The big stories buried beneath the headlines

Posted on September 3, 2021 by alan

In news stories this morning about pet abduction and sustainable fashion, the most critical parts are buried deep in the article: a chance remark that gives away the bigger story.

During the lockdown there has been a steep rise in the cost of dogs and other pets, and this has led to an increase in pet abductions. The most high profile example was when Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot during the theft of her bulldogs in Los Angeles, but the BBC reports that there are over 2000 pet thefts in the UK alone last year.

Pet abduction to be made new criminal offence in thefts crackdown – BBC News

In principle pet theft is a crime covered by the UK Theft Act, but the use of this evidently does not reflect the emotional harms of pet abductions, hence the need for the new law. Reading further the article says:

Although offences under the Theft Act 1968 carry a maximum term of seven years, ministers say there is little evidence of that being used, because the severity of the sentence is partly determined by the monetary value of the item taken.

It was this that caught my eye. The most severe penalties under the Theft Act are for the most valuable items. If the second-hand car of a pensioner near the poverty line is stolen, it will attract a less severe sentence than the trophy Porsche from the millionaire’s collection. This sounds like a law made in the 17th century, but is in fact from 1968 and applies today.

The lesson is clear, if you are poor then even the criminal law does nothing for you.

The second story is about Molly-Mae, ex-Love Island contestant and social media influencer, who has just been recruited as creative director of Pretty Little Things with a particular focus on sustainable fashion.

Molly-Mae: “I’m not just an influencer anymore”

Reading further there is a section entitled “Wearing the same dress twice”, that has the following quote from Molly-Mae:

“I even captioned one of my Instagram pictures the other day saying ‘PSA it’s ok to wear the same dress twice’ – it’s a bad habit us girls have got into, like if you put it on Instagram it means you can’t wear it again.”

Although I did know some of the figures for this before, it still shocked me to hear that “wearing the same dress twice” is regarded as a significant message.

Sadly, this does reflect the previous figures I’ve seen suggesting that the median number of times a garment is worn is indeed one, with something like 20% of clothes never worn at all once bought. This all has to be added to around 1/3 of fashion clothing that is shredded or otherwise disposed of without ever being sold, due to end of season, returns, or other reasons.

The fashion industry is estimated to contribute 10% of all global carbon emissions, not to mention plastic micro-fibres, chemical, water and other environmental impacts, as well as being built upon near slave-labour conditions across the world.

Given this, even wearing clothes twice could be a major benefit.

However, just imagine how the statement sounds to someone who lived through the second world war, or even anyone over 50. This is reflected in figures for environmental action by age group: awareness is greatest in the younger age groups, but in nearly all areas life-style action is greatest in the older ones. Perhaps influencers such as Molly-Mae can help turn this round.

So as you read the news, do look beyond the headlines, the most hard-hitting parts are often buried deep.

Image: jimbomack66, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Covid-19, the impact of university return

Posted on August 9, 2020 by alan

For many reasons, it is important for universities to re-open in the autumn, but it is also clear that this is a high-risk endeavour: bringing around 2% of the UK population together in close proximity for 10 to 12 weeks and then re-dispersing them at Christmas.

When I first estimated the actual size of the impact I was, to be honest, shocked; it was a turning point for me. With an academic hat on I can play with the numbers as an intellectual exercise, but we are talking about many, many thousands of lives at risk, the vast majority outside the university itself, with the communities around universities most at risk.

I have tried to think of easy, gentle and diplomatic ways of expressing this, but there are none; we seem in danger of creating killing zones around our places of learning.

At the very best, outbreaks will be detected early, and instead of massive deaths we will see substantial lockdowns in many university cities across the UK with the corresponding social and economic costs, which will create schisms between ‘town and gown’ that may poison civic relationships for years to come.

In the early months of the year many of us in the university sector watched with horror as we watched the Covid-19 numbers rising and could see where this would end. The eventual first ‘wave’ and its devastating death toll did not need sophisticated modelling to predict; in the intervening months it has played out precisely as expected. At that point the political will was clearly set and time was short; there was little we could do but shake our heads in despair and feel the pain of seeing our predictions become reality as the numbers grew, each number a person, each person a community.

Across the sector, many are worried about the implications of the return of students and staff in the autumn, but structurally the nature of the HE sector in the UK makes it near impossible even for individual universities to take sufficient steps to mitigate it, let alone individual academics.

Doing the sums

For some time, universities across the UK have been preparing for the re-opening, working out ways to reduce the risk. There has been a mathematical modelling working group trying to assess the impact of various measures, as well as much activity at individual institutions. It appears too that SAGE has highlighted that universities pose a potential risk [SN], but this seems to have gone cold and universities are coping as best they can with apparently no national plan. Universities UK have issued guidance to universities on what to do as they emerge from lockdown [UUKa], but it does not include an estimate of the scale of the problem.

As I said, the turning point for me came when I realised just how bad this could be. As with the early national growth pattern, it does not require complex mathematics to assess, within rough ranges, the potential impact; and even the most conservative estimates are terrifying.

We know from freshers’ flu that infections spread quickly amongst the student community. The social life is precisely why many students relocate to distant cities. Without strong measures to control student infections it is clear that Covid-19 will spread rapidly on campuses, leading to thousands of cases in each university. Students themselves are at low (though not zero) risk of dying or having serious complications from Covid-19, but if there is even small ‘leakage’ into the surrounding community (via university staff, transport systems, stay-at-home students or night life), then the impact is catastrophic.

For a mid-sized university of 20,000 students, let’s say only 1 in 20 become infected during the term; that is around 1,000 student cases. As a very conservative estimate, let’s assume just one community infection for every 10 infected students. If city bars are open this figure will almost certainly be much higher, but we’ll take a very low estimate. In this case, we are looking at 100 initial community cases.

Now 100 additional cases is already potentially enough to cause a handful of deaths, but we have got used to trading off social benefits against health costs; for any activity there is always a level of risk that we are prepared to accept.

However, the one bit of mathematics you do need to know is the way that a relatively small R number still leads to a substantial number of cases. For example, an R of 0.9 means for every initial infection the total number of infections is actually 10 times higher (in general 1/(1-R), see [Dx1]). When R is greater than 1 the effect is worse still, with the impact only limited when some additional societal measure kicks in, such as a vaccine or local lockdown.

A relatively conservative estimate for R in the autumn is 1.5 [AMS]. For R =1.5, those initial 100 community cases magnify to over 10,000 within 5 weeks and more than 600,000 within 10 weeks. Even with the most optimistic winter rate of 1.2, those 100 initial community infections will give rise to 20,000 cases by the end of a term.

That is for a single university.

With a mortality rate of 1% and the most optimistic figures, this means that each university will cause hundreds of deaths. In other words, the universities in the UK will collectively create as many infections as the entire first wave. At even slightly less optimistic figures, the impact is even more devastating.

Why return at all?

Given the potential dangers, why are universities returning at all in the autumn instead of continuing with fully online provision?

In many areas of life there is a trade-off to be made between, on the one hand, the immediate Covid-19 health impacts and, on the other, a variety of issues: social, educational, economic, and also longer term and indirect mental and physical health implications. This is no less true when we consider the re-opening of universities.

Social implications: We know that the lockdown has caused a significant increase in mental health problems amongst young people, for a variety of reasons: the social isolation itself, pressures on families, general anxiety about the disease, and of course worries about future education and jobs. Some of the arguments are similar to those for schools except that universities do not provide a ‘child minding’ role. Crucially, for both schools and universities, we know that online education is least effective for those who are already most economically deprived, not least because of continued poor access to digital technology. We risk creating a missed generation and deepening existing fractures in civil society.

Furthermore, the critical role of university research has been evident during the Covid crisis, from the development of new treatments to practical use of infrastructure for rapid production of PPE. Ongoing, the initial wave has emphasised the need for more medical training. Of course, both education and research will also be critical for ‘post-Covid’ recovery.

Economic situation: Across the UK, universities generate £95 billion in gross output and support nearly a million jobs (2014–2015 data, [UUKb]). Looking at Wales in particular, the HE sector “employs 17,300 full-time members of staff and spending by students and visitors supports an estimated 50,000 jobs across Wales”. At the same time the sector is particularly vulnerable to the effects of Covid-19 [HoC]. Universities across the UK were already financially straitened due to a combination of demographics and Brexit, leading to significant cost-cutting including job cuts [BBCa]. Covid-19 has intensified this; a Wales Fiscal Analysis briefing paper in May [WFA] suggests that Welsh universities may see a shortfall due to Covid-19 of between £100m and £140m. More recent estimates suggest that this may be understating the problem, if anything. Cardiff University alone is warning of a £168m fall in income [WO] and Sir Deian Hopkin, former Vice Chancellor of London South Bank and advisor to the Welsh Assembly, talks of a “perfect storm” in the university system [BBCb].

Government support has been minimal. The rules for Covid-19 furlough meant that universities were only able to take minimal advantage of the scheme. There has been some support in terms of general advice, reducing bureaucratic overheads and rescheduling payments to help university cashflow, but this has largely been within existing budgets, not new funding. The Welsh government has announced an FE/HE £50m support package with £27m targeting universities [WG], but this is small compared with predicted losses.

Universities across the UK have already cut casual teaching (the increase in zero-hour contracts has been a concern in HE for some years) and many have introduced voluntary severance schemes. At the same time the competition over UK students has intensified in a bid to make up for reduced international numbers. Yet one of the principal ways to attract students is to maximise the amount of in-person teaching.

What is being done

To some extent, as in so many areas, coronavirus has exposed the structural weaknesses that have been developing in the university sector for the past 30 years. Universities have been forced to compete constantly and are measured in terms of student experience above educational impact. Society as a whole has been bombarded with messages that focus on individual success and safety rather than communal goals, and most current students have grown up in this context. This focus has been very evident in the majority of Covid-19 information and reporting [Dx2].

Everything we do is set against this backdrop, which both fundamentally limits what universities are able to do individually, and at the same time makes them responsible. This is not to say that universities are not sharing good practice, both in top down efforts such as through Universities UK and direct contacts between senior management, and from the bottom up via person-to-person contacts and through subject-specific organisations such as CPHC.

Typically, universities are planning to retain some level of in-person teaching for small tutorials while completely or largely moving large-class activities such as lectures to online delivery, some live, some recorded. This will help to remove some student–student contact during teaching. Furthermore, many universities have discussed ways in which students could be formed into bubbles. At a large scale that could involve having rooms or buildings dedicated to a particular subject/year group for a day. At a finer scale it has been suggested that students could be grouped into social/study bubbles of around ten or a dozen who are housed together in student accommodation and are also grouped for study purposes.

My own modelling of student bubbles [Dx3] suggests that while reducing the level of transmission, the impact is rapidly eroded if the bubbles are at all porous. For example, if the small bubbles break and transmission hits whole year groups (80–200 students), the impact on outside communities becomes unacceptable. For students on campus the temptation to break these bubbles will be intense, both at an individual level and through bars and similar venues. For those living at home, the complexities are even greater, and crucially they are a primary vector into the local community.

Combined with, or instead of, social/study bubbles some universities are looking at track and trace. Some are developing their own solutions both in terms of apps and regular testing programmes, but more will use normal health systems. In Wales, for example, Public Health Wales regard university staff as a priority group for Covid-19 testing, although this is reactive (symptoms-based) rather than proactive (regular testing).

Dr Hans Kluge, the Europe regional director for the World Health Organization and others have warned that global surges across the world, including in Europe, are being driven by infections amongst younger people [BBCc]. He highlights the need to engage young people more in the science, a call that is reflected in a recent survey by the British Science Association which found that nine out of ten young people felt ignored by scientists and politicians [BSA].

As of 27^th July, the UK Department for Education were “working to” two scenarios “Effective containment and testing” (reduce growth on campuses and reactive local lockdowns) and “On and off restrictions” (delaying all in-person teaching until January) [DfE]. Jim Dickinson has collated and analysed current advice and work at various government and advisory bodies including the DfE report above and SAGE, but so far there seems to be no public quantification of the risk [JD].

What can we do?

I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of high-level advice from national governments and pan-University bodies, and most individual university thinking, has been driven by safety concerns for students and staff rather than the potentially far more serious implications for society at large.

As with so many aspects of this crisis, the first step is to recognise there is a problem.

Within universities, acknowledge that the risk level will be far higher than in society at large because the case load will be far higher. How much higher will depend on mitigating measures, but whereas general population levels by the start of term may be as low as 1 in 5,000, the rate amongst students will be an order of magnitude higher, comparable with general levels during the peak of the ‘first wave’. This means that advice, particularly for at risk groups, which is targeted at national levels, needs to be re-thought within the university context. This means that advice that is targeted at national levels, particularly for at risk groups, needs to be re-thought within the university context. Individual vulnerable students are already worried [BBCd]. Chinese and Asian students seem more aware of the personal dangers and it is noticeable that both within the UK and in the US the universities with the greatest number of international students are more risk averse. University staff (academics, cleaners, security) will include more at risk individuals than the student body. It is hard to quantify, but the risk level will considerably higher than, say, a restaurant or pub, though of course lower than for front line medical staff. Even if it is ‘safe’ for vulnerable groups to come out of shielding in general society, it may not be safe in the context of the university. This will be difficult to manage: even if the university does not force vulnerable staff to return, the long-term culture of vocational commitment may make some people take unacceptable risks.

Outside the universities, local councils, national governments and communities need to be aware of the increased risks when the universities reopen, just as seaside towns have braced themselves for tourist surges post-lockdown. While SAGE has noted that universities may be an ‘amplifier’, the extent does not appear (at least publicly) to have been quantified. In Aberdeen recently a cluster around a small number of pubs has caused the whole city to return to lockdown, and it is hard to imagine that we won’t see similar incidents around universities. This may lead to hard decisions, as has been discussed, between opening schools or pubs [BBCe] – city centre bars may well need to be re-thought. Universities benefit communities substantially both economically and educationally. For individual universities alone the costs of, say, weekly testing of students and staff would be prohibitive, but when seen in terms of regional or national health protection these may well be worthwhile. Although this is a ‘for example’ it could well be critical given the likelihood of large numbers of asymptomatic student cases.

Educate students – this is of course what we do as universities! Covid-19 will be a live topic for every student, but they may well have many of the misconceptions that permeate popular discourse. Can we help them become more aware of the aspects that connect to their own disciplines and hence to become ambassadors of good practice amongst their peers? Within maths and computing we can look at models and data analysis, which could be used in other scientific areas where these are taught. Medicine is obvious and design and engineering students might have examples around PPE or ventilators. In architecture we can think about flows within buildings, ventilation, and design for hygiene (e.g. places to wash your hands in public spaces that aren’t inside a toilet!). In literature, there is pandemic fiction from Journal of the Plague Year to La Peste, and in economics we have examples of externalities (and if you leave externalities until a specialised final year option, rethink a 21^st century economics syllabus!).

Time to act

On March 16, I posted on Facebook, “One week left to save the UK – and WE CAN DO IT.” Fortunately, we have more time now to ensure a safe university year but we need to act immediately to use that time effectively. We can do it.

Yesterday our amazing team working on the 3D face masks delivered 80 face shields to Morriston Hospital! 👏

Here's some of the first masks being trialled by Anaesthetic Consultants at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital. pic.twitter.com/kpSdBAVyed

— Swansea Engineering (@SUEngineering) April 1, 2020

References

[AMS] The Academy of Medical Sciences. Preparing for a challenging winter 2020-21. 14th July 2020. https://acmedsci.ac.uk/policy/policy-projects/coronavirus-preparing-for-challenges-this-winter

[BBCa] Cardiff University to cut 380 posts after £20m deficit. BBC News. 12^th Feb 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-47205659

[BBCb] Coronavirus: Universities’ ‘perfect storm’ threatens future. Tomos Lewis BBC News. 7 August 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53682774

[BBCc] WHO warns of rising cases among young in Europe. Lauren Turner, BBc New live reporting, 10:05am 29^th July 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-53577222?pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:59cae0e7-5d3d-4e35-94ec-1895273ed016

[BBCd] Coronavirus: University life may ‘pose further risk’ to young shielders
Bethany Dawson. BBC News. 6th August 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-53552077

[BBCe] Coronavirus: Pubs ‘may need to shut’ to allow schools to reopen. BBC News. 1^st August 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53621613

[BG] Colleges reverse course on reopening as pandemic continues. Deirdre Fernandes, Boston Globe, updated 2^nd August 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/08/02/metro/pandemic-continues-some-colleges-reverse-course-reopening/

[BSA] New survey results: Almost 9 in 10 young people feel scientists and politicians are leaving them out of the COVID-19 conversation. British Science Association. (undated) accessed 7/8/2020. https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/news/new-survey-results-almost-9-in-10-young-people-feel-scientists-and-politicians-are-leaving-them-out-of-the-covid-19-conversation

[DfE] DfE: Introduction to higher education settings in England, 1 July 2020 Paper by the Department for Education (DfE) for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Original published 24^th July 2020 (updated 27th July 2020). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-introduction-to-higher-education-settings-in-england-1-july-2020

[Dx1] More than R – how we underestimate the impact of Covid-19 infection. . Dix (blog). 2^nd August 2020 https://alandix.com/blog/2020/08/02/more-than-r-how-we-underestimate-the-impact-of-covid-19-infection/

[Dx2] Why pandemics and climate change are hard to understand, and can we help? A. Dix. North Lab Talks, 22nd April 2020 and Why It Matters, 30 April 2020 http://alandix.com/academic/talks/Covid-April-2020/

[Dx3] Covid-19 – Impact of a small number of large bubbles on University return. Working Paper. A. Dix. July 2020. http://alandix.com/academic/papers/Covid-bubbles-July-2020/

[HEFCW] COVID-19 impact on higher education providers: funding, regulation and reporting implications. HEFCW Circular, 4^th May 2020 https://www.hefcw.ac.uk/documents/publications/circulars/circulars_2020/W20%2011HE%20COVID-19%20impact%20on%20higher%20education%20providers.pdf

[HoC] The Welsh economy and Covid-19: Interim Report. House of Commons Welsh Affairs Committee. 16^th July 2020. https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/1972/documents/19146/default/

[JD] Universities get some SAGE advice on reopening campuses. Jim Dickinson, WonkHE, 25^th July 2020. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/universities-get-some-sage-advice-on-reopening-campuses/

[SN] Coronavirus: University students could be ‘amplifiers’ for spreading COVID-19 around UK – SAGE. Alix Culbertson. Sky News. 24^th July 2020. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-university-students-could-be-amplifiers-for-spreading-covid-19-around-uk-sage-12035744

[UUKa] Principles and considerations: emerging from lockdown. Universities UK, June 2020. https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/principles-considerations-emerging-lockdown-uk-universities-june-2020.aspx

[UUKb] https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Pages/economic-impact-universities-2014-15.aspx

[WFA] Covid-19 and the Higher Education Sector in Wales (Briefing Paper). Cian Siôn, Wales Fiscal Analysis, Cardiff University. 14^th May 2020. https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2394361/Covid_FINAL.pdf

[WG] Over £50 million to support Welsh universities, colleges and students. Welsh Government press release. 22^nd July 2020. https://gov.wales/over-50-million-support-welsh-universities-colleges-and-students

[WO] Cardiff University warns of possible job cuts as it faces £168m fall in income. Abbie Wightwick, Wales Online. 10^th June 2020. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/education/cardiff-university-job-losses-coronavirus-18393947

Who not to feel sorry for facing an uncertain Brexit

Posted on March 5, 2017 by alan

Reading Julia Rampen’s “11 things I feel more sorry about than Cornwall losing money after Brexit” in the New Statesman, I agree with all the groups she cites who are going to suffer the effects of Brexit, but did not vote for it.

However, it is clear that, when considering Cornwall, which voted 56.5% to leave, where affluent second home owners and retirees are cheek-by-jowl with post-industrial poverty and decay, and which is now worried about the loss of regional funding; Rampen’s sympathy is, to say the least, muted.

This made me ponder other groups for whom I have little sympathy as we face the uncertainty, and quite likely utter disaster, of Brexit.

those, like myself, academics, professionals, who have reaped the benefits of open markets and labour, but ignored the plight of those who have suffered because of it
those who have accepted the narrative that those who suffered most were in some way to blame
the newspapers that lampooned and vilified Gordon Brown for his overheard private comment about a “bigoted woman“, but now happy to label leave voters who hold similar views as racist.
those that passively accepted the implicit racism of the leadership debates in the 2010 general election without comment
those who have accepted EU rules as an excuse for government inaction … such as happened with Port Talbot steel just before the referendum election
the governments and administrations of multiple hues over many years, who have applied EU regulations in ways that no other country would regard as reasonable

Some of these ‘unwilling vicitims’ will suffer from Brexit despite voting to remain. However, many of those who will suffer worst will have voted to leave, but only because remaining in offered them no hope either.

After a generation of closing our hearts to those suffering on our doorstep, we now demonise them yet again.

slaughter of the innocents – human shields or collateral damage?

Posted on December 28, 2016 by alan

By Huynh Cong Ut (also known as Nick Ut), image from Wikipedia

From the ‘Napalm Girl‘ in Vietnam, to Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach in 2015 and endless images of White Hat’s pulling children from the rubble in Aleppo, it is easy to become inured to the death of innocent children around the world.

In the church calendar, December 28th¹ is the Feast of the Innocents or Childermas, a day to remember the children killed by King Herod as he sought the baby Jesus.

In Matthew’s Gospel we read:

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under (Matt. 2:16, NIV).

However, for many it is the words in the Christmas carol, “Unto us a boy is born“, which is most familiar:

All the little boys he killed at Bethlehem in his fury.

Mary and Joseph had already fled, refugees to Egypt, so the babies were not simply slaughtered, but slaughtered in vain, an action missing its true target, like the bombs that killed Gaddaffi’s children and grandchildren in 1986 and 2011.

I’ve been reading Simon Garfield’s “Timekeepers‘ (a Christmas gift). Garfield describes a meeting with Nick Ut, the photographer of ‘Napalm Girl’². The common story is that the US attack on the village from which Phan Thi Kim Phuc was running was a mistake, but Ut describes how in the village there were many dead Viet Cong, so that the mistake was more likely inadequate intelligence that the villagers had fled (Timekeepers, p.168).

A few weeks ago a BBC reporter in Yemen was visiting a school, which Saudi air strikes had repeatedly hit. This was one example of many such incidents targeting schools during this conflict³. The reporter talked of how the school kept on working and pupils kept attending, despite the damage and the danger. However, the report also showed the Houthi rebel arms dump next to the school. “Can’t you move the school away from this?”, asked the reporter. “They would simply move the dump to follow us”, replied the headmaster.

Again this is a story we have heard so many times before: missiles fired from hospital grounds in Gaza, Ukraine keeping its air corridors open whilst in the midst of its air campaign against separatists⁴, ISIS preventing civilian evacuation from Mosul, or the South Korean artillery firing into disputed areas from a populated island.

In some cases civilians are deliberately put in the way of danger (as with ISIS); in others fighting in built up areas makes civilian presence inevitable (Aleppo, Gaza). In some cases terror is the main aim of an attack or the civilians are seen as legitimate targets (as with ISIS attacks in Europe); in others terror is a deliberate secondary war aim (as with Dresden or Nagasaki). In some cases attackers seem to show flagrant disregard for civilian life (as in Gaza), and in others all care is take, but (often substantial) civilian deaths are accepted as collateral damage (probably the case with US drone extrajudicial killings).

Whether you blame those on the ground for using human shields or those attacking for disregarding human like, often depends on which side you are on⁵.

In most conflicts the truth is complex, especially where there are mismatches of firepower: Hamas in Gaza, anti-Assad rebel groups in Syria, or ISIS in Iraq would all have been slaughtered if they fought in the open. And for the attacking side, where does the responsibility lie between callous disregard for human life and justifiable retaliation? How do we place the death of children by bombs against those of starvation and illness caused by displaced populations, siege or international sanctions?

If the events in Bethlehem were to happen today, how would we view Herod?

Was he despotic dictator killing his own people?

Was the baby Jesus a ‘clear and present danger’, to the stability the state and thus the children of Bethlehem merely collateral damage?

Or were Mary, Joseph and God to blame for using human shields, placing this infant of mass disruption in the midst of a small town?

It is worryingly easy to justify the slaughter of a child.

Some organisations that are making a difference:

Save the Children Fund — working across the world to help children in need
UNICEF — general relief including child refugees in Syria, “one of the most dangerous places to be a child”
Tear Fund “No Child Taken” — preventing child trafficking

The date varies in different churches, it is 28th December in most Western churches, but 27th, 29th Dec, or 10th January elsewhere[back]
The ‘Napalm Girl’ recent obtained fresh notoriety when Facebook temporarily censored it because it showed nudity.[back]
Another BBC report,amongst many, “Yemen crisis: Saudi-led coalition ‘targeting’ schools” documents this.[back]
Before MH17 was shot down a Ukrainian military transport and other military planes had been shot down, and the first messages following the destruction of MH17 suggest the rebels thought they had downed another military aircraft. Instead of re-routing flights the flying ceiling was raised, but still within distance of ground-to-air missiles, and carriers made their own choices as to whether to overfly. Some newspapers suggest that the motives were mainly financial both for Malaysian Airways, and for the Ukrainian government decisions, rather than Ukraine using civilian flights as a deliberate human shield.[back]
Patrick Cockburn’s comparison of Aleppo and Mosul in The Independent argues this is the case for the current conflicts in Syrian and Iraq.[back]

the educational divide – do numbers matter?

Posted on December 24, 2016 by alan

If a news article is all about numbers, why is the media shy about providing the actual data?

On the BBC News website this morning James McIvor‘s article “Clash over ‘rich v poor’ university student numbers” describes differences between Scottish Government (SNP) and Scottish Labour in the wake of Professor Peter Scott appointment as commissioner for fair access to higher education in Scotland.

Scottish Labour claim that while access to university by the most deprived has increased, the educational divide is growing, with the most deprived increasing by 0.8% since 2014, but those in the least deprived (most well off) growing at nearly three times that figure. In contrast, the Sottish Government claims that in 2006 those from the least deprived areas were 5.8 times more likely to enter university than those in the most deprived areas, whereas now the difference is only 3.9 times, a substantial decrease in educational inequality..

The article is all about numbers, but the two parties seem to be saying contradictory things, one saying inequality is increasing, one saying it is decreasing!

Surely enough to make the average reader give up on experts, just like Michael Gove!

Of course, if you can read through the confusing array of leasts and mosts, the difference seems to be that the two parties are taking different base years: 2014 vs 2006, and that both can be true: a long term improvement with decreasing inequality, but a short term increase in inequality since 2014. The former is good news, but the latter may be bad news, a change in direction that needs addressing, or simply ‘noise’ as we are taking about small changes on big numbers.

I looked in vain for a link to the data, web sites or reports n which this was based, after all this is an article where the numbers are the story, but there are none.

After a bit of digging, I found that the data that both are using is from the UCAS Undergraduate 2016 End of Cycle Report (the numerical data for this figure and links to CSV files are below).

Figure from UCAS 2016 End of Cycle Report

Looking at these it is clear that the university participation rate for the least deprived quintile (Q5, blue line at top) has stayed around 40% with odd ups and downs over the last ten years, whereas the participation of the most deprived quintile has been gradually increasing, again with year-by-year wiggles. That is the ratio between least and most deprived used to be about 40:7 and now about 40:10, less inequality as the SNP say.

For some reason 2014 was a dip year for the Q5. There is no real sign of a change in the long-term trend, but if you take 2014 to 2016, the increase in Q5 is larger than the increase in Q1, just as Scottish Labour say. However, any other year would not give this picture.

In this case it looks like Scottish Labour either cherry picked a year that made the story they wanted, or simply accidentally chose it.

The issue for me though, is not so much who was right or wrong, but why the BBC didn’t present this data to make it possible to make this judgement?

I can understand the argument that people do not like, or understand numbers at all, but where, as in this case, the story is all about the numbers, why not at least present the raw data and ideally discuss why there is an apparent contradiction!

Numerical from figure 57 of UCAS 2016 End of Cycle Report

	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
Q1	7.21	7.58	7.09	7.95	8.47	8.14	8.91	9.52	10.10	9.72	10.90
Q2	13.20	12.80	13.20	14.30	15.70	14.40	14.80	15.90	16.10	17.40	18.00
Q3	21.10	20.60	20.70	21.30	23.60	21.10	22.10	22.50	22.30	24.00	24.10
Q4	29.40	29.10	30.20	30.70	31.50	29.10	29.70	29.20	28.70	30.30	31.10
Q5	42.00	39.80	41.40	42.80	41.70	40.80	41.20	40.90	39.70	41.10	42.30

UCAS provide the data in CSV form. I converted this to the above tabular form and this is available in CSV or XLSX.

the rise of the new liberal facism

Posted on December 9, 2016 by alan

Across Europe the ultra-right wing raise again the ugly head of racism in scenes shockingly reminiscent of the late-1930s; while in America white supremacists throw stiff-armed salutes and shout “Heil Trump!” It has become so common that reporters no longer even remark on the swastikas daubed as part of neo-Nazi graffiti.

Yet against this we are beginning to see a counter movement, spoken in the soft language of liberalism, often well intentioned, but creating its own brand of facism. The extremes of the right become the means to label whole classes of people as ‘deplorable’, too ignorant, stupid or evil to be taken seriously, in just the same way as the Paris terrorist attacks or Cologne sexual assaults were used by the ultra-right to label all Muslims and migrants.

Hilary Clinton quickly recanted her “basket of depolarables”. However, it is shocking that this was said at all, especially by a politician who made a point of preparedness, in contrast to Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks. In a speech, which will have been past Democrat PR experts as well as Clinton herself, to label half of Trump supporters, at that stage possibly 20% of the US electorate, as ‘deplorable’ says something about the common assumptions that are taken for granted, and worrying because of that.

My concern has been growing for a long time, but I’m prompted to write now having read Pankaj Mishra‘s “Welcome to the age of anger” in the Guardian. Mishra’s article builds on previous work including Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics and the growing discourse on post-truth politics. He gives us a long and scholarly view from the Enlightenment, utopian visions of the 19th century, and models of economic self interest through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of Islamic extremism and ultimately Brexit and Trump.

The toxicity of debate in both the British EU Referendum and US Presidential Election is beyond doubt. In both debates both sides frequently showed a disregard for truth and taste, but there is little equivalence between the tenor of the Trump and Clinton campaign, and, in the UK, the Leave campaign’s flagrant disregard for fact made even Remain’s claims of imminent third world war seem tame.

Indeed, to call either debate a ‘debate’ is perhaps misleading as rancour, distrust and vitriol dominated both, so much so that Jo Cox viscous murder, even though the work of a single new-Nazi individual, was almost unsurprising in the growing paranoia.

Mishra tries to interpret the frightening tide of anger sweeping the world, which seems to stand in such sharp contrast to rational enlightened self-interest and the inevitable rise of western democracy, which was the dominant narrative of the second half of the 20th century. It is well argued, well sourced, the epitome of the very rationalism that it sees fading in the world.

It is not the argument itself that worries me, which is both illuminating and informing, but the tacit assumptions that lie behind it: the “age of anger” in the title itself and the belief throughout that those who disagree must be driven by crude emotions: angry, subject to malign ‘ressentiment‘, irrational … or to quote Lord Kerr (who to be fair was referring to ‘native Britains’ in general) just too “bloody stupid“.

Even the carefully chosen images portray the Leave campaigner and Trump supporter as almost bestial, rather than, say, the images of exultant joy at the announcement of the first Leave success in Sunderland, or even in the article’s own Trump campaign image, if you look from the central emotion filled face to those around.

The article does not condemn those that follow the “venomous campaign for Brexit” or the “rancorous Twitter troll”, instead they are treated, if not compassionately, impassionately: studied as you would a colony of ants or herd of wildebeest.

If those we disagree with are lesser beings, we can ignore them, not address their real concerns.

We would not treat them with the accidental cruelty that Dickens describes in pre-revolutionary Paris, but rather the paternalistic regard for the lower orders of pre-War Britain, or even the kindness of the more benign slave owner; folk not fully human, but worthy of care as you would a favourite dog.

Once we see our enemy as animal, or the populous as cattle, then, however well intentioned, there are few limits.

The 1930s should have taught us that.

the internet laws of the jungle

Posted on September 15, 2016 by alan

Where are the boundaries between freedom, license and exploitation, between fair use and theft?

I found myself getting increasingly angry today as Mozilla Foundation stepped firmly beyond those limits, and moreover with Trump-esque rhetoric attempts to dupe others into following them.

It all started with a small text add below the Firefox default screen search box:

Partly because of my ignorance of web-speak ‘TFW‘ (I know showing my age!), I clicked through to a petition page on Mozilla Foundation (PDF archive copy here).

It starts off fine, with stories of some of the silliness of current copyright law across Europe (can’t share photos of the Eiffel tower at night) and problems for use in education (which does in fact have quite a lot of copyright exemptions in many countries). It offers a petition to sign.

This sounds all good, partly due to rapid change, partly due to knee jerk reactions, internet law does seem to be a bit of a mess.

If you blink you might miss one or two odd parts:

“This means that if you live in or visit a country like Italy or France, you’re not permitted to take pictures of certain buildings, cityscapes, graffiti, and art, and share them online through Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.”

Read this carefully, a tourist forbidden from photographing cityscapes – silly! But a few words on “… and art” … So if I visit an exhibition of an artist or maybe even photographer, and share a high definition (Nokia Lumia 1020 has 40 Mega pixel camera) is that OK? Perhaps a thumbnail in the background of a selfie, but does Mozilla object to any rules to prevent copying of artworks?

However, it is at the end, in a section labelled “don’t break the internet”, the cyber fundamentalism really starts.

“A key part of what makes the internet awesome is the principle of innovation without permission — that anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way.”

Again at first this sounds like a cry for self expression, except if you happen to be an artist or writer and would like to make a living from that self-expression?

Again, it is clear that current laws have not kept up with change and in areas are unreasonably restrictive. We need to be ale to distinguish between a fair reference to something and seriously infringing its IP. Likewise, we could distinguish the aspects of social media that are more like looking at holiday snaps over a coffee, compared to pirate copies for commercial profit.

However, in so many areas it is the other way round, our laws are struggling to restrict the excesses of the internet.

Just a few weeks ago a 14 year old girl was given permission to sue Facebook. Multiple times over a 2 year period nude pictures of her were posted and reposted. Facebook hides behind the argument that it is user content, it takes down the images when they are pointed out, and yet a massive technology company, which is able to recognise faces is not able to identify the same photo being repeatedly posted. Back to Mozilla: “anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way” – really?

Of course this vision of the internet without boundaries is not just about self expression, but freedom of speech:

“We need to defend the principle of innovation without permission in copyright law. Abandoning it by holding platforms liable for everything that happens online would have an immense chilling effect on speech, and would take away one of the best parts of the internet — the ability to innovate and breathe new meaning into old content.”

Of course, the petition is signalling out EU law, which inconveniently includes various provisions to protect the privacy and rights of individuals, not dictatorships or centrally controlled countries.

So, who benefits from such an open and unlicensed world? Clearly not the small artist or the victim of cyber-bullying.

Laissez-faire has always been an aim for big business, but without constraint it is the law of the jungle and always ends up benefiting the powerful.

In the 19th century it was child labour in the mills only curtailed after long battles.

In the age of the internet, it is the vast US social media giants who hold sway, and of course the search engines, who just happen to account for $300 million of revenue for Mozilla Foundation annually, 90% of its income.

If the light is on, they can hear (and now see) you

Posted on April 1, 2015 by alan

Following Samsung’s warning that its television sets can listen into your conversations¹, and Barbie’s, even more scary, doll that listens to children in their homes and broadcasts this to the internet², the latest ‘advances’ make it possible to be seen even when the curtains are closed and you thought you were private.

For many years it has been possible for security services, or for that matter sophisticated industrial espionage, to pick up sounds based on incandescent light bulbs.

The technology itself is not that complicated, vibrations in the room are transmitted to the filament, which minutely changes its electrical characteristics. The only complication is extracting the high-frequency signal from the power line.

However, this is a fairly normal challenge for high-end listening devices. Years ago when I was working with submarine designers at Slingsby, we were using the magnetic signature of power running through undersea cables to detect where they were for repair. The magnetic signatures were up to 10,000 times weaker than the ‘noise’ from the Earth’s own magnetic field, but we were able to detect the cables with pin-point accuracy³. Military technology for this is far more advanced.

The main problem is the raw computational power needed to process the mass of data coming from even a single lightbulb, but that has never been a barrier for GCHQ or the NSA, and indeed, with cheap RaspberryPi-based super-computers, now not far from the hobbyist’s budget⁴.

Using the fact that each lightbulb reacts slightly differently to sound, means that it is, in principle, possible to not only listen into conversations, but work out which house and room they come from by simply adding listening equipment at a neighbourhood sub-station.

The benefits of this to security services are obvious. Whereas planting bugs involves access to a building, and all other techniques involve at least some level of targeting, lightbulb-based monitoring could simply be installed, for example, in a neighbourhood known for extremist views and programmed to listen for key words such as ‘explosive’.

For a while, it seemed that the increasing popularity of LED lightbulbs might end this. This is not because LEDs do not have an electrical response to vibrations, but because of the 12V step down transformers between the light and the mains.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to listen into someone in their home, from obvious bugs to laser-beams bounced of glass (you can even get plans to build one of your own at Instructables), or even, as MIT researchers recently demonstrated at SIGGRAPH, picking up the images of vibrations on video of a glass of water, a crisp packet, and even the leaves of a potted plant⁵. However, these are all much more active and involve having an explicit suspect.

Similarly blanket internet and telephone monitoring have applications, as was used for a period to track Osama bin Laden’s movements⁶, but net-savvy terrorists and criminals are able to use encryption or bypass the net entirely by exchanging USB sticks.

However, while the transformer attenuates the acoustic back-signal from LEDs, this only takes more sensitive listening equipment and more computation, a lot easier than a vibrating pot-plant on video!

So you might just think to turn up the radio, or talk in a whisper. Of course, as you’ve guessed by now, and, as with all these surveillance techniques, simply yet more computation.

Once the barriers of LEDs are overcome, they hold another surprise. Every LED not only emits light, but acts as a tiny, albeit inefficient, light detector (there’s even an Arduino project to use this principle). The output of this is a small change in DC current, which is hard to localise, but ambient sound vibrations act as a modulator, allowing, again in principle, both remote detection and localisation of light.

If you have several LEDs, they can be used to make a rudimentary camera⁷. Each LED lightbulb uses a small array of LEDs to create a bright enough light. So, this effectively becomes a very-low-resolution video camera, a bit like a fly’s compound eye.

While each image is of very low quality, any movement, either of the light itself (hanging pendant lights are especially good), or of objects in the room, can improve the image. This is rather like the principle we used in FireFly display⁸, where text mapped onto a very low-resolution LED pixel display is unreadable when stationary, but absolutely clear when moving.

pix-11 pix-21
pix-12 pix-22
LEDs produce multiple very-low-resolution image views due to small vibrations and movement⁹.

Sufficient images and processing can recover an image.

So far MI5 has not commented on whether it uses, or plans to use this technology itself, nor whether it has benefited from information gathered using it by other agencies. Of course its usual response is to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ such things, so without another Edward Snowden, we will probably never know.

So, next time you sit with a coffee in your living room, be careful what you do, the light is watching you.

Not in front of the telly: Warning over ‘listening’ TV. BBC News, 9 Feb 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31296188[back]
Privacy fears over ‘smart’ Barbie that can listen to your kids. Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian, 13 March 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/13/smart-barbie-that-can-listen-to-your-kids-privacy-fears-mattel[back]
“Three DSP tricks”, Alan Dix, 1998. https://alandix.com/academic/papers/DSP99/DSP99-full.html[back]
“Raspberry Pi at Southampton: Steps to make a Raspberry Pi Supercomputer”, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/[back]
A. Davis, M. Rubinstein, N. Wadhwa, G. Mysore, F. Durand and W. Freeman (2014). The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 33(4):79:1–79:10 http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/[back]
Tracking Use of Bin Laden’s Satellite Phone, all Street Journal, Evan Perez, Wall Street Journal, 28^th May, 2008. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/05/28/tracking-use-of-bin-ladens-satellite-phone/[back]
Blinkenlight, LED Camera. http://blog.blinkenlight.net/experiments/measurements/led-camera/[back]
Angie Chandler, Joe Finney, Carl Lewis, and Alan Dix. 2009. Toward emergent technology for blended public displays. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp ’09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 101-104. DOI=10.1145/1620545.1620562[back]
Note using simulated images; getting some real ones may be my next Tiree Tech Wave project.[back]

lies, damned lies, and the BBC

Posted on February 13, 2015 by alan

I have become increasingly annoyed and distressed over the years at the way the media decides a narrative for various news stories and then selectively presents the facts to tell the story, ignoring or suppressing anything that suggests a more nuanced or less one-sided account.

Sometimes I agree with the overall narrative, sometimes I don’t. Either way the B-movie Western accounts, which cannot recognise that the baddies can sometimes do good and the goodies may not be pristine, both distort the public’s view of the world and perhaps more damagingly weaken the critical eye that is so essential for democracy.

For the newspapers, we know that they have an editorial stance and I expect a different view of David Cameron’s welfare policy in The Guardian compared with The Telegraph. Indeed, I often prefer to read a newspaper I disagree with as it is easier to see the distortions when they clash with one’s own preconceptions. One of the joys of the British broadsheet press is that whatever the persuasion, the underlying facts are usually there, albeit deeply buried towards the end of a long article.

However, maybe unfairly, I have higher expectations of the BBC, which are sadly and persistently dashed. Here it seems not so much explicit editorial policy (although one hears that they do get leant upon by government occasionally), more that they believe a simplistic narrative is more acceptable to the viewer … and maybe they just begin to believe there own stories.

A typical (in the sense of terrifyingly bad) example of this appeared this morning.

After the wonderful news of a peace agreement in Ukraine yesterday, this morning the report read:

Ukraine crisis: Shelling follows Minsk peace summit

The ceasefire is due to start on Sunday, so one can only hope this is a last violent outburst, although to what avail as the borders are already set by the Minsk agreement.

The first few lines of the article read as follows:

New shelling has been reported in the rebel-held east Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, a day after a peace deal was reached in Minsk.

There are no confirmed reports of casualties. Both cities are near the front line where the pro-Russian rebels face government forces.

The ceasefire agreed in the Belarusian capital is to begin in eastern Ukraine after midnight (22:00 GMT) on Saturday.

The EU has warned Russia of additional sanctions if the deal is not respected.

If you have kept abreast of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and can remember your geography, then you will know that this means the Ukrainian Army was shelling rebel-held cities. However, if you are less aware, this is not the immediate impression of the article.

First notice the passive wording of the title. Imagine if this had been Syria, the headline would have surely been “Assad’s forces bombard Syrian cities” or “Syrian Army shell civilian areas“. While the BBC may want to avoid flamboyant titles (although do not demure elsewhere) the article itself is no better.

The opening paragraphs mention ‘shelling’, ‘rebels’ and the EU warning Russians to clean up their act. The emotional and rhetorical impact is that in some way Russians are to blame for the shelling of cities, and indeed when I read the words to Fiona this was precisely what she assumed.

That is, while the facts are there, they are presented in such a way that the casual reader takes away precisely the opposite of the truth. In other words, the BBC reporting, whether intentionally or unintentionally, systematically misleads the public.

To be fair, in the earliest version of the article its later parts report first Ukrainian army deaths and then civilian casualties in rebel-held areas:

On Friday morning, a military spokesman in Kiev said eight members of Ukraine’s military had been killed in fighting against separatists in the past 24 hours.

~~The rebels said shelling killed three civilians in Luhansk, reported AFP news agency~~.

(Although the second sentence is removed from later versions of the article.)

early and later version of same BBC story

The early versions of the article also included an image of a wall in Kiev commemorating Ukrainian army deaths, but not the graphic images of civilian casualties that would be used in other conflicts¹. This was later changed to a refugee departing on a bus to Russia ((Later still the image of an armoured vehicle was also added. I’d not realised before just how much these news stories are post-edited)), which better reflects the facet behind the article.

Of course, this is not a one-sided conflict, and later reports from the region during he day include rebel shelling of government held areas as well as government shelling. Both sides need to be reported, but the reporting practice seems to be to deliberately obfuscate the far more prevalent Ukrainian army attacks on civilian areas.

If this were just a single news item, it could be just the way things turn out, and other news items might be biased in other directions, but the misreporting is systematic and long term. Many of BBCs online news items include a short potted history of the conflict, which always says that the current conflict started with Russian annexing of Crimea, conveniently ignoring the violent overthrow of the elected government which led to this. Similarly the BBC timeline for Ukraine starts in 1991 with the Ukrainian referendum to separate from the USSR, conveniently ignoring the similar overwhelming referendum in Crimea earlier in 1991 to separate from Ukraine².

To be fair on the journalists on the ground, it is frequently clear that their own raw accounts have a different flavour to the commentary added when footage is edited back in London.

In some way Ukraine could be seen as a special case, the Russians are the bogey men of the today, just like Germany was 100 years ago and France was 100 years previously, it is hard for a journalist to say, “actually in this case they have a point“.

Yet, sadly, the above account could be repeated with different details, but the same underlying message in so many conflicts in frequent times. Will the media, and the BBC, ever trust the public with the truth, or will ‘news’ always be a B movie?

Maybe this is just deemed too horrifying; a recent Times report of Donetsk morgue includes graphic accounts of shrapnel torn babies, but does not include the Getty images of the morgue preferring an image of an unexploded rocket.[back]
While ignoring the history of Crimea. which does seem germane to the current conflict, the BBC timeline is overall relatively fair; for example, making clear that Yanukovych’s election was “judged free and fair by observers“.[back]

I want to pay more tax too

Posted on July 16, 2012 by alan

Some of the ‘super rich’ in the US are beginning to ask publicly why it is they pay so little tax. For those of us less rich, but still with above average salaries, perhaps we should be asking the same. In the UK the effective rate of tax is 32% for those on average pay and 40% for those on high pay, hardly a progressive system. Yes government, please tax the super rich more, but tax me properly too.

I have just have read Stephen King fantastic article “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”¹ where he joins Warren Buffett in questioning why he, as part of the super rich, does not pay more tax. He does give to charity, but argues that that this is not the same as paying tax, which is crucially abut citizenary. This all falls out from statistics that show the richest in the US end up paying a far smaller percentage of their income than the average citizen. Effectively King argues that the issue here is not about entitlement or rights, but responsibility.

King is talking about the super rich in the US and similar statistics in the UK show the richest 10% paying only marginally more taxes than the poorest 10%, and certainly less than the average tax payer.

However, the same arguments also apply to those who are not super rich, but on the better end of the income scale — including me.

In recent years I have cut my income substantially by choosing to work part-time in order to (try to!) do more personal research, still some of my income falls into ‘higher rate’ tax — so by that measure I am well off².

You might think that being in the higher tax threshold means you pay a lot more tax; after all the basic rate tax in the UK is 20% and the higher rate is 40%. You might think that, but think again! Even without tax avoidance measures used by the very rich or the fact that the poor tend to end up paying more indirect taxes such as VAT (purchase tax) and duty (on alcohol and fuel), still my marginal rate is only slightly higher than that of basic income. I pay an effective marginal rate of 40%, but those on lower income in reality pay 32%, not the 20% that it says ‘on the tin’.

The reason for this is National Insurance. For those not on the UK, this is an additional tax, started in 1911 and expanded in the 1940s to pay for health, pension and other welfare provision — just as you might take out a private health insurance, or pension, national insurance was intended to be a sort of pooled insurance arranged by government. However unlike private insurance, it has always been redistributive — the rich pay more, but do not get proportionally higher benefits.

In the UK since the Thatcher years, but continued by subsequent Labour governments, there has been a gradual shift from ‘in your face’ income tax, to less visible taxes, notably National Insurance and VAT. In 1978 National Insurance was at 6.75% (on income over a lower threshold) and the standard rate of VAT, paid on most basic goods and services you bought in shops, was 8%³. Currently the equivalent figures are 12% for National Insurance and 20% for VAT. That is the combined effect of these less visible taxes has more than doubled from 14.75% in 1978 to 32% today⁴. Because these are flat rate taxes, they hit the poor as much as the rich.

However, it is worse than this first appears. National Insurance has a maximum cut off point. Above a certain point, you pay no more National Insurance … and crucially this point cuts in just before higher rate tax starts. This means that in one’s pay cheque if you are earning an average wage you pay 32% of every additional pound in tax, whereas if your income is higher, over £40,000 or so, you pay 40%.

I’ll say this again, as it always seems unbelievable — in the UK, without any additional measures to reduce tax liability, the real difference between basic rate and higher tax is just 8%.

If then the person earning £15,000 buys a basketful of ordinary VAT goods, out of the 68p they have left they pay over 13p VAT, whereas the person with £50,000 income out the 60p in the pound they have left pay an additional 12p. Adding the effect of VAT that makes the effective total rates of tax on an ordinary shopping basket at 45.6% for basic rate tax payers vs 52% for those on higher income. In fact, even this is a little of a simplification, as some goods are zero rated (principally food) and some have additional duties (principally alcohol and fuel), but in fact this tends to make things worse as typically richer households have spending patterns that have a lower proportion of VAT and duty.

Like the US, the UK system is not progressive; so with Stephen King I say, “I want to pay more tax”⁵.

In particular, take the lid of National Insurance, make me pay full National insurance on all my income. At a conservative estimate this would be equivalent to the revenue of 5% VAT⁶ — if we all paid full NI, then either spending cuts could be less draconian, or the VAT rate could be cut by 5%, either of which would have a dramatic effect on those at the bottom of society for whom the pressing problem is not getting the best offshore tax break, but finding the next meal.

Which he wrote in April, so I am a bit behind![back]
Although you do have to be careful in using higher rate threshold as meaning ‘well off’, as the UK system is incredibly family-unfriendly. Because tax is on an individual not household basis, if a couple earn £20,000 each they pay very little tax, but if one is not working — in particular if engaged in full-time child care — and one is earning £40,000, then that is heavily taxed. This anomaly became apparent recently when the government proposed removing child-benefit, one of the few universal benefits, from those where one of the parents is paying higher rate tax. Strangely, when it comes to welfare benefits households become the unit! [back]
See UK Tax History for historical rates of National Insurance and VAT.[back]
See HM Revenue & Customs site for current NI and VAT rates.[back]
And yes, I know that I can give to charity and indeed do tithe through Charities Aid Foundation and make other payments, but, as King argues, that is NOT the same as paying taxes.[back]
I recall doing the calculations for this when the new government put up VAT some years ago, it was hard to get detailed figures for higher rate tax earnings, but made this estimate based on lower bounds of various brackets.[back]