Chickenpox daytrip

Fish at Golden Acre Park

Golden Acre Park

My daughter has had chickenpox and couldn’t go to nursery this week, so I stayed off work for a couple of days to look after her. She hasn’t had any symptoms apart from the spots so we were able to spend a day together visiting Golden Acre Park in the Leeds sunshine. It was great.

I helped her get the hang of her pushbike which she’s not had much chance to ride since Christmas because of the bad weather. We fed the ducks. We watched goslings and ducklings following their parents. We sat on benches. I answered “what’s that?” a hundred times (“a fir cone”, “a spider on his way home to his wife and family”, “squirrel poo”… and so on). We saw Max the cat. Max is ten years old and decided to move to the park from Cookridge for a better life. He has thyroid problems and is awaiting a second operation, but very happily wanders around the gardens, cat-napping in the big greenhouse on colder days and being stroked by visitors, including us. We watched the fish swimming in the indoor garden pond, with flowers I don’t the names of reflected in the water. We bought ice creams, sat on the grass in the sun, and then drove home. She fell asleep in the car on the way.

There were mainly two types of people in the park that day. Retired people, some with grand-kids, some without. And well-spoken mums with their well-spoken kids. I didn’t see many dads. Perhaps they were all at work.

The idea whose time has come

The Living Wage is a brilliant idea. If you pay employees enough to meet the actual cost of living and participate economically in society then it is good for them, good for the business they work for, and good for society. People will be happier. They won’t need to top up subsistence wages with benefits. They’ll be able to buy more goods and services to help fuel the economy.

It’s such a brilliant idea that it has cross-party support. The Prime Minister says it is “an idea whose time has come”. But here’s the problem: he said that 3 years ago and it’s still not Government policy. So why the delay and how do we get the politicians to deliver on their words?

One reason for the delay is that the Government isn’t really prepared to sell the Living Wage to the private sector whose natural instinct is to drive wages down and create worker insecurity. The Coalition could have sold this as the flip-side to their demonisation of people unable to find employment –a ‘beatification of the working man and woman’ if you like, but instead they chose only the demonising bit.

I wanted to understand the situation within the public sector organisations in my workplace. Of all sectors, the public sector should be leading the way on the Living Wage, right? Well, only 25 councils (5%) have adopted the Living Wage, and only the London estates of 3 Government departments (thanks to Valdemar Ventura) have adopted the Living Wage so far. You can see who is signed up here.

Information already in the public domain showed that all the permanent staff in the organisations in the building where I work are paid at or above the Living Wage. As at Feb-13 the lowest paid NHS staff were paid below the Living Wage, but no staff at this grade are based in my building. FOI requests (sent by a friend who worked with me on this issue) found that temporary agency staff employed directly by the Department of Work & Pensions, the Department of Health and NHS England are paid at or above the Living Wage, including the period before their Agency Worker Rights take effect. This was positive news. However, the FOI response (dated Feb-13) from DWP stated:

“Telereal Trillium [the private sector company who maintain the building] have informed us that of the cleaning, catering and security staff based in Leeds, 140 of them are paid less than the Living Wage of £7.45 per hour, but all of them are paid at least the minimum wage.

Currently 15 contractors in the Leeds area, who are employed by Balfour Beatty Workplace (BBW) to carry out post room and office service duties, receive less than the Living wage. The contractor is currently in discussions with Trade Unions for the 2013 pay agreement and consideration of the Living wage will feature in these discussions.”

So confirmation that the budgets of Government departments are being used to pay people below the Living Wage even though all the main political parties are fully signed up to the Living Wage and think it’s an idea whose time came three years ago. We can expect overall Government expenditure on these employees to be higher due to the amount of benefits that they will need to claim than if they were paid the Living Wage.

I took this information to my MP, Hilary Benn, to see if he could influence the situation in any way. He voiced his strong support for the Living Wage and said he would ask a parliamentary question. The question to Mark Hoban (DWP Minister) is published here. It adds little to the FOI information but at least puts the situation on the record and demonstrates to the Minister that the issue is seen as important by the public.

At the same time, Hilary Benn asked Brandon Lewis, Minister at Department for Communities and Local Government a similar question which is published here. Brandon Lewis’ answer is more helpful in some ways than Mark Hoban’s. He says:

“The Government supports the living wage and encourages business to take it up where possible and affordable. However, the decision on what wages to set is for individual employers and workers, and these include agency staff working in the Department.

More broadly, from April 2013, the Government has raised the personal income allowance to £9,440—an income tax cut for 24 million tax payers—which will particularly help those on local incomes. The recent Budget announced the personal allowance will rise again to £10,000 from April 2014.”

Brandon Lewis reiterates the hollow phrase “the Government supports the living wage…” and states quite clearly that his Government are not going to do anything to actually make sure it is implemented, despite the economic and well-being cases. In fact he says that the Government prefers to prop up low pay by use of the tax and benefits system rather than make the “idea whose time has come” reality.

I was thinking about what to do next when Ed Miliband announced his plan to implement the Living Wage should Labour regain power. In a Guardian article here he says that firms could be offered either tax reliefs on training or capital investment, or lower business rates, in return for paying the living wage as a way to boost productivity and cut welfare bills. I’d certainly support this. But people need to keep the pressure on to make sure these are not just more words on the pile.

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The campaign site for the Living Wage can be found here. Follow it on twitter @LivingWageUK

Should we read the news?

Old-school journalist

Old-school journalist

In ‘The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions’, Rolf Dobelli argues that we should not watch the news. I think there is truth in the points he makes about news (as in TV and newspaper news) being irrelevant, misleading and having little explanatory power. My last post about the BBC News at 10 looked at these limitations.

Dobelli also talks about passive news absorption as something that wastes people’s time and kills their creativity. And he cites studies showing how the brain of a news junkie undergoes structural change as a result of their addiction, leaving them unable to concentrate for longer periods. But there is a problem with cutting yourself off from the news…

I believe citizens have to aspire to delivering their part of the social contract. We have given up some of our freedoms and allowed ourselves to be ruled by governments and other such organisations in exchange for the protection of our remaining freedoms and rights (as opposed to mob rule in some dusty wasteland). But we know the power we vest in the people running these organisations has a tendency to corrupt them, and so we each have to try and take on a responsibility to fight the corruption and inequity when it appears. No one else will do this for us.

To fight corruption and inequity we need to know that the corruption and inequity exists. We need to know who else is fighting it – and we need to how we can help as individuals. Quality news reporting is part of this information. Poor quality news reporting is part of the disinformation that prevents useful citizen actions and is therefore also a target.

Dobelli says “Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth.” But investigative journalists are an endangered species within the mainstream news outlets as a result of the commercialisation of the media over the last few decades. As Nick Davies reports in ‘Flat Earth News’, 80% of news stories in the ‘quality’ papers and TV news programmes comes from wire agencies such as the Press Association and from fundamentally biased public relation sources. Papers do not spend money on expensive things like investigative journalism as that would cut into profits.

So we need to add “reporting the news” to the list of responsibilities which citizens should aspire to as part of the social contract! Fortunately, many bloggers and tweeters have paved the way (see my recommended sites list for a few examples). The lesson from Dobelli is to make sure we don’t just absorb all this “alternative” news information. Read it. Use it. Get involved.

Pistorius, horsemeat and flaming balloons, but no women and children: BBC News at 10

BBC News at 10

This post discusses analysis of 10 hours of ‘BBC News at 10pm’ broadcast between 5th February and 4th March 2013. The BBC’s News at 10pm is the BBC’s flagship news programme with the highest viewing figures of a BBC news programme (4.9 million average per evening).

The purpose of the analysis was to find out whether the BBC, as a publicly funded body, provides a balanced news output or whether they follow the same patterns of churnalism and biased output that the corporately funded media do. I wanted to find out whether the BBC do “inform, educate and entertain” whilst also delivering on their objectives, which include ensuring that all audiences are well served. Continue reading →

Almost washed my hair

I can only speak for my own hair. Slightly thinning on top, a few grey strands poking through as a badge of parenting honour. But it does seem to be true that if you stop shampooing your hair then after a few weeks it will be self-regulating and you no longer need to put loads of ‘product’ on it.

I’d read about not washing your hair in the moneyless manifesto and thought I’d give it a try, partly out of curiosity, partly to save money and partly because the cosmetics industry operates on abhorrent grounds – even when it seems to be doing a good thing, it isn’t really. So something worth not participating in. Continue reading →

A very short discussion on Buddhism and the National Lottery

I’m no Buddhist, but I appreciate the idea that habitual gambling is psychologically damaging because it is motivated by, and perpetuates, delusion, greed and false notions of good and bad luck. I also think that there is some truth in the notion of the National Lottery being a tax on the poor. It certainly distracts people’s attention and resources away from real issues, both within and outside of their own lives.

People may convince themselves the National Lottery is about raising money for charities, but charity begins in the head – how many ticket buyers know what the National Lottery is doing with their money? Are ticket buyers happy that £425 million was diverted from charities to fund the Olympics?

I was speaking to a mindfulness trainer (and Buddhist of 40 years) recently and he was telling me how developing mindfulness stops you thinking in terms of moving from A to B. The idea is to instead become happy being at A, which is where we always are really. Here.

Anyway, I cancelled my direct debit to the National Lottery this morning.

Is it only physical violence against women that we don’t tolerate?

I’ve been struggling to understand why hate crime against women is treated differently to hate crime against other groups. Two examples: the Sentencing Council proposed in their public consultation that gender-based hate was excluded as a culpability factor in sexual offences. And the UK Government’s plan to tackle hate crime – ‘challenge it, report it, stop it’ – specifically excludes hate crime against women. I asked the Home Office if they could explain the thinking here. They said: Continue reading →