Seeing the redwoods for the trees

I was reading John Redwood's blog the other day - not something I am proud of, but it was one of the many random feeds I get via Twitter, following UK politics. For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Mr Redwood was one of the swivel-eyed acolytes of what became known as Thatcherism, who has rested on his laurels of being a businessman ever since being elected to the cushiest public sector job in the land, as MP for Wokingham, some 23 years ago. What caught my eye was his column on public sector cuts, and his view of the heroic stoicism with which the private sector has borne the recession, as opposed to the mewling and puking he perceives within the public sector as Osborne's austerity budget begins to bite.

John begins his story thus:

In 2008-9 many private sector companies faced declines in their revenue of 25% or more. This was all far more horrific than the cash figures for the public sector this year and next. I do not recall these companies appearing in the media telling us they would have to take lumps out of their service to customers, identifying in public ways they could make their service or product worse, or proposing strikes to complain about the loss of public revenue support.

Instead they got on with the difficult but essential task of bringing costs down to meet the reduced revenue. Managers and workers worked together to reduce stocks, cut costs without damaging customer service, accepted pay freezes or even cuts in remuneration for the bad times, lost pension benefits and bonuses, negotiated cheaper purchases from suppliers. They often also at the same time worked on how they could improve their service or product for customers.

Speaking as someone who went through that painful process, I can identify one very significant cost reduction that John seems to have euphemistically skipped over, and not one that people did willingly or voluntarily. What he might call a total "cut in remuneration", as the ranks of the unemployed swelled, putting pressure onto the already contracting public sector. Which is, of course, a rise in demand for their "service or product".

Which is where John's tidy analogy breaks down, because the public sector receives highest demands for its services at exactly the times when there is less money to pay for it. In fact, given the enormous expansion in responsibilities local government has absorbed over the last 15 years, despite being at the mercy of central government for 75% of its revenue, most of the work of the front line delivery of public services is doing exactly what Mr Redwood challenges them to do: improving the service they provide while getting less money to do it with.

The huge contraction in the UK economy was down to an enormous reduction in demand, following the banking crisis. The total opposite to what local government is struggling to cope with as greater demands are placed upon its services; I do remember sitting in an office when the phone stopped ringing, not something I can imagine they have seen happening at the Social Services offices up and down the land.

I predict a riot

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, not only can we no longer afford to die beyond our means, it would seem any form of demand we place upon health or welfare services in the next few years is likely to end in an unhappy user experience. That is if we are to believe the government's projected plans for spending cuts, which seem to change on a weekly basis. Two weeks ago we were told there would be across-the-board cuts of 25%, now government departments must prepare for 40%. No doubt by the time you read this sentence, the coalition government's new website for the repeal of unhelpful legislation will abolished the laws of mathematics, allowing fiscal cuts of 150%.

The consequences of this, as has been much remarked elsewhere, not least by those wielding the axe, will not be pretty, with up to 1.5 million public sector workers finding themselves relieved of their ability to earn money. To balance this, George Osborne has promised on his mum's life that the private sector will leap into the breach to magic up 2.5 million other positions by way of compensation, like a fat-fingered, job-creating Dutch boy. Since such a scale of employment growth are unknown in even the boomiest of growth years, it doesn't so much beg the question as to how this will happen as grab it by the collar pressing a knife to its throat.

But when you put together the clues given by recent government policy announcements, the answer becomes clear: you're going to do it. Yes, you. Consider the newly-announced, misleadingly paradoxical Free Schools, where any Tom, Dick or Hermione with a bigger agenda than sense can set up his or her own school. Meanwhile, Ian Duncan Smith wants the Job Centres to be available for the distribution of Rwandan-style food parcels to the poor of this country; maybe we could combine the two, and get school children to grow food for the new starving to generate a wartime spirit and Dig For Victory? This is the Big Society at work or, should I say, at out-of-work. And here's where you come in.

Free Schools, Food Vouchers, growth of the third sector - it's all a bit piecemeal. And with attempts by the new government to tighten immigration from non-EU countries, it surely means it won't be enough to offer people the chance to run a school, job centre or orthopaedic surgery unit. Pretty soon we'll all be obliged to do so. As the rubbish fills the streets and the dead go unburied, everyone will be compelled to take a second job as road sweeper, social worker or Astronomer Royal to fill the gaps left by the collapse of local government under the Austerity Budget. We'll all be like a new immigrant class, with two jobs to hold down just to make sure there are enough people replacing the windows following the bread riots.

On the other hand, the extra money will come in handy to pay for all those tax rises.

The Beautiful. Gamed.

As the World Cup commercial build-up finally gives way to the football, there's a danger we might be distracted by the sport from our primary duty of buying stuff because there is a football tournament happening. Mindful of this, Mars is suing Nestle for infringement, because it claims its commercials imply an official sponsorship of the England team, a role Mars presently holds. Interestingly, the (Adidas) boot was on the other foot four years ago, when Mars was sued for insinuating a commercial relationship with Team England where none existed.

Yet on the global stage, some of the World's biggest brands are doing the same thing with breathtaking chutzpah: Pepsi and Nike use their stable of Brand Ambassadors to create some of the biggest World Cup-related advertising, without needing to pay a penny to FIFA for the privilege, such is the power of their stars' image. But what irritates me about this is the culture of expectation this generates, which takes these ads beyond merely brand promotion, as though they are a part of the fabric of our culture. No longer a sideline to the main event, they herald it like John the Baptist, and are listened to almost as reverently - it's as though the World Cup isn't real until we have had the honour of being sold to by the mega corporations.

First out of the blocks this year was Nike, undercutting Adidas as official sponsor of the World Cup with a 3 minute 44 second piece of homage to the central role of commerce to the beautiful game (click here to see the full ad). Nike's nominal message "Write your future" comes over as "Write your cheque", as a parade of the world's biggest football stars play out a story of triumph, failure and redemption on a football field, whose actions ripple across the world and into their bank accounts. Apart from the technical prowess of the story telling, and multiple, shifting narratives juxtaposing the players' private battles with the national mental equilibrium back home, it tries to get inside the minds of the world's top footballers.

And what a place that is. Wayne Rooney (above), apparently, will chase down 60 yards of pitch, just to stop Frank Ribery getting his own poster campaign, and having to live in a trailer sporting an enormous beard. Ronaldinho hopes one day to be the inspiration for a QVC video best-seller. And as for Ronaldo - only the prospect of a 50-metre high platinum statue is going to make him hit that free kick into the top corner. Though in his case, I can actually believe that may be true.

Commercial sponsorship is nothing new in football, and I remember the stars of my own childhood mugging for the camera to push a new football boot or aftershave. But if they were lucky, they might have earned over a professional career what Rooney will earn in a season. They played along for the sake of their pension. Given the vast wages already commanded by the elite stars of these ads, the earnings must be secondary to the honour of being part of a celebratory event - after all, they don't just smile and hold the label to camera, they are required to actually act in these 3-minute epics.

Maybe as an alternate ending, we could cut back to Rooney, still living in his trailer because he misplaced one pass (obviously), who still steps outside to torture himself by looking at a poster of his nemesis Ribery (naturally). The camera pulls back further to reveal the caravan is on the edge of an African shanty town, and we see troops of children walking to their jobs at the factory manufacturing certain branded sports equipment for 50p a day. Write your future, kids.

Won't get fooled again.

Last week my son gave me an interesting insight into how we understand the world when he asked me the following question: Are all brown skinned people vegetarians? He had obviously spent a while mulling it over with all the data at his disposal: of the 30 kids in his class, maybe 8 or 9 are non-white, all of whom have some cultural or religious dietary requirements. In school dinner terms, the safest bet for religiously observant parents is to choose the vegetarian option for their offspring. So in my son's universe of 30, there was a noticeable correlation. QED.

While this is charmingly naive in a 7-year-old boy, it would be ridiculous if grown adults followed this statistical method. And yet it is actually remarkably similar to the approach used by newspaper editors when approaching a story about science and evidence. Perhaps my favourite definition of why we take a scientific approach to information is by Robert M Pirsig in Zen and the art and motorcycle maintenance: "The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into believing you know something you actually don't know." Whereas the average newspaper editor seems to operate on the principle that the real purpose of the scientific method is to act as another branch of the entertainment industry.

It was an apposite thing to be considering as it came on the same day the GMC formally struck off Andrew Wakefield, originator of the research that led to what I can only describe as the MMR media hoax. He was not barred from practising medicine because of his bad science but rather his habit of taking blood samples for money at children's parties and performing unnecessary, and bowel-rupturing, endoscopies upon autistic children. His foot soldiers in the war on reason were the British press who ensured the story remained active beyond the point when it became clear the evidence did not support his claims.

Top of the list of offenders was, unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail, though you'd never have guessed it from Tuesday's reporting. Unusually they didn't seek a balancing quote from one of their medical experts: Carole Caplin, Carol Vorderman, Julia Carling or Jackie Fletcher. Nor did they make any mention of the hundreds of column centimetres they had given to popular readings of Wakefield's work. He was hung out to dry as the lone shooter, with the Mail denying its role behind the grassy knoll, as it was shocked, SHOCKED to discover that Wakefield had a vested interest for finding a link between autism and MMR that caused him to ignore the facts. Unlike the Daily Mail, of course.

Of all the coverage devoted to this issue, one fact that continues to amaze me. Wakefield's original research, in 1998, was not ever meant, in itself, to be proof of anything for one simple reason: it was a study based upon 12 very sick children with multiple conditions, including autism. As a sample size for proving anything it is next to useless, and any editor who couldn't see that was either staggeringly stupid or truly desperate for news. Next to this, my son's observation looks like a model of rigour and caution.

Gods and monsters

One of the most important breakthroughs in modern science happened last week to the breathless delight of the tabloid press. You can tell it was an important story, because it was the fourth story on the Six O'clock News, hot on the heels of the marriage breakdown of a pop star. Nevertheless, the Daily Mail duly fell for the bait dangled by Craig Venter, a "maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur" no less, that he had built a synthetic cell from scratch (story here).

How does it measure up according to our Mid-market Daily Science Story index? Reporting single, unverified claim as scientific fact? Check. Unhelpful diagrams showing sciency things? Check. Apocalyptic speculation based upon ridiculous extrapolations? Check. And, finally, explaining something complex with reference to a movie? Check.

And inevitably he was accused of "playing God" with his experiments, a phrase that always confuses me. Assuming we mean on a metaphorical level, I am uncertain how what Venter has done is morally different from the genetic engineering that mankind has been doing for centuries - cultivating wheat, breeding cattle, clearing and creating forests. The fact that he has done it in an extremely roundabout way is, to me, arguing about angels on a pinhead - and, in fact, he seems to have used an existing life form, one of the oldest known, as an incubator. It's hardly Dr Frankenstein's lightening bolt reanimating the departed.

According to this criteria, I've played God a couple of times in my life, creating lives that would never have existed without me - and I didn't even ask the Daily Mail's permission. Politicians play God every day, making decisions that will affect the life chances of millions of people: whether to go to war, whether to feed the starving, whether to fund the medicines of ill people, whether to protect an animal species.

Meanwhile God seems to have moved on from the whole creating life business to acting as a adjuster for insurance companies - setting off volcanoes to ruin our holidays or freak weather conditions to flatten our homes, as anyone who has tried to claim compensation will know. By logical extension, the Daily Mail should accuse the striking British Airways cabin crew of playing God, interfering with holiday plans in ways previously attributed to acts of the almighty.