically and people have the chance to interpret (and misinterpret) my work, but this morning’s surprise came as an unwelcome little shock. I discovered that I have been held up as a figure for abuse in a newsletter distributed in my neighborhood by Islington International Working Class Action.

When the latest edition of the “Mildmay and Highbury Independent” landed on my doorstep (not yet available online) I thought I would give it a read. I wouldn’t say I am completely ideologically aligned with them but I have some sympathy with their regular diet of stories of poorly maintained public housing and council property sell-offs that don’t result in significant benefits for the borough’s substantial population of working class people. I turned the page and found an article entitled “Gentrification: is it good for you?” following on from a recent Guardian article which pointed out the benefits of the restoration of a local park (that I had some part in) but also quoted some residents who felt they had not benefited from the changes. And there, to my distress, I read the following:

“Mr Brake has made it very clear which kind of ‘regeneration’ he wants to see. His website announces triumphantly that the: ‘Gentrification of Newington Green proceeds apace’… For Mr Brake the arrival of ‘a genuine French patisserie, several restaurants and a vegetarian deli’ is proof that ‘the benefits will be felt by all who live here for generations to come.”

Well I was a little baffled. None of this sounded like anything I had written on the official NGAG website (which is rather out of date now that I am no longer press officer). And indeed I hadn’t written anything like that in my official capacity. Then I went back through the archives of this blog and discovered that the quotes had been pulled from here – from this post and this one. Of course the quotes were selective and the author of this particular hatchet job hadn’t bothered to call me up and try to find out my actual views.

I don’t know whether having read my words through their own ideological lenses they felt they knew what I would say or whether they simply wanted to use me as a sort of punching bag and were deliberately misquoting me but whichever the reason the result was quite irritating. All the more so because actually I do agree with the author to some extent about the issues s/he was trying to raise.

So to be clear about what I think I have observed that Newington Green is gentrifying but with decidedly mixed emotions. I personally enjoy the arrival of the local patisserie and deli, which (it must be said) have not come at the expense of any authentically working class amenities that I am aware of. What I campaigned for and helped to achieve, however was the cleaning up of the Green itself, which has been turned into a proper park at last and my intention was that that green space used by everyone (not the restaurants) would provide the “benefits for all who live here” alluded to earlier.

I am uncomfortably aware that improvements to an area like this one can lead to gentrification which may alienate working class people but I would regret it if this did happen and indeed as long as the numerous council estates in this area remain it seems unlikely that working class people would be “driven out” as the author warns may happen. It is difficult, however, to see what the alternative is. Should we have left the green as an overgrown traffic roundabout to protect the neighborhood from gentrification? Shades of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”!

At any rate had I been approached I would have had some sympathy with the author and could have helped them with their piece – as it is (like all too many groups on the left) their rigid ideological stance has lost them a potential supporter.

Laurie Taylor in his excellent Thinking Allowed radio programme recently interviewed Simone Abram at length about her anthropological study of tenants’ experiences of “urban regeneration” in Norfolk Park, Sheffield (she has produced a film about this as well with accompanying website). The programme also features interviews with the residents themselves. Strangely enough she concludes that even with the best of intentions the connection between consultation and results on the ground can be very tenuous – especially when a public private partnership (or a tangle of overlapping partnerships) is involved!

When fighting a ruthless enemy there is always a danger that democracies can lose the moral upper hand through over-reaction. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was bad enough but the latest UK government anti-terrorism proposals (full statement here) seem to be going a long way too far in an attempt to curb terrorism. Making “justifying or glorifying” terrorism anywhere an offence and “automatically refusing asylum to anyone with anything to do with terrorism anywhere” seem OK on the surface but are rife for misuse. As our mayor Ken Livingstone points out, twenty years ago these laws could have been applied to Nelson Mandela and his supporters.

The fact that some of the proposed rules may be applied retrospectively is also very alarming. And while many of the most draconian restrictions are applied to non-citizens resident here, Blair envisions the extension of powers to strip existing citizens of their citizenship for being “engaged in extremism”.

As with all such rash laws they may well be used initially to target people most of us would consider dangerous or distasteful (and the blurring of the distinction between the two is an important part of the problem). However there is no guarantee that such laws would not be misused by a future administration.

There has been a lot of alarm raised (by the BBC among others) about sites and people who publicise and glorify the terrorism of Al Qaeda and its ‘fellow travellers’ but rather than trying to stamp them out (probably a hopeless task) and criminalise writers and readers shouldn’t we be keeping an eye on those who are already involved and (as I noted earlier) shouldn’t we be trying to minimise legitimate Muslim grievances so the radicals eventually lose their moral ‘ammunition’?

If a picture is worth 1000 words how many words is an animated GIF worth?

Update: Images by ‘Stargazer‘ and words by ‘jslayeruk‘.

I’ve just finished watching the whole series of Boys from the Blackstuff (a pivotal drama set in recession-hit Liverpool in the early 1980s) which I couldn’t help but find moving even though it was in many places transparently manipulative and though I don’t subscribe entirely to the politics on offer in it.

Characteristically, it made me wonder about the statistics behind these stories of men on the dole only able to support their families through working in the black economy. Of course the main way in which the unemployed have benefited since 1982 is that there are a lot more (low paid) jobs available for them and more help and training available to get then those jobs – that is where the emphasis of government policy has gone – but nonetheless I wondered to what extent the lot of the remaining unemployed has improved since that time.

I have found a table from the government with the weekly rates of the main social security benefits but they only go back to 1993 and there must have been a hundred different kinds of benefit listed which made it difficult to figure out what a typical unemployed household might have received. The very useful UK Poverty site also only goes back to 1996 – it at least shows both pensioners and couples with young children on benefits appear to be nearly 40% better off now – after inflation – than they would have been in 1998. But for a couple without children who are on benefits their income would not have changed at all adjusted for inflation over that period, leaving them 20% poorer relative to average earnings. But where should I look if I want to get a longer historical perspective on UK poverty? All I found about the 1980s was this depressing fact from the ‘key facts‘ at the poverty site: “The numbers of people on relative low incomes [60% of median income] remained broadly unchanged during the 1990s after having doubled in the 1980s”.

Wouldn’t you know it I ended up in Bloomsbury where two of the blasts occurred and suddenly it seemed like everywhere I looked were police cordons and other things that reminded me of the bombs. I have put up a few pictures on Flickr that I took using my mobile phone’s lousy camera and added them to the London Bomb Blasts pool there.

A friend I hadn’t heard from for a while popped up on my blog and posted about her concern at “the way these ‘murders’ are somehow seen as worse than the many other ‘murders’ we know of, from rapes and muggings through hit-and-run driving deaths to deaths from starvation.” Well, I certainly wouldn’t go as far as she does on that point – after all there is, I believe, a moral difference between deliberately killing people and neglecting to save their lives when this is possible. But it’s certainly worth thinking about.

Above is a UN map of the proportion of the world’s population that is malnourished (more details statistics are available from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization). While the global media’s attention focuses on an attack which likely killed 50 people, it swivels away from the G8’s inadequate response to the ongoing disastrous situation much of the world where 24,000 people die of starvation every day – a situation that global climate change may only make worse.

As for the attack itself, it seems to indicate to me that the so-called ‘war on terror’ continues to be fought in the wrong ways. No amount of surveillance (and London may be the surveillance capital of the world) can keep determined terrorists from striking. The only way to deal with terrorism is at its source – in other words a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.

Obviously, the West can’t (and shouldn’t) attempt to meet the terrorists’ ‘demands’ (insofar as they are articulated). But we should, where possible, attempt to deal with some of the Arab world’s legitimate grievances over our behaviour. We should, for example, be leaning on Sharon that if he is going to impose a peace settlement it should at least be a just one which leaves Palestine in a form capable of taking care of itself. We should also be talking a little more about how to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s outrageous that the coalition doesn’t even publish figures on this issue leaving the counting to volunteers like Iraq Body Count – giving the erroneous impression that the coalition authorities there aren’t concerned with the problem and handing terrorists potent propaganda.